based on going back to the Greek texts, to see what they said and thought, that is, not determined by how these texts were translated into Latin and later into English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle opens up is the “but”: But, when Aristotle calls ἐντελέχεια a movement, then what? The inherited reading of Aristotle ignores this “ἐντελέχεια as movement” and explains that movement can “only” be in the κίνησις and not in actuality (ἐνέργεια). Such an interpretation or reading has to see ἐνέργεια as a result that is completed, thus no longer in movement.

But when we take what in Aristotle is said and meant – “so obviously” – in a fresh way, when we look at it anew, when we rethink it, based on hearing the word anew and away from the inherited translations – then (a) movement is not limited to the κίνησις of the crossing but is a part of the entire dynamic from δύναμις to ἐντελέχεια, (b) δύναμις is never inert, passive potentiality, but always an inborn active tendency, (c) ἐνέργεια is not the name for a finished actuality that from now on stands “without movement,” but continues to work and to unfold, and (d) ἐντελέχεια is in no way a finished completeness, but an ongoing being-at-work in the τέλος. Thus (e) ἐνέργεια and ἐντελέχεια are phenomenologically the same, and all three of them (δύναμις ἐνέργεια ἐντελέχεια) are always and a continually active and dynamic movement: they are all of them always “at-work,” that is, dynamically and in movement.¹⁶ I suggest that δύναμις is a name for the no-form no-thing dynamic of radiant emptiness.

Joe Sachs¹⁷ writes a remarkable paragraph about translating Aristotle into English, which applies singularly to the translation of dynamis-energeia-entelecheia in Book Θ of Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

At all the most crucial places, the usual translations of Aristotle abandon English and move toward Latin. They do this because earlier translations did the same. Those earlier translators did so because their principal access to Aristotle’s meaning was through Latin commentaries. The result is jargon, but that seems not to make most of the professional

16 In a preliminary way we can say that Aristotle sees ἐντελέχεια and ἐνέργεια as convergent. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX-3, 1047a, 30–1 and 1050a, 21–3), as well as Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics, 79. We will look further into this matter in a minute.

17 Sachs was a colleague of Jacob Klein at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. Klein, who has been described as one of Heidegger’s “star graduate students,” heard Heidegger’s lecture course Platon: Sophistes (GA 19) in 1924, where Heidegger showed how to rethink Aristotle’s Greek in today’s language. Klein knew Greek very well, and he knew Aristotle. Klein took Heidegger’s wisdom regarding Aristotle as a guide for redoing the English ways of translating Aristotle’s Greek. He understood well Heidegger’s question: How does one translate the Greek in Greek philosophy? See Klein’s articles “Aristotle: An Introduction”; and “Aristotle (I).”
In his Introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Sachs tells how, along with Heidegger, Klein was an “outstanding reader” of Aristotle who “led me [Sachs] to see that a new way of translating him [Aristotle] was necessary and possible. Jacob Klein, in his extraordinary brief essay ‘Aristotle: An Introduction,’ helped me begin to encounter Aristotle’s thinking directly and genuinely.”

A refreshing and rethinking retrieval of Greek thinking - Kenneth Maly