The Logic of Life Heidegger's Retrieval of Aristotle's Concept of Logos

In the work of Martin Heidegger, the quest for the proper philosophical beginning is motivated by an awareness of the "historical" nature of thought: its dependency upon the beginning of philosophy in the historical sense. This study explores the early Heidegger's attempt to provide philosophy with a new beginning by explicitly addressing the legacy of Aristotle, regarded as the philosophical origin, which philosophy cannot avoid to confront without remaining naive with respect to its own foundation. Heidegger's project is here considered with respect to how it conceives of the question of human reason, and it is taken to be driven by the ambition to come to grips with a traditional logical and theoretical ideal of cognition. Turning to Aristotle as the alleged originator of this ideal, Heidegger focuses on the concept of logos, taking as his point of departure Aristotle's classical definition of man as zoion logon echon, commonly rendered as "the rational animal". The study explores Heidegger's retrieval of Aristotle's concept of logos. In this pursuit, Heidegger is guided by the assumption that this concept must be traced back to Aristotle's understanding of life and praxis, since it is based upon an experience of speech as the basic trait of human cognition. It is shown how Heidegger on the basis of his interpretation of Aristotle tries to develop a notion of a speaking or discursive reason. Thereby, he hopes to overcome an idea also present in Aristotle: that the supreme form of knowledge is contained in the simple apprehension of nous. It is argued that the point in revealing the "practical" foundation of Aristotle's notion of logos is essentially to find out what it means for philosophy to be a form of praxis. Thereby, the aim is to show that Heidegger affirms Aristotle's idea that philosophy as theory, theoria, is the supreme mode of praxis. For this reason, the theme of logos is situated within the context of Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle's teleology. A guiding assumption is that Heidegger thinks that the concept of kinesis, change, provides us with the ontological background to Aristotle's inquiry into logos. It is shown how Heidegger argues that Aristotle conceives of logos as a kind of kinesis. Yet he also shows that Aristotle was not able to fully affirm this because of his assumption that being in the true sense is not kinesis but entelecheia, unchanging, complete activity, which belongs not to logos but to nous.