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Thomas J. Sheehan

ἐνεργεια - Κίνησις (and therefore φύσις) is already a primordial structure of retrieve, namely, becoming what one already is. (e) The appropriation-process is radically transformed when the movement that is φύσις becomes the movement that is logos in the human existence. In his 1922 course on Aristotle Heidegger first pointed out how for the Greeks logos is a form of κίνησις, but a unique one, as he indicates four years later: "The movedness [Bewegtheit] of existence is not the motion [Bewegung] of something present-at-hand" (SZ 374 f.). Human existence is that unique form of movement which, by stretching ahead of itself towards its death, opens the realm of sense-as-such. In its ordinary condition, however, existence hides this movement from itself and falls back on various forms of stability, such as accepting handed down meanings rather than waking up to the generation of sense-as-such. The act of resolve is the self-appropriating insight or self-disclosive retrieval whereby existence accepts and understandingly becomes the most proper possibility it already is, its dying. This constitutes a "retrieve of itself" (Wiederholung ihrer selbst, SZ 308), a "coming back to what one already properly is" (Zurückkommen auf das eigenste Gewesen, SZ 326), a "return to the possibilities one already is"(Rückgang in Möglfchkeiten des dagewesenen Daseins, SZ 385). In that dimension of retrieve called historicity Heidegger speaks of a "Sichüberliefern der Mõglichkeiten" (SZ 383 f.), which is not the "handing down" of possibilities as the existing English translation has it, but a "freeing up" of possibilities for oneself, a destruction-retrieve formally homologous with the classical therapeutic process delineated by Freud and with the process of reactualization of archetypes in primitive cultures. To draw upon proper possibility in the act of resolve or in historical retrieve is not to pull δύναμις into full present appearance (cf. "... nicht, um es abermals zu verwicklichen” SZ 385), but rather to bring it indirectly into presence precisely by leaving it possible, i.e, in absence. In resolve one lets the possibilizing absence be present when one chooses the dying, hence finitely present, self that one is. Anticipation thus constitutes the "revering" of the "repeatable possibilities of existence" (SZ 391).

A marginal note in the Humanismusbrief gets right to the topic. At 330=161.21 Heidegger glosses the phrase “die eigentliche Würde des Menschen” with: “Die ihm eigene, d.h. zu-geeignete, er-eignete Würde. Eignung und Ereignis.” In the early period the “value proper