could serve—this could easily evoke for readers of Being and Time that mode of being of Zeug or “equipment.” Indeed, Heidegger is suggesting there that perhaps the equipment we use in our everyday going about in the world might in and of itself pose some resistance to the exclusive metaphysical identification of Being with present beings. And when he makes this point, he appeals to the Greek experience of beings and a specific term in Greek that is often translated as “being,” namely “pragma.” Heidegger writes:
The Greeks have an appropriate term for “things”: πράγματα— that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings (πρᾶξις [goal-directed action]). But ontologically, the specifically “pragmatic” character of the πράγματα is just what the Greeks left in obscurity; they thought of these “proximallly” as “mere things.” We shall call those beings which we encounter in concern “equipment” ... Equipment is essentially “something in order to” [“etwas um-zu”]. (BT 96–97/68)
Although the exact dynamic is somewhat different, in 1927 the word “equipment” refers in its way of being to the aim at which our concerned employment of it is directed; and in 1924 a natural being, as the putting to work of a δύναμις, refers back to the material out of which it arose and forward to what it might become or how it might serve. Thus, there does seem to be a real resonance between the two discussions, at least insofar as they both observe an ontologically constitutive referential or relational, quasi-ecstatic structure in beings.
However, I would suggest that there is an even more powerful resonance with a later work of Heidegger’s, with respect to the insistence in 1924 that natural beings are constituted in their way of being by Abwesenheit or “absence, lack, and being- away.” That is, there is something more radical in the early discussion than the mere reference to another being, more than the reference to a totality of other equipment, which is indeed what we find in Being and Time and which would ultimately entail only a kind of mild or provisional non- presence in the way of being of these beings.20
Insofar as Heidegger finds in Aristotle a more radical participation of non-being, we might find a kind of foreshadowing of the thinking Heidegger calls for in his 1929 essay “What Is Metaphysics?” There he remarks:
The nothing does not merely serve as the counter-concept of beings, but rather it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the being of beings, the nihilation of the nothing occurs. (“WM” 91/12)
20. Perhaps the mode of being of the individual piece of equipment in the analysis of Being and Time is possessed of a greater degree of absence, or a deeper aspect of non-presence, than I am crediting it with here (and in the note on “readiness-to-hand” in the “Introduction”). Nonetheless, the talk of the world to which the piece of equipment points as a Verweisungsganzheit or “referential totality” (BT §16) seems to indicate that although a given piece of equipment is what it is by reference to the whole, and thus to what it itself is not, there is a certain ultimate or projected completion and overcoming of that absence when the entire context is taken into account.