In opposition to Aristotle, Heidegger assumes phronesis as the model of philosophical knowledge. Pointing out an ambivalence in Aristotle’s thinking, he contrasts the ontology of production (for which the texts of the Physics and Metaphysics are the relevant reference) to his own ontology of life (the foundations of which he sees in De Anima, the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics).

According to his own testimony, Heidegger gains essential insight into the understanding of existence from his analysis of De Anima, “a doctrine of living Being” offering “an ontology of Being characterized as life”. Then, employing a method to which he will come back later in Being and Time, he turns to the Rhetoric, seen by him as an interpretation of Dasein in its “everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit). In this context, Heidegger’s attention focuses on the Aristotelian interpretation of pathe where he finds a thematic basis for the understanding of the “attunement” (Befindlichkeit). Furthermore, by an integration of conceptual elements from the Nicomachean Ethics, the concept of pathe is interpreted in terms of a disposition or propensity (exis) to act, thereby opening a wide horizon with respect to the problem of an ethical dimension of existential analytics.

Even though these moments of the Aristotelian thinking – the doctrine of pathe from the Rhetoric, the analyses of life from De Anima, and of the cairological instant from book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics – offer the basis for an understanding of the fundamental categories of life, it is Heidegger’s view that Aristotle did not integrate these important intuitions into a doctrine of the entire human life. To achieve this integration is the task Heidegger sets himself in the existential analytics. In doing so, he does not acquire the fundamental categories of the Aristotelian comprehension of life in their original context of Being as production, but in the horizon of Being as “Being-toward-death”.

¶ 4:21 AM