Dehnung). This is presumably a reference to Aristotle’s claim that motion is also among the things that are “continuous” (200b16–17; δοκεῖ ἡ κίνησις εἶναι τῶν συνεχῶν), a claim explicitly cited and discussed in the published protocol (GA83, 228).
For the next class of May 21, Weiss marks her notes as being from the protocol of Simon Moser (WP3, 1) and this is the protocol published in GA83. The notes and the protocol therefore parallel each other very closely, though they are not identical in wording. They show the class to have focused on Aristotle’s claim at 201a3 that each of the categories is “split” (διχῶς ὑπάρχει πᾶσιν). But Heidegger’s central argument is that the way in which the category of ousia is split or divided is fundamentally different from that in which the other categories are.5 Ousia, as Aristotle says, is divided into “shape” (μορφή) and “privation” (στέρησις) (201a4–5). The former term, we are told, does not mean shape in a spatial sense, but rather everything that constitutes the “thisness” (Diesheit) of a thing as its essential characteristics. The latter term means the not-being-present-at-hand of a determinate nature in a determinate thing present-at-hand. It has a twofold relation to the character ousia has of being a tode ti (“this thing here”): (1) what is “robbed” (Beraubung) of something through sterêsis is a tode ti; (2) in being robbed of something, this thing is not determined in a universally negative way, but rather as being robbed of a determinate particular content (WP3, 2). Sterêsis or “privation” here has an immanent tendency toward a positive content that we express in the words “not yet.” Heidegger now notes an im-portant contrast between this conception of sterêsis and that defined at the outset of Metaphysics Δ.22: the latter refers to the lack of something a thing by nature should have (1022b22–23; ἔχῃ τι τῶν πεφυκότων ἔχεσθαι). Here in contrast, sterêsis is understood as dunamis: what a thing lacks in the sense of not yet having it. The split here approaches the opposition of contradiction, as between, for example, what is a table and what is not a table. But what-is-not-a-table in the sense of not-yet-a-table is already a determinate piece of wood.
The split or double-structure that characterizes the other categories, in contrast, does not have the character of contradiction, but rather the character of opposition between contraries, as, for example, between white and black in the category of quality. What is found between these contraries are not isolated moments, but a stream of shades of color flowing into each other. This double structure of the categories conditions the motion or change that is to be found only within the categories: as Aristotle says, there are as
5. Interestingly, Heidegger does not make this distinction in his discussion of the same passage in SS1924; see GA18, 311–12.