Yet, as the very term “motionless” indicates, motion is denied it in some sense. In what sense?
Heidegger suggests an important difference in kind between the claim that something is unmoved and the claim that it is motionless. The former is an ontic claim distinguishing, within the region of beings capable of motion, those that currently are not in motion from those that are. The latter claim, in contrast, is an ontological or pre-ontological claim about the way of being of an entire class of beings. But this leads Heidegger to suggest that “motionless” might also be a privation: not an ontic privation as in the case of moveable beings currently deprived of motion, but an ontological privation. But, Heidegger asks, in this case what is the debitum? (WP3, 26) What is being motionless as a way of being deprived of and what is it owed? When we can answer this question, Heidegger concludes, we will see that even the understanding of what is motionless is oriented toward motion.
If the class ends with this question left open, the answer is quite evident if we have been following the argument: what the motionless as a way of being is deprived of, what it is “‘owed,” is the motion that is the way of being of Dasein itself. The debitum is Dasein! With this answer we see indeed that even the motionless can be understood only in relation to what Heidegger has called absolute motion. That this is indeed what Heidegger is suggesting is explicit in his own notes for the seminar, in a passage that is therefore worth citing here. Referring to the ontological privation that characterizes the motionless, Heidegger writes: “This lack in relation to which debitum? In relation to the debitum that lies in Dasein, that it qua freely existing temporality should understand all beings essentially from out of movedness [wesenhaft aus Bewegtheit verstehen]. Being means temporality, movedness. As long as there exists this debitum for the understanding of being, we have precisely the possibility to uncover from out of it and in it the kind of being that essentially does not have the character of being in the sense of being-in-motion” (GA83, 18–19). In short, Dasein’s own being-in-motion is what enables it to understand, by way of privation, a way of being that lacks the character of being-in-motion.
With this class, the published protocols come to an end. But it should be clear, contra the assertion of the editor of GA83, that the seminar could not have come to an end here. The reason is not so much that fundamental questions that have been raised have been left unanswered—that in itself would not be surprising—but that there has been no return to Aristotle. Having discussed the problem of motion independently of Aristotle’s text