Translated by Pete Ferreira
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However, in this research engaging with Greek thought, research that the confrontation with Aristotle exemplifies and demonstrates in the best way possible, there emerges a problematic aspect that cannot be concealed, and which differentiates Heidegger's approach to Greeks from Hegel's, instead bringing him closer to the Nietzschean criticism of Greek metaphysics. I mean that in Heidegger's confrontation with Aristotle and with Greek thought one can in general note a fundamental ambivalence that manifests itself in the methodological oxymorons to which Heidegger is inclined – destruction as radical appropriation, crossing over as overcoming and passing beyond, 'Überwindung' as 'Verwindung' – and that call for there to be clarification. On the one hand, in fact, Heidegger points out that the Greeks, and especially Aristotle, represent the radical dimension of the West, so that an understanding of the present age that does not take account of these roots is unfounded and contradictory. Although, on the other hand, he implements this return to the Greeks in the form of a radical questioning of Western thought in which the same Greek philosophy is intertwined.
So, we have seen that the radical appropriation of Aristotelian ontology and practical philosophy enables Heidegger to solve the problems that strand modern philosophies of the subject, in particular Husserlian phenomenology, but later he finally comes to discover, and has to put in question the assumptions on which rests, the same Aristotelian understanding of being (which, indeed, is precisely why it is critical to the West). The ontological depth that Heidegger enacts, first as 'destruction' and later as 'step back' and overcoming, is not a turning back and it fulfills itself with a near complete consumption of the traditional space of philosophy and with an approach to thinking that no longer wants to be philosophy, but the radical putting into question of philosophy, and that takes shape in the manner of a 'commemorative thinking' or a 'poetic thinking'.
Therefore, while Hegel in the previous century still thought of power resuming and bringing to fruition from the absolute point of view the original motivation of philosophy, which occurs for the first time in the Greek ideal of λόγος and ἐπιστήμη, Heidegger represents in our century the radical dismissal of all those forms of thinking which are based on the traditional ways of the λόγος and of the ratio. And in this sense he gathers and makes his own the legacy of Nietzsche's finitude and nihilism.