Note that the thinking Heidegger finds at work here among the Greeks is specifically a schöpferische Forschung or “creative investigation” into Being, and this creativity is not at all presented as a philosophical deficiency. Indeed, it would seem that something about thinking Being properly even requires creativity. As we saw above, it seems to demand a certain going beyond the positive scientific study of beings and even beyond the initial critical scientific study of the universal Being of beings, both of which would approach beings as completely and thoroughly knowable in a traditional sense. What Heidegger seems to see in Plato here, and presumably in Aristotle, is a creative response to Being, a response to Being in its provocation of wonder and questioning, insofar as it holds itself in excess of the beings it allows to arise into appearance. Indeed, this thinking, precisely as creative, abdicates an exhaustive understanding of itself with respect to what is most decisive for it, namely Being.
And in case we are tempted to think that this lack of self- understanding would be a kind of deficiency, to which for instance Aristotle (as later and clearer) or Heidegger himself (as even later and even clearer, presumably) might not be susceptible, we should take note of a comment Heidegger makes much later on, as he is transitioning from Aristotle to Plato. He writes:
The Romantic appreciation of Plato within the history of philosophy precisely does not see what is properly positive in him, i.e., what is not well- rounded, what is fragmentary, what remains underway. That is the genuinely positive element in all research [Forschung]. (PS 285/412–13)
Again, it is the remaining underway, the incompletion, of Platonic philosophizing that can point the destructive reader beyond beings and the Being of beings, to that aspect of Being according to which it holds itself back and remains irremediably question-worthy.
Δύναμις or “Potency”
Toward the end of the introduction to Being and Time, after explaining that his method in the book will be properly, essentially phenomenological, even as it departs quite profoundly from the Husserlian method “in its actuality as a philosophical movement,” Heidegger makes the following broad and radical pronouncement: “Higher than actuality stands possibility” (BT 63/38). In addition to serving as a kind of dismissal of Husserlian phenomenology, this statement is surely intended as a sort of rebuttal