Dasein - Monoskop

168 PART M
That Heidegger was sensitive to the ontological issues involved
in, and presupposed by, transcendental phenomenology, is not surprising
in view of his earlier work on medieval philosophy and in view
of his strong interest in Aristotle and the neoscholastics. Heidegger
himself has reported that it was his reading of Brentano's On the
Manifold Meanings of Being in Aristotle (1862) 131 that as early as
during his high school years stirred his interest in questions of ontology
and made him turn to Brentano's student Husserl during his
early academic years. 132 However, in turning from Brentano's Aristotle
to Husserl, Aristotle was not left behind. Indeed, the importance
of Aristotle for Heidegger's development can hardly be exaggerated.
This can be seen, for instance, from the fact that by 1922 Heidegger
planned to work out his hermeneutics of Dasein in a book-size study
on Aristotle 133 , from the fact that he frequently devoted his lectures
to Aristotle's philosophy 134 , and from some of his pronouncements
on the Stagirite. For example, in a lecture course on "The
Phenomenology of Religion" (1920/21), Heidegger said that "Aristotelian
metaphysics is perhaps ahead of our metaphysics today" 135 .
In 1926, in lectures on "The History of Philosophy from Thomas
Aquinas to Kant", the same assessment is suggested. 136
Today it is difficult to see exactly in which way Heidegger arrived
at some of the central tenets of his own project via a critical reading
of Aristotle, for the book manuscript of 1922—if it ever existed—is
not preserved. The long treatment of Aristotle's ontology, however,
in the 1926 lectures on "Ancient Philosophy", and the lectures given
in 1924 on Aristotle's rhetoric 137 , provide some indications as to what
the Todtnaubergian might have gained from his encounter with the
Stagirite.
In the lectures of 1926 Heidegger praises Aristotle for having
been the first philosopher who asked for the meaning of Being qua
Being. This praise notwithstanding, Heidegger goes on to examine
critically whether Aristotle's analysis of the meanings of Being is
free of undetected presuppositions. Heidegger thinks that there are
mainly two such hidden presuppositions in Aristotle's ontological
enterprise. One is the tacit assumption that the genuine meaning of
Being is something like "independent constancy" or "presence(-athand)",
the other is the belief that the meaning of Being is to be