Aristotle’s Ontology of Motion and the Being of Human Life as Absolute Motion
The SS1928 Seminar on Book 3 of the Physics
The date of the 1928 seminar is itself significant in showing that Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle’s Physics continued after the publication of Being and Time and was therefore not merely a preparation for that work. The seminar’s focus on the account of motion in the Physics is new among the seminars we have considered here, but not new in the context of Heidegger’s other courses: this was already the focus of the latter part of the SS1924 course on the Fundamental Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Yet if Heidegger returns to this text after Being and Time, it is because that work has led him to seek in the Physics something that he had not sought several years earlier. That something is an analysis of what he now calls “absolute motion” and identifies with the motion of Dasein itself: “absolute” because not the motion of a being nor the being of motion. This is the motion that first makes possible an understanding of beings in their being, a motion whose temporality precedes and grounds the being-in-time that characterizes beings as such. It is not hard to see how a reading of the Physics through this lens continues the reflection left incomplete in Being and Time. It is indeed striking that the “destruction” of Aristotle’s treatise of time that Heidegger projected for the second part of Being and Time (SZ, 40) and to some extent carried out in the SS1927 course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA24), is followed by a rather positive appropriation of Aristotle’s account of motion in Physics III (specifically, chapters 1 and 2), even if one that obviously goes well beyond Aristotle’s own intentions.1
Our procedure in reconstructing the argument of this seminar must differ from that in previous chapters for the reason that in this case Heidegger’s
1. The lack of access to this seminar represents a major lacuna in the account in Mora 2000 of the important role the Physics played both in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and in his own thought.