The Place of Aristotle in the development of Heidegger’s Phenomenology

Above mentioned topic is rather new for the Russian phenomenology. A.G. Chernjakov had done a lot to clarify the difficult interrelations between the philosophy of Aristotle, the phenomenology of Husserl und the fundamental ontology of Heidegger.

My purpose in this presentation is rather limited. I wish to state briefly that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle has influenced him more profoundly than any other thinker.

With the increasing availability of Heidegger’s early lectures it has become possible to attain a better understanding of the development of his thought before SZ. It is tempting to regard the phenomenological hermeneutics of this great work as a direct response to Husserl’s phenomenology. But the lectures prior to 1927 make it even more clear than SZ itself that Heidegger’s response to other philosophical influence such as Aristotle must also be understood and incorporated.

Heidegger tells us in “My Way to Phenomenology” that his reading of Aristotle was decisive in his more radical formulation of the project of phenomenology. The appropriation of Aristotle, he says, led him to develop his own unique “way” to phenomenology.

It is worth to show the Aristotelian character of Heidegger’s early phenomenological pathway, a pathway that led to the publication of SZ 1. Heidegger itself claimed on many occasions that his discovery of Aristotle was decisive for the genesis of SZ and the development of his own phenomenological method. Much of Heidegger’s teaching prior to the publication of SZ was related to his work on Aristotle as well as the later works2.

I quote from one of the articles of AG. Chernjakov, that was published 11 years ago: “My deep conviction, which I share with many contemporary authors, is that it is the corpus Aristotelicum that contains the most important clues for the solutions later developed by Heidegger. < ….> Heidegger himself in his books and lecture courses interprets a large body of Aristotle’s texts. It is not our goal … to evaluate, whatever the criteria of such an evaluation might be, whether Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle is “authentic” or not. Much more important is the task of observing and studying how Heidegger’s ideas and even terminology “grow out” of this interpretation”3.

The titles of Heidegger’s early courses on Aristotle indicate that the “method” with which he reads Aristotle is “phenomenological”. But Heidegger does not intend to drug Husserl’s phenomenology back to an epoch where it does not and could not belong. Rather, he claims that his phenomenological procedure is not more than an explication of Aristotle’s own way of investigation, indeed, of the methodos that was indigenous to Greek philosophical thought itself. So, with that “phenomenological method” Heidegger broke with Husserl and with the entire traditional appropriation of Greek philosophy. But this explication of Aristotle’s procedure leads to a transformation of Aristotle’s problematic.

My claim is that a careful investigation of Aristotle was a necessary and critical part of Heidegger’s phenomenological project. I would like to examine briefly the recovered lost manuscript - Heidegger’s 1922 introduction to a projected book on Aristotle – Phaenomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation) 4.

In this essay Heidegger demonstrates that phenomenology is not just a hermeneutically naive appeal to the things themselves, as if it were a matter of recapturing or approximating some lost original position. It is the self-address of factual life. Heidegger’s pervasive claim in this essay is that philosophy is life, that is, the self-articulation from out of itself of life. All philosophical research remains attuned to the life situation out of which and for the sake of which it is inquiring.

One of the clearest indications of the legitimacy of efforts to show the link between the genesis of SZ and Heidegger’s work on Aristotle is found in this lost “Aristotle Introduction” when Heidegger announces that the question he is asking as he approaches Aristotle’s texts is the question of the being of human being. He makes clear that his projected reading of Aristotle is to be a Daseinsanalytik, a questioning about the being who experiences and interprets being. His aim in reading Aristotle is to uncover der Sinn von Dasein, the various “categories” that constitute the way of being which in some manner always already is in relationship to being. The fact that Heidegger looked to Aristotle for help in clarifying the many ways of being and knowing that found the possibility of hermeneutic phenomenology complicates the traditional explanation of Heidegger’s destruction as a critical movement back through the history of philosophy in order to overcome it. In the case of Aristotle at least, Heidegger discovers that the very future of philosophical thinking has already been prepared for but covered over by the scholasticism of the tradition.

It is indeed fascinating and informative that so many of the sections of SZ were already so cogently and compactly presented here in outline form. Already in place in 1922 was much of the philosophical vocabulary of SZ, words like Sorge, Besorgen, Umwelt, Umsicht, Bedeutsamkeit etc. In some regards, in reading this essay, one gets a better sense of the interdependence of each of the parts of SZ.

1. Heidegger M. Phä nomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einfü hrung in die phä nomenologische Forschung, hrsg. von Walter Brö cker und Kä te Brö cker-Oltmanns (GA 61), Frankfurt am Main 1985; Heidegger M. Phä nomenologische Interpretationen ausgewä hlter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, hrsg. von Gü nther Neumann (GA 62), Frankfurt am Main 2005; Heidegger M. Phä nomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation). Ausarbeitung fü r die Marburger und die Gö ttinger Philosophische Fakultä t (1922), Anhang zu: Heidegger M. Phä nomenologische Interpretationen ausgewä hlter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, hrsg. von Gü nther Neumann (GA 62), Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 341-419; Heidegger M. Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, hrsg. von Mark Michalski (GA 18), Frankfurt am Main 2002; M. Platon: Sophistes, hrsg. von Ingeborg Schlü ssler (GA 19), Frankfurt am Main 1992.

2. Heidegger M. Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, hrsg. von Walter Biemel (GA 21), Frankfurt am Main 1976; Heidegger M. Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie, hrsg. von Franz-Karl Blust (GA 22), Frankfurt am Main 1993; Heidegger M. Die Grundprobleme der Phä nomenologie, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 24), Frankfurt am Main 1975; Heidegger M. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 29/30), Frankfurt am Main 1983; Heidegger M. Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1-3. Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft, hrsg. von Heinrich Hü ni (GA 33), Frankfurt am Main 1981; Heidegger M. Vom Wesen und Begriff derΦ ύ σ ι ς. Aristoteles, Physik B, 1. In: Heidegger M. Wegmarken, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (GA 9), Frankfurt am Main 1976.

3. Ontology of Human Action (Aristotle’s Eth. Nic. VI and Heidegger’s Commentary) // Топос. – 2005. – № 2 (11). – С. 5–15.

4. Heidegger M. Phä nomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation). Ausarbeitung fü r die Marburger und die Gö ttinger Philosophische Fakultä t (1922), Anhang zu: Heidegger M. Phä nomenologische Interpretationen ausgewä hlter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, hrsg. von Gü nther Neumann (GA 62), Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 341-419.

[32] Yuliya Azarova

Kharkov National University, Ukraine