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Preferred Citation: Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo. The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger's 

An Introduction to Metaphysics. In: Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting 

Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna 2000 

The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger's 

An Introduction to Metaphysics 1 

Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo 

In a lecture delivered in 1935 entitled An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger 

forges what appears to be an un-Platonic link between poetry and philosophical 

thinking. This lecture offers the first extensive treatment of these two topics, to 

which Heidegger will dedicate a great deal of attention in the years to follow. This 

apparently un-Platonic link is, in fact, only apparent, since the very concepts of 

thinking (noein) and poetry (poiesis) to which Heidegger refers in this lecture are 

themselves un-Platonic. To be precise: they are pre-Platonic. Turning to the Pre- 

Socratic thinkers– in this case Parmenides and Heraclitus– Heidegger retrieves a 

notion of philosophical thinking supposedly more original than that of the 

tradition beginning with Plato and Aristotle, for whom thinking was adapted to the 

1 All references to An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 

Yale University Press, 1987), will be indicated in the body of this discussion by the abbreviation 

IM; Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: 

Harper Collins, 1962), will be indicated by BT; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 

translated by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), will be indicated 

by BPP. The theme of this paper fits into my larger project of examining the place of 

art in the development of Heidegger’s thought.

ALEXANDER DI PIPPO: 2 

THE CONCEPT OF POIESIS IN HEIDEGGER'S AN INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 

model of seeing. Heidegger furthermore retrieves in Sophoclean tragedy a concept 

of techne, or the 'know-how' corresponding to the activity of poiesis 

(Herstellen/Fabrication), that is more original than the Platonic-Aristotelian 

interpretation of this concept understood as a form of mimesis. By way of synthesis, 

Heidegger then tries to demonstrate the original kinship between the notions of 

poiesis and noein as they were originally conceived but which, with Plato and 

Aristotle, become no longer accessible. 

What this kinship consists in, however, is not immediately clear. 2 Heidegger 

insists upon the difference between poetry and philosophical thinking, yet he also 

maintains that they occupy 'the same order.’(IM, 26) To complicate matters further, 

Heidegger claims that the thinking of the Presocratics distinguishes itself by 

the fact that it was still poetical and, reciprocally, the poetry of Sophocles is distinguished 

by the fact that it was still thoughtful. (IM, 144) Anyone familiar with 

Hegelian dialectic cannot help but call into question, at least at first, the substance 

of this alleged distinction between poetry and philosophical thinking on the basis 

that the one appears to depend on the other in order to be what it is. We might 

begin to clarify this almost purposeful obscurity as follows. Whereas philosophical 

thinking is explicitly concerned with the sense of Being, original poetry, while 

implicitly concerned with the sense of Being, does not make this issue thematic. 

Thus, the language of the philosopher and the poet reflects this difference, even 

though the Presocratic philosophers oftentimes borrow from poetical discourse in 

the expression of their thinking. Still, this explanation is obviously one-sided. It 

only helps clarify how original poetry was thoughtful, but does not reckon with 

how philosophical thinking at the inception of the tradition was poetical. To 

answer that the thinking of the Presocratic philosophers was poetical to the extent 

2 This relation between poetry and philosophy remains unclear even after An Introduction to 

Metaphysics. At times Heidegger maintains their difference and at other times, for example, 

in 'The Nature of Language' he identifies the two as the same. See Joseph Kockelmans, Heidegger 

on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), pp. 194-202. 

Thinking and original poetizing become increasingly difficult for Heidegger to distinguish, 

and we might add the same applies to the distinction between thinking and praxis as well. 

Hence Heidegger's important statement in the 'Letter on Humanism'. Responding to the 

question concerning when he planned to write an ethics, Heidegger explains that first we 

need to clarify the distinction between ethics and ontology. He tries to show how this distinction 

is derivative of a more original notion of thinking which is 'the original ethics’. See 

'Letter on Humanism' in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 

1993), especially pp. 255-265.



that these thinkers often borrowed certain formal elements from poetical discourse 

to express the content of their thinking is unsatisfactory because it overlooks the 

ontological significance that Heidegger attributes to original poetry. The poetry of 

the early Greek poets is , with respect to its content, characterized by its 

thoughtfulness. This means that the poetry of the Greek poets is not poetical 

simply because of the language they employ and, correlatively, the thinking of the 

