toward perfection: in relation to perfection it is not all that it could be. . . . Hence the imperfect is that whose being entails a definite orientation towards perfection. “Imperfect” means that the thing of which it is predicated does not have the perfection it could have, should have, and is desired to have.⁷²

Movement is ἐνέργεια ἀτελής, the incomplete completion of something, or better, its im-perfection as a functioning-unto-perfection. As moving or being moved, a thing already possesses to a degree the full appearance disclosedness that it is striving for. In a way that is (only) analogous to Nietzsche, Aristotle stamped becoming with the characteristics of being.⁷³ Aristotle is the philosopher of the “on-the-way” (Unterwegs) and of the “re-lative” in the sense of “what is borne unto” (πρός τι) perfection. Like Heraclitus he valorized ἀγχιβασίη (frag. 122), “approximation”—a thing’s “towardness” or anticipation of its fullness—as itself real in its own way.⁷⁴ He saw a thing’s functioning-unto-perfection as already suffused, to a degree, with the blessings of perfection.

At issue in Aristotle’s world are not disembodied ideal forms but the concrete and particular, the τόδε τι, “this thing here.” Such things are in movement in one way or another, and Heidegger insists that Aristotle was the first Greek philosopher to conceptualize movement as real being. Unlike Plato he refused to relegate moving things to the status of less-than-real (μὴ ὄν) in contrast to the forms as the really real (ὄντως ὄν). Unlike the Eleatic Sophist Antiphon (fl. 410 BCE), Aristotle saw that being-in-movement (e.g., a tree that is growing) or being changed (e.g., a table under construction) does not exclude a thing from the realm of the real but rather belongs to the very being of the thing.⁷⁵ Thus Aristotle asks what it is about these changing or changeable things that makes them participate to some degree in self-identical presence or reality.

It would be simplistic and misleading to interpret Aristotle as somehow bringing the Platonic forms “down to earth” and “infusing” them into things as “energies” or “powers.”⁷⁶ Surely Aristotle first had to have understood

72. GA 19: 15.18–23 and .28–31 = 10.30–34 and 11.1–4. Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica I, 5, 1, c.: “est autem perfectum unumquodque, inquantum est actu.”

73. Compare “Dem Werden den Charakter des Seins aufzuprägen,” Nietzsche, Sämliche Werke VIII, 1, 320.15 = The Will to Power no. 617, 330.88.

74. Re ἀγχιβασίη: Bekker, Suidae Lexicon, 20a, s.v. ἀγχιβατεῖν; also Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, I, 178.6–7, no. 122. Further: Dreyfus and Wrathall, A Companion to Heidegger, 213 n. 71. GA 77: 152.18ff. = 99.37ff.: “Herangehen”: to approach; GA 15: 215.25–26 = 133.9–10, Fink: “In die Nähe kommen.”

75. Physics II 1, 193a9–28.

76. GA 6, 2: 372.12–15 = 9.10–14.