Unfolding the Manifold Senses of Being: Martin Heidegger’s 1930/31 Notes on Aristotle

For Martin Heidegger’s quest to understand the meaning of being, Aristotle’s repeated claim that being “is spoken of in many ways” was both an inspiration and a provocation. Yet the places where Heidegger directly confronts and seeks to understand Aristotle’s claim are surprisingly few, with the most extensive and open-ended reflection now to be found in the recently published volume 91 of the Gesamtausgabe. Heidegger here, unlike too many others and himself elsewhere, does full justice to the radicality of Aristotle’s claim that refers not only to the different senses of being according to the categories (‘substance’, ‘quality’, ‘quantity’, etc.), but also to non-categorial senses (‘truth’, ‘accidental being’, ‘dunamis and energeia’) and sub-senses and refuses to reduce this plurality within plurality of senses to a unity. The Aristotle highlighted here is not the systematic but rather the ‘broken’ one. In the notes, Heidegger furthermore considers the possibility that this indeterminacy and darkness at the heart of Aristotle’s ontology, rather than a limitation due to an understanding of being as presence from the perspective of logos, reflects the indeterminacy and darkness at the heart of being itself. Heidegger’s ‘broken’ and even contradictory reading of Aristotle in these notes thus becomes his own attempt to think through the meaning of being in its withdrawal.