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Let us summarize some key points of this chapter. Heidegger’s re-reading of Aristotle begins with the phenomenological insight that the realness of things implies their openness and availability and, with that, their relatedness to man (cf. οὐσία as “stable possessions”). Probing behind οὐσία Heidegger finds a kinetic dimension to this availability, the emergence (ϕύσις) of a thing from out of hiddenness and unavailability into stable (ἀεί) presence (εἶδος) in an implicit conjunction with human intelligence (cf. τὸ ὂν λεγόμενον). By such emergence-into-presence Heidegger clearly is not referring to the pre-human natural emergence of things in the spatio-temporal universe during, say, the Jurassic Period, some 200 to 150 million years ago: the blooming of conifers, the birth of reptiles, or the physical presence of things on the supercontinent Pangaea. He means, rather, the emergence of things into meaningful availability to human beings in what he will call der Welteingang des Seienden, “the entry of things into world,” where “world” means the world of meaning.156 Such emergence into meaningful availability entails two things: that the thing (1) has “taken a stand” within its defining limits (πέρας) as what and how it is, and that, as such, (2) it can “show up” in an “intelligible appearance” (εἶδος: what the thing “looks like” to the mind). Even from this much it is clear that Heidegger reads Aristotle as a proto-phenomenologist rather than as a naïve realist who considers things merely as “objects” out there in the world.
Plato’s thematization of εἶδος as the knowable whatness of a thing runs a double risk: that of banishing emergence in favor of a notion of realness as the stable identity, unchangeability, and permanent presence—the essence—of a thing; and that of reducing the particular thing to a state of relative unreality (μὴ ὄν, εἴδωλον). Aristotle, on the other hand, valorizes incomplete (“kinetic”) realness as a thing’s progress towards and participation in fulfillment. Movement is the incomplete completion of something. In Aristotle’s theory of analogy, to-be-real admits of degrees. He offers four lists of what “real” means, and he settles on the concrete and kinetic particular—this-thing-here (τόδε τι)—as the primary bearer of realness. A particular thing’s functioning-unto-completeness (its ἐνέργεια ἀτελής) is its degree of realness, its measure of having come into its own.
The genius of Aristotle lies in his implicit thematization of “being-real,” on an analogical scale, as the availability of something to human intelligence (i.e., to νοῦς qua λόγoς) in a broad sense that encompasses both practical and theoretical activities. With this doctrine of the givenness of things, Heidegger
156. GA 14: 87.1 = 70.10–11: “Es gibt sie [= Anwesenheit] nur, wenn Lichtung waltet.” Welteingang: GA 26: 250.32 = 194.27; and Wahrheit: GA 83: 21.8–11. World as meaningfulness: SZ 87.17–18 = 120.23; 334.33–34 = 384.1.