to articulate in phenomenological terms what he was after? But for whatever reason, he did not, and he thereby opened a Pandora’s Box of misclues and misunderstandings that still hamstrings his work to this day. Professor Tezuka was quite right: when it comes to the needless confusion that dogs Heidegger’s philosophy (not only among analytical philosophers but among Heideggerians as well), much of the blame must be laid at Heidegger’s own doorstep.
As an example, we may note how Heidegger reads Greek philosophy. Most commentators might offer Aristotle, Heidegger’s favorite philosopher, as an example of traditional objectivist ontology. But when Heidegger reads Aristotle, he in fact interprets him not as a naïve realist but as a phenomenologist avant la lettre. We note that this interpretation is not yet Heidegger’s “retrieval of the unsaid” (die Wiederholung des Ungesagten) in Aristotle, which would be the articulation of the ground of being that metaphysics had overlooked. Rather, this phenomenological reading is based on Heidegger’s conviction, from the winter semester of 1921–1922 onward, that Aristotle’s metaphysical texts are replete with unthematized examples of the proto-phenomenological correlation between things and the apprehension of them. In his famous 1939 text on ϕύσις in Aristotle’s Physics II 1, Heidegger argues that Aristotle always understands things as phenomena—that is, as what shows up within the field of human comportment and interpretation. Aristotle’s phrase τὸ ὂν λεγόμενον (things insofar as they are taken up in λόγος) refers to things insofar as we apprehend them as intelligible in this way or that.90 In other words, Aristotle always, if implicitly, understands things as situated in a phenomenological relation with human beings and thus—since man is the living thing that has λόγος—in correlation with human intelligence. We do not merely bump up against things with our bodily senses and then add meanings to them. Rather, we always have an a priori relation not to the specific meaning of the thing but to its general intelligibility, its ability to have a specific meaning within a specific context. Thus Heidegger boldly declares that Aristotle was as much an idealist as was Kant.
If the meaning of “idealism” amounts to understanding that being [i.e., the meaningful presence of entities] can never be explained by way of those entities but is already “transcendental” with regard to each of those entities, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant.91
90. Aristotle, Metaphysics VI 2,
1026a33.
GA 19: 207.22–23
= 143.21–22.
GA 22: 59.14
= 50.8: “das Enthüllte, λεγόμενον.”
GA 6, 2: 317.8–9
= 212.23–24: “Im ‘als solches’ wird gesagt: das Seiende ist unverborgen.”
91. SZ 208.3–7
= 251.35–39.