Heidegger’s teaching on Metaphysics Lambda : a challenge for Aristotelizing scholars

Martin Heidegger’s approach to Aristotle is highly unconventional. It offers a crucial key towards Martin Heidegger’s own philosophy. As a specimen, our paper deals with Martin Heidegger’s deconstructed approach to a book by Aristotle – Metaphysics Lambda – as in HGA 62, summer semester 1922. Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda played the overarching role in the Aristotelian scholarly tradition, whereas the young Martin Heidegger, for the sake of his 1922 Freiburg classes, reduces it to bits and pieces. Here, we put in the middle his short but significant quotes from this book. We focus on Martin Heidegger’s most original methodological attitudes. We find that Martin Heidegger’s quotes are fully idiomatic, refilled as they are with new meaning and values: his Übersetzungen are in no way meant to be just literal translations. In fact, in Martin Heidegger’s own view, the remaining part of his class can be regarded as an investigation and exegesis of his own Übersetzungen from Aristotle. This offers the chance to contextualize Heidegger’s way of treatment of Aristotle’s Metaphysics books, particularly Lambda, in the early 20th c. German Universities. A main role was played by Werner Jaeger’s youth monograph (Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles, Berlin 1912) which was credited with immediate success within the German academic milieu: Jaeger’s hypothesis were promptly amplified and taken as a paradigm in the 1920 revised edition of Ueberweg-Praechter Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie– i.e., in Martin Heidegger’s favorite reference work for the sake of Martin Heidegger’s 1924/1925 classes. We may conclude that Jaeger’s negative reconstruction of the aim and scope of Aristotle’s first philosophy underlies Martin Heidegger’s attitude toward Lambda and other Aristotle Metaphysics books.