of understanding such being-at-hand-in-movement leads back to original motion” (WP3, 20–21). Significantly, this observation is followed by a reference: “in connection to this, cf. Metaph. Θ6.” This, recall, is the chapter in which Aristotle defends a distinction between kinêsis as incomplete and energeia as complete because possessing its own end. Is Heidegger suggesting some kind of comparison between absolute motion and the completeness of energeia? As we will see, it is to this chapter that Heidegger turns for the last class. Finally, we should note that in the published protocol, though not in the notes of Weiss, “absolute motion” is explicitly identified with “the motion of Dasein itself” (GA83, 261). That is the phenomenon we are dealing with here.
The class of July 23 began, according to Weiss, with a clarification being
made to the beginning of the protocol for the previous class. The clarification concerns a point that seems already clear enough in Weiss’s own notes for the preceding class: “‘Absolute motion’ is a presupposition, not only for the understanding of motion, but for the understanding of being overall” (WP3, 21). So it is emphasized that the understanding of motion at issue here is an ontological one. More important, I believe, is a stated aim of the discussion to follow, which only Weiss records: “We will need to ask: what is the metaphysical significance of ἐνέργεια and δύναμις in Aristotle? To be examined is the extent to which motion is taken to be the way of being of determinate beings, or whether in a broader sense, though indeed understood latently and indeterminately” (WP3, 21). If we seem to have left the text of the Physics behind, it is because what Heidegger seeks is precisely this latent and indeterminate broader understanding of motion nowhere explicit in what Aristotle says.
Now the class, as Weiss informs us, simply continued the discussion of
the previous class, asking in what way the resting of the stool is understood by us in our dealings with it. The fundamental way in which we understand ontologically the character of rest of things and have it manifestly present is in letting them “be,” in letting them “rest in themselves,” leaving them to themselves (auf sich beruhen lassen).20 This “letting” or “leaving” is a fundamental form of existing that concerns all beings, including those that announce themselves as “being-in-themselves.” Indeed, what Heidegger is trying to show is that we can experience something as existing in itself only in letting it be, in leaving it to itself. Since this leaving or letting is as a way of existing clearly a motion, we can see that Heidegger is supporting here his thesis that only the motion of our existing, what he has called “absolute
20. “Auf sich beruhen lassen” is a colloquial expression in German that unfortunately does not have a similarly colloquial equivalent in English.