I am not suggesting that in 1924’s destruction of the texts of Aristotle there is already fully at work this later thinking of beings in relation to “the nothing” out of which they emerge and present themselves. But Heidegger does seem to suggest that we encounter, through that destruction, a trace of an ontologically legitimate non-being and non-presence prior to Aristotle’s inauguration of metaphysics and the conceptualization of οὐσία and δύναμις, prior to the reduction of the former to a present and utterly available being and of the latter to the mere not-yet-a-reality of possibility.
In the end, destruction points to a dynamic and kinetic way of being, rather than the customary meaning of οὐσία, by distinguishing an experiential register from the conceptual register, as we have seen now again and again. That is, Heidegger draws here the crucial distinction between, on the one hand, Aristotle’s lived involvement with movement as the being of natural beings and, on the other, the generation of the concept of δύναμις that is passed along to the tradition. Indeed, in this discussion in particular, Heidegger makes a special appeal to his students, arguing for the need to dig back into the pre-conceptual register of experience, in order to understand the precise function and sometimes surprising radicality of the concepts Aristotle is creating. He writes:
One must be clear as to ... the fact that previously [prior to Aristotle’s research into these matters] the decisive categories were not yet familiar. For us, the concepts δύναμις, ἐνέργεια, ἐντελέχεια are so worn out that one is not at all capable of seeing what was at stake in the fundamental meaning of these concepts. We must work to insert ourselves into the time when the concepts δύναμις and ἐνέργεια were first being cultivated. (BCArP 198–99/293, translation modified)
Heidegger has done just this by taking Aristotle’s examples seriously, chasing down implications in the etymologies of the terms, and trying to suspend as much as possible the time-worn whittled-down definitions of these concepts as they have been delivered over to us by the tradition.
And, in Aristotle’s radical thinking of δύναμις and natural beings as essentially dynamic in this sense, Heidegger sees an indication or a trace of the relation to Being as beyond beings, as non- being. This is so, even if once again Aristotle himself does not think or even experience that withdrawn source of beings, but ultimately reduces beings to present beings, anchoring their dynamic and essentially potential mode of being in an actualization that makes them intelligible and gives them ontological stability. Aristotle himself did not sense these implications concerning the ontologically fundamental force of δύναμις in the everyday appearing