Presocratic philosophers remains poetical even when their thinking is expressed in 

the language of the poets. The alternative which resolves this aporia, and at the 

same time points to a deeper understanding of poetry as well as philosophical 

thinking, is that poiesis is a mode of disclosure (a-letheia) of Being which is 

conceptually broader than, and so can assume the modality of, either philosophical 

or poetical discourse. Otherwise put: the concept of poiesis furnishes the analogical 

unity of the poet and philosopher. Poiesis becomes the original site of Being's 

disclosure, whether this becomes thematic in the case of the philosopher or 

unthematic in the case of the poet. So construed, this enables us to understand how 

Heidegger can explicate (aus-legen) what is implicit in early Greek poetry to 

illuminate his interpretations of the early Greek philosophers. 

In this paper I shall examine the concept of poiesis articulated in An Introduction 

to Metaphysics and attempt to clarify the sense in which, according to Heidegger, it 

is an original site of truth. To this end, I will first examine why the issue of artistic 

production moves into the foreground of Heidegger's concerns in the 1930s. Since 

this concern is animated by Heidegger's retrieval of an original concept of poiesis, I 

shall endeavor to reconstruct the conceptual basis of this discovery. Here I hope to 

show how Heidegger's discovery of an original concept of poiesis was in large measure 

made possible through his turn to the Presocratics. 

Let me emphasize at the start that this last claim does not imply either that Heidegger 

completely neglects the Presocratics before the 1930s or that the concept of 

poiesis had no role in the project of Fundamental Ontology. On the contrary, we 

can find plenty of references to the Presocratics in Being and Time and other Marburg 

writings, and during this same period Heidegger's interpretation of poiesis 

plays an indispensable role in both his 'Existential-Analytic' of Dasein and his 

destructive retrieve of Greek ontology. However, the role Heidegger assigns to the 

Presocratics and his interpretation of poiesis have an altogether different complexion 

in the 1930s.



First, in his Marburg period (1923-8) Heidegger discerns no discontinuity 

between, on the one hand, Plato and Aristotle and, on the other hand, the 

Presocratic thinkers. 3 Indeed, it is clear that during this time Heidegger views the 

Presocratics as the source of certain prejudices that the tradition commencing with 

Plato and Aristotle simply takes over.4 The failure to distinguish the two groups of 

3 Cf. Jacques Taminiaux's "The Interpretation of Greek Philosophy in Heidegger's 

Fundamental Ontology" in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 19 (1988), pp. 3- 

13; Marlène Zarader, "The Mirror with the Triple Reflection" in Martin Heidegger: Critical 

Assessments, Vol. II, edited by Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 17-36; 

& Jean-François Courtine, "The Destruction of Logic: From Logos to Language", translated 

by Kristin Switala and Rebekah Sterling, in The Presocratics after Heidegger , ed. David C. Jacobs 

(Albany : State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 25-53. All three of these 

scholars share this view. 

4 In Being and Time, we find five explicit references to Parmenides and one to Heraclitus. 

There are two in particular, concerning Parmenides, which demonstrate that Heidegger did 

not detect a discontinuity between the Presocratics and Plato and Aristotle. Both concern the 

privileging of intuition as the mode of cognitive apprehension proper to philosophy. i) 

"Legein itself- or rather noein, that simple awareness of something present-at-hand in its sheer 

presence-at-hand, which Parmenides had already taken to guide him in his interpretationhas 

the temporal structure of a pure ‘making present’ of something." (48); ii) In reference to 

Aristotle’s account of the genesis of science, Heidegger writes: "This Greek interpretation of 

the existential genesis of science is not accidental. It brings to explicit understanding what 

has already been sketched out before hand in the principle of Parmenides: to gar auto noein 

estin te kai einai. Being is that which shows itself in the pure perception which belongs to beholding, 

and only by such seeing does Being get discovered. Primordial and genuine truth 

lies in pure beholding. This thesis has remained the foundation of Western philosophy ever 

since." (215) Furthermore, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger not only 

claims that Parmenides is ‘the true founder of the West’, but also that the thesis of Parmenides 

just indicated, which he translates as "noein, perceiving, simple ap-prehension, intuiting, 

and being, actuality are the same", anticipates the Kantian identification of Being 

and thinking and, by implication, German Idealism as a whole. (110) This is striking when 

we compare this passage with the one found in An Introduction to Metaphysics in which Heidegger 

criticizes Kant and the other German Idealists for tracing back their epistemological 

position to Parmenides. Heidegger explains that translating Parmenides’ fragment to read 

