and politics. The comprehensive theoretical virtue, the authentic understanding of philosophy, sophia, in turn would now become the comprehensive temporal science of the ever unique human situation. This unique temporal clearing (Lichtung), the nous-surrogate that would provide the temporal standards (ethos) of the customs and traditions for human dwelling in its productive activity (division 1) and its properly human actions (division 2) would have been the topic of the unwritten third division of Being and Time. The temporal science of the ever-unique human situation, which is “in each case mine (ours),” with each human being or generation allotted its own time, must accordingly develop those peculiarly temporal universals sensitive not only to the distributive “each” (jede) but also to its varying temporal contexts, “je nach dem.” Such novel universals adaptable to the changing situations of history might therefore be called jeweilige Universalia, the temporally particularizing universals. After all, Aristotle had already observed that “being is not a genus,” cannot be reduced to the indifferent commonality of a generic universal, of the All or Everyone.
The basic aim of the course is to understand some of Aristotle’s ground concepts in their native growth out of the native soil from which they sprang and continue to stand (Bodenständigkeit). That native soil was the Greek language. A glance at the lexicon of Metaphysics 5 shows that Aristotle developed some of the most basic terms of his philosophy by way of a refinement of ordinary everyday Greek, the doxa of its language. The most important of the thirty concepts that Aristotle lists in his lexicon is the eighth, ousia, one of Aristotle’s words for “being.” It is a word which since Parmenides, as Heidegger had just discovered in a major revolution and caesura in his own thought, meant “constant presence” for the Greek titans, Aristotle included. More specifically, in the native soil of the Greek language, the word ousia finds its practical roots in the domestic domain of household goods, property (Habe, having), and real estate (Anwesen), which in the German tellingly also means “presence.” In placing ousia first in his philological analysis, Heidegger is here inaugurating his own lifelong project of replacing it, of displacing the ousiological elements of “being as having” and habit operative in the Greek fixation on the real estate of an eternal, everlasting world. He wants instead to translate these ousiological insights of Greek Da-sein into the kairological language of a German Da-sein that never possesses itself but is always dispossessed, thrown into the world temporarily, in this