that appears a digression, an appearance that is reinforced by the fact that it ends in the notes with the following sentence: “And now [finally!] to Θ.6.”22 The discussion first addresses the Scholastic omne ens est verum, said to go back to Aristotle’s claim in De Anima that “the soul is in a way all things” (ἡ ψυχή τὰ ὄντα πῶς ἐστιν) and to persist in Hegel’s identification of substance with subject (WP3, 28). How does Scholasticism arrive at this claim? The first answer is that it arrives at it through the notion of creation (Geschaffensein): “because all being as created is the object of the intuitus Dei, it is verum” (28). It is also bonum. But if God created all things, is he not the cause also of evil? The Scholastics avoid this conclusion, according to Heidegger, by maintaining that, while human freedom is a gift of God, “Human beings have on the basis of this gift an entirely other causality that, when in play, eliminates [ausschaltet] its cause, God, in its causal character” (WP3, 28). If this is not simply a digression having nothing to do with the argument of the seminar as a whole, it may be that Heidegger wishes us to recognize in this “entirely other causality” an insight into the distinctive being-in-motion of Dasein.23 But now Heidegger adds that the appeal to creation is in fact not necessary here: simply being an object for God (that is, even if not created by God) suffices for being verum and bonum. Indeed, that such an appeal to a creator God is not necessary here is shown by the fact that Aristotle already treated on (being) and hen (one) as fundamental characteristics and that Plato brought on into relation with agathon.
This last point now leads to a very surprising claim, especially surprising given Heidegger’s interpretation of Metaphysics Θ in the earlier 1924/25 seminar. There, recall, Heidegger insisted on Aristotle’s opposition to Plato in this book, especially in chapter 8 where Aristotle, after arguing for the priority of energeia in time, account, and ousia over dunamis, criticizes the Platonic Ideas for being nothing but dunamis and thus inverting this priority. But now Heidegger is reported to have asserted the following: “Book Θ in the end joins Plato again (as is ultimately the case with all philosophy): the priority of ἐνέργεια is fundamentally the same as the ἐπέκεινα of the Ideas. (So that Jaeger’s thesis of Aristotle’s development is false also for this reason; for Met. Θ belongs to the late period in which Aristotle is supposed to have overcome Platonism)” (WP3, 29). Unfortunately, no further explanation is given of this startling claim. Yet one can guess that what Heidegger sees now that he perhaps did not see in 1924/25 is the following: while the Ideas are indeed only dunameis, in recognizing the existence beyond them of a good that is the origin of both their existence and their being-known, Plato
22. But the turn to Θ.10 could also be motivated by the earlier question of the relation between “self-announcing” and “being-in-itself,” as the following note by Heidegger could suggest: “Mit anderen Worten: Zum Seienden gehört Bekundlichekit seines Seins. Mit welchem Recht sagen wir das? Weil ‘Sein an sich’ durch Wahrheit bestimmt ist. Sein an sich gibt sich nur, es ist nicht und nie” (GA83, 21).
23. Observing that our transcendental dependence on world is the condition for what is in-dependent announcing itself as such, Heidegger writes, as the last word of his notes: “Freiheit!”