"Thinking and Being are the same"– note: this is precisely how Heidegger himself translated 

it in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology– is entirely "un-Greek". This is a projection of 

German Idealism on to Parmenides. Since for the German Idealists, Heidegger writes, 

"thinking and being are supposed to be the same according to Parmenides, everything becomes 

subjective. Nothing is in itself. But such a doctrine, we are told, is found in Kant and 

the German Idealists. Essentially Parmenides anticipated their teachings [we are told]...This 

familiar view requires special mention here...because the dominance of these views has made 

it difficult to understand the authentic truth of the primordially Greek words spoken by 

Parmenides." (136-137)



thinkers results from the fact that in this period Heidegger primarily focuses on 

Plato and Aristotle and, therefore, merely assimilates the Presocratics into this interpretation. 

So, when I claim that Heidegger ‘turns’ to the Presocratics we can understand 

this as a ‘re-turn’ provided we keep in mind that a decisive reconfiguration 

takes place. While in his Marburg period Heidegger viewed the Presocratics, Plato, 

and Aristotle collectively as the founders of Western philosophy, in the 1930s he 

introduces a division into what was previously a unity. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, 

where this new constellation emerges for the first time, Heidegger argues 

that the Presocratics represent the ‘Original or First Beginning,’ whereas Plato and 

Aristotle represent the ‘End of the First Beginning’ or, alternatively, the ‘Beginning 

of the Second Beginning.’ (IM, 179) 

Second, the transformation which Heidegger's interpretation of poiesis undergoes 

in the 1930s is a complex issue which I will try to elaborate it in some detail below. 

In brief, though, Heidegger's understanding of poiesis during his Marburg period is 

not conceived as an original site of the disclosure of Being as it is in the early 1930s. 

This early interpretation is limited by both the transcendental framework within 

which Heidegger is working and, relatedly, by the fact that Heidegger's understanding 

of poiesis at this time is mediated primarily through Aristotle. The path 

that Heidegger's thinking later takes, in which he attempts to free himself from this 

transcendental framework, opens up an even deeper horizon against which the 

Being-question is examined. It is this deeper horizon which also paves the way, I 

think, towards a more comprehensive interpretation of poiesis . 

I have organized the following discussion into three main parts. First, I will try to 

clarify Heidegger's interpretation of poiesis in the Marburg period. Second, I will 

consider some of the developments which contribute to the discovery of a more 

original concept of poiesis in the 1930s. Lastly, I will examine Heidegger's retrieval 

of this concept of poiesis as it is concretely worked out in An Introduction to Metaphysics 

.



I 

In order to establish the context for Heidegger's interpretation of poiesis in his 

Marburg period, we must first briefly recall the basic contours of Heidegger's project 

during this time which he calls Fundamental Ontology. This background 

sketch will also prove helpful later when we examine the motivation behind Heidegger's 

reappropriation of this concept in the 1930s. Fundamental Ontology 

represents an attempt to clarify the sense or meaning of Being (Sinn des Seins) 

which can then serve as a basis for all regional ontologies. A regional ontology 

concerns itself with a particular being and, in so doing, presupposes a certain 

determinate interpretation of the sense of this being. The sense of a particular being 

furnishes the horizon in which a particular being becomes intelligible. Heidegger 

thus wishes to exhibit the sense of Being in general that provides the ground for the 

possible interpretations of the Being of any particular being whatsoever. 

Heidegger's project is qualified as Fundamental Ontology because of its 

propaedeutic nature. (BPP, 224) Before attempting to elucidate the sense of Being 

in general, Heidegger begins by clarifying the sense of a particular being, namely, 

ourselves. The operative assumption is that the clarification of the Being-sense of 

this being will open up the horizon, hitherto concealed, for an interpretation of the 

sense of Being as such. This procedure is justified and promises to be a fruitful one, 

Heidegger believes, because of the unique character of our Being. We always 

already live in a pre-thematic understanding of the sense the Being of beings in 

general. (Thus including both the Being-sense of ourselves and that of beings other 

than ourselves.) We are Da-sein: the ‘there’ or ‘here’ (Da) for whom an 

understanding of ‘Being’ (Sein) is disclosed. To state the same point again, Da-sein 

is the site where this transcending of beings to Being has (always already) occurred. 

