The book begins where Heidegger did: with the Greeks. The goal of chapters 2 and 3 is to lay out Heidegger’s view of what Greek metaphysics, and in particular Aristotle, did and did not accomplish. Some readers may find these chapters a bit thick, and for that I offer my apologies in advance. Nonetheless, this path is essential to a proper understanding of Heidegger’s problematic in general and of how he formulated and answered his own basic question. We must insist that the advice Heidegger gave his students about studying Nietzsche applies as well to reading his own works: “First study Aristotle for ten or fifteen years.”136
Some might find it easier to start directly with chapter 4, even though it is arguably quite difficult (I would say: impossible) to adequately understand Heidegger without understanding how he read the Greeks in general and Aristotle in particular. I argue that many of the needless quandaries in contemporary Heidegger scholarship stem from inadequate understandings of how he made his way through Aristotle to his own question. To take only one example: The key to Heidegger’s own phenomenology and specifically to how he understands Sein in Being and Time lies in his embrace of Aristotle’s dictum that any given thing “has as much disclosedness [ἀλήϑεια] about it as it has being [εἶναι].”137 Heidegger anchored that thesis in his brilliant interpretation of Metaphysics IX 10, which establishes that in the highest sense (κυριώτατα)138 Sein means the disclosedness-to-understanding of whatever is in question.139 Heidegger thus argued that, within the limitations of metaphysics, Aristotle had established the proto-phenomenological fact that the analogical unity of all modes of being is disclosedness-to-understanding. Only on this basis was Heidegger able to step beyond Husserl’s extraordinary discovery of the categorial intuition (Logical Investigations VI/6) into his own question about what makes such categorial intuitions possible. The confluence of these two culminating moments—Metaphysics IX 10 as the apex of the whole of the Metaphysics, and Investigation VI/6 as the highpoint of Logical Investigations—started Heidegger on his lifelong search for the appropriation of ex-sistence as the clearing.
Heidegger’s formative insight was that neither Aristotle nor the early Husserl had gone far enough. Neither of these two greats, at the beginning and at the end of metaphysics, asked how and why the intelligible disclosure of things to understanding is possible and necessary. Neither of them raised the question: How does a thing’s meaningful-presence-as come about? Heidegger
136. GA 8: 78.9 = 73.33: “studieren zuvor zehn oder fünfzehn Jahre hindurch Aristoteles” (as it seems Heidegger himself did).
137. Metaphysics II 1, 993b30–31.
138. Metaphysics IX 10, 1051b1.
139. GA 73, 2: 975.24: “Sein ist nie ohne Offenbarkeit von Seienden zu Denken.”