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8 Beyond or Beneath Good and Evil? Heidegger’s Puri¤cation of Aristotle’s Ethics Francisco J. Gonzalez Es gilt nicht Neues zu sagen, sondern das zu sagen, was die Alten schon meinten. Martin Heidegger (GA18, 329) Published for the ¤rst time in 2002 but originally delivered in 1924, Heidegger’s course Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie1 has without question been very eagerly awaited. Though some knowledge of the course was possible earlier through the Walter Bröcker transcript in the Marcuse Archive, and though apparently Heidegger’s own manuscript survives for approximately only one-third of the course, the Gesamtausgabe volume nevertheless provides the most complete picture of the course currently possible. That it was worth the wait cannot be denied. What most impresses initially is Heidegger’s ability to free Aristotle’s texts from layers of metaphysical dogma deposited on them throughout the course of two thousand years. Yet the goal here is not some archeology of the past for its own sake, but the opening up of future possibilities within the past. The methodological presupposition according to which history and the past have Stoßkraft (jolting-power) for the present and future is, in Heidegger’s words, the very air in which philology breathes (334). Heidegger can thus claim that the goal of the course is neither the history of philosophy nor even philosophy but philology, understood as the passion for logos (“die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis des Ausgesprochenen,” 4): speci¤cally in this case, the passion for making the Aristotelian logos, the Aristotelian fundamental words, speak again. What accordingly also impresses in the course is its existential urgency: the insistence that what is at stake here is not the learning of abstract philosophical concepts, but our becoming who we are. At one point Heidegger exhorts his students not simply to learn, repeat, and apply Aristotle ’s concepts, but to imitate what he does, to see the matter itself with the same genuineness and originality. This is the fundamental earnestness of the course. If Heidegger at one point dismisses the word Lebensphilosophie as a redundancy comparable to “botany of plants” (242), this is because for him philosophy and life are not two distinct things: philosophy is life, indeed, as will emerge from the course, life in the fullest and most genuine sense. An explicit presupposition of the course is that Dasein is capable of standing completely on its own (sich einzig auf sich selbst stellen) in the genuine interpretation and determination of its possibilities (334), without, that is, the help of faith, religion, or the like (6). Here we can see how the course is not just a discussion of Aristotle’s basic concepts, but an exhortation to live the life Aristotle himself considered the most free: the life of theoria. One can understand why, according to Gadamer, students had a hard time telling whether it was Aristotle or Heidegger speaking:2 instead of the scholarly discussion of Aristotle’s philosophy to which they were accustomed in other courses, what they encountered here was an Aristotle redivivus3 exhorting them to the autonomous and genuine realization of the possibilities of their existence. I emphasize this way in which the very performance of the course appears to be an appropriation of Aristotelian ethics because my focus in the present paper is precisely how Heidegger in the content of the course transforms Aristotle’s basic ethical concepts. This might seem an odd focus, given that a cursory glance at the table of contents in the Gesamtausgabe volume shows that Heidegger devotes only a small part of the course to a reading of Aristotle’s Ethics; more time is devoted to the Physics, Metaphysics , and Rhetoric (though the habit of referring to the course as a course on Aristotle’s Rhetoric greatly exaggerates the amount of space devoted to this work). Furthermore, Heidegger devotes more time to the Ethics in the Sophist course offered the next semester (WS 1924–25) where he provides a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s treatment of the “dianoetic virtues” in Book 6. However, in the SS 1924 course Heidegger provides interpretations of some of the most fundamental concepts in Aristotle’s Ethics: agathon, telos, hexis, arete, hedone, lype, and proairesis; interpretations that are presupposed , rather than repeated, by his turn to the dianoetic virtues in the Sophist course. Furthermore, these interpretations demand both our re-®ection and a critical distance of which the original auditors were perhaps incapable, because the transformations to which they subject Aristotle’s 128...

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