motion,” makes it possible to experience the stool as being at rest or in motion. Heidegger tries to makes this phenomenon clearer through a counterfactual: if the grasping subject were a camera that only “sees” and copies (what was earlier referred to as a static and timeless “I”), it would never be able to grasp the being-in-itself of the stool (WP3, 22).21 He can even claim, therefore, that the God of the Scholastics, understood as absolute “intuitus,” would not be able to see the world (where “world” is being understood here as the being-in-itself of the things we encounter and deal with). To understand the being-in-itself or the “rest” of the stool, it is not enough simply to see it: I must leave it to itself as something produced or as something useful for such and such and waiting to be used or even as something in use but remaining itself in this use. “In order to be able to ‘let it rest by itself,’ such a being must be in some way ‘willed’ (in a completely broad sense), that is, is possible only within a needing [Bedürfen]” (WP3, 23). Heidegger can therefore characterize as a fundamental error (Grundirrtum) the idea that all manners of comporting myself toward beings that involve taking an interest in them or having something to do with them are “subjective.” “Much more the contrary: in doing, in letting-rest-in-itself, herein does the reality of beings announce itself” (WP3, 23). Heidegger observes that it is therefore no accident that the Greek word signifying “being”, that is, ousia, also meant “household goods.”
Having thus taken the understanding of being back to Dasein “that necessarily moves itself” (WP3, 24), Heidegger considers an objection: this might be all well and true in relation to beings that are moved or unmoved, but what of beings that are immoveable, that in principle cannot be in motion, such as spatial relations, relations between numbers and, in general, mathematical objects? Surely, they presuppose for the understanding not a subject in motion but a motionless subject! After suggesting that in any case number is not really without motion (and referring to the relation between number and time in Kant’s schematism), Heidegger proceeds to give a general and fundamental response to this objection. He does so by examining the relation between what is moved, what is unmoved, and what is motionless. What is unmoved is characterized by a privation relative to what is moved: that is, it lacks something that it could have and even should have. Heidegger speaks here of a debitum (WP3, 25): motion is “owed” to the moveable thing that is not in motion. But how does what is motionless relate to motion? The motionless cannot be said to lack or be deprived of motion, to be owed motion, because it has no possibility of being in motion.
21. The same point is made in Heidegger’s notes: GA83, 15.