point that to understand being as presence is to understand it in relation to time. Not only the terms energeia and dunamis, but “the derivative German terms ‘Möglichkeit’ and ‘Wirklichkeit,’ and the even much less original ‘potency’ and ‘act,’ are understandable in their innermost core and relation only from time” (WP3, 11–12).
Heidegger now announces, though only in the Weiss transcript (12), that he wishes to clarify this problematic “independently of the text” (frei vom Text). Before doing so, however, Heidegger addresses a possible objection to the claim that the notion of heterotês does not suffice to explain motion. Weiss, unlike the published protocol, clearly marks this as a digression or “interpolation” (WP3, 12; Einschaltung): in the proposition that A is other than B, do we not have a transition (Übergang) from A to B and therefore motion? Heidegger replies that the transition or movement here is not in the relation between A and B itself, but in my grasping of the relation. It is my thought that moves from A to B in grasping their otherness.19 So Heidegger again insists that being-in-motion has a completely different ontological character than being-other.
Now Heidegger for the rest of the class addresses a series of fundamental questions and in doing so, as he has indicated, leaves Aristotle’s text behind. He raises the first question by way of noting that modern physics can do nothing with Aristotle’s definition of motion. This is in part due to the rejection in modern physics, already noted earlier, of the theory of place (τόπος) that appears tied up with Aristotle’s understanding of motion: that is, Aristotle’s commitment to the existence of fixed places, of an absolute “above” and “below” where the light and the heavy respectively belong (WP3, 13). One question Heidegger raises and again leaves open, therefore, is whether Aristotle’s definition of motion must fall with his conception of place (GA83, 256). But the more important reason why modern physics can do nothing with Aristotle’s definition is that, while it must presuppose a pre-ontological understanding of motion in order to talk about motions at all, it does not, like Aristotle in his definition, seek to transform this pre-ontological understanding into an ontological concept. But now Heidegger asks the crucial question: if the ontic experience of things in motion is grounded in an ontological understanding of motion, what is the latter itself grounded in and how is it possible? One might think that this too or especially is a question to be left open for now given its obvious difficulty. But, surprisingly, Heidegger immediately gives an emphatic and clear answer as his own! Since Weiss is especially clear and succinct here, I will cite
19. This point is also found in Heidegger’s notes: GA83, 13.