ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF Φύσις
be a derivative of movement, also has movedness as its essence. The purest manifestation of the essence of movedness is to be found where rest does not mean the breaking off and cessation of movement, but rather where movedness is gathered up into standing still, and where this ingathering, far from excluding movedness, includes and for the first time discloses it. For example: ὁρᾷ ἅμα καὶ ἑώρακε (Metaphysics Θ 6, 1048 b2 3): "Someone sees, and in seeing he or she has also at the same time (precisely) already seen." The movement of seeing and inspecting what is around one is properly the highest state of movedness only in the repose of (simple) seeing, gathered into itself. Such seeing is the τέλος, the end where the movement of seeing first gather itself up and essentially is movedness. ("End" is not the result of stopping the movement, but is the beginning of movedness as the ingathering and storing up of movement.) Thus the movedness of a movement consists above all in the fact that the movement of a moving being gathers itself into its end, τέλος, and as so gathered within its end, "has" itself: ἐν τέλει ἔχει, ἐντελέχεια, having-itself-in-its-end. Instead of the word ἐντελέχεια, which he himself coined, Aristotle also uses the word ἐνέργεια. Here, in place of τέλος, there stands ἔργον, the "work" in the sense of what is to be produced and what has been pro-duced. In Greek thought ἐντελέχεια means "standing in the work," where "work" means that which stands fully in its "end." But in turn the "fully ended or fulfilled" [das "Vollendete"] does not mean "the concluded," any more than τέλος means "conclusion." Rather, in Greek thought τέλος and ἔργον are defined by εἶδος they name the manner and mode in which something stands "finally and finitely" ["endlich"] in its appearance.
From movedness, understood as ἐντελέχεια, we must now try to understand the movement of what moves as one manner [355] of being, namely, that of a κινούμενον. Relying on an example can make the direction of our essential insight more secure. And following Aristotle's approach we choose our example from the field of "production," the "making" of an artifact. Take a case of generation: a table coming into existence. Here we obviously find movements. But Aristotle does not mean the "movements" performed by the carpenter in handling the tools and the wood. Rather, in the generation of the table, Aristotle is thinking precisely of the movement of what is being generated itself and as such. Κίνησις is μεταβολή, the change of something into something, such that in the change the very act of change itself breaks out into the open, i.e., comes into appearance along with the changing thing. The orderable wood in the workshop changes into a table. What sort of being does this change have? The thing that changes is the wood lying present here, not just any wood but this wood that is appropriate.
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