This intentional structure of transcendence which belongs intrinsically to the Being 

of Da-sein is indeed the condition that makes raising the Being-question in an 

explicit manner possible in the first place, and so working it out assumes the form 

of an immanent clarification as it does in Hegel. Such is required because, although 

Dasein is constituted by an understanding of the sense of Being in general, Dasein 

has not made it transparent to itself. It has not been clarified by the tradition, 

according to Heidegger, because a certain interpretation of Being has 

predominated. Being has been interpreted in terms of a being static and present-athand 

(Vorhanden) constitutive of things and Heidegger maintains that the tradition 

beginning in Greek ontology comprises but reinscriptions of this interpretation.



This interpretation not only erases, first, the irreducible difference between Being 

and beings– what Heidegger in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology for the first 

time refers to as ‘The Ontological Difference’– but also, second, the difference 

between the Being of the present-at-hand and that of Da-sein. For Heidegger the 

first problem has its source in the second. The interpretation of Dasein's Being in 

terms of the present-at-hand of things results in a subject-object dualism from 

which insoluble epistemological problems concerning the relation of the sensible 

and the intelligible emerge. Construing the Being of Da-sein in this way covers over 

the fact that transcendence, or an understanding of Being which is irreducible to 

beings, belongs to the very Being of Da-sein itself. 5 Thus, the orientation of the 

tradition to the present-at-hand has its roots in the failure to clarify the Being of 

Dasein in its own authentic (eigentlich) character. 

The preceding remarks enable us to view Heidegger's privileging of Dasein more 

convincingly. Since i) Dasein exists in an understanding of Being in general and ii) 

the traditional standard of Being is the present-at-hand, yet iii) the Being of Dasein 

is not reducible to this traditional interpretation of Being, this traditional interpretation 

needs to be supplemented such that it takes into account the Being of 

Dasein. Furthermore, since Dasein exists in an understanding of Being in general, 

the clarification of the Being of Dasein will thereby reveal the horizon in which an 

understanding of beings other than Dasein is possible. It will, in other words, reveal 

the conditions which underwrite the Being-sense of the present-at-hand and place it 

within a more comprehensive framework of intelligibility. 

5 Husserl, of course, saw this already with his notion of 'intentionality' and Heidegger is 

deeply indebted to him. However, Heidegger is also critical of his teacher because Husserl 

does not clarify radically enough the Being of subjectivity. As a result, Husserl still works 

within the Cartesian framework, albeit one which is radically modified by his notion of intentionality. 

See Heidegger's 1925 lecture course The History of the Concept of Time: 

Prologomena, translated by Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 

especially pp. 27-131 for the most detailed treatment and critique of Husserl in Heidegger's 

writings. See also Marion Tapper, "The Priority of Being or Consciousness for Phenomenology: 

Heidegger and Husserl" in Metaphilosophy 17 (1986), pp. 153-161, & John D. 

Caputo's "Husserl, Heidegger and the Question of a 'Hermeneutic' Phenomenology" in 

Husserl Studies 1 (1984), pp. 157-178. We should add that Hegel also, I believe, maintains a 

proto-Husserlian notion of intentionality. According to Hegel, in response to Kant, we already 

are open to Being (as it is in itself). The problem is that this has not yet become for 

consciousness. Still, Hegel too, whom Heidegger maintains, thought the tradition through to 

its logical end and achieved an epistemological closure, is, like Husserl, operating in the Cartesian 

framework which understands truth as (self) certainty.



Heidegger's analysis of Da-sein demonstrates that temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is the 

horizon of sense in which its Being must be comprehended. The published sections 

of Being and Time unfold this argument. Heidegger begins with a very broad characterization, 

or ‘formal indication,’ of Da-sein as Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt- 

Sein), which is then gradually, by way of regressive analysis, given a more concrete 

filling. The provisional expression of Being-in-the-world is just another way of 

articulating the complex structure of Da-sein's transcendence indicated above and 

is an alternative to the subject-object dualism of modern philosophy. Dasein is not 

a ‘subject’ which is externally related to an ‘object.’ This dualism, which can be 

traced back to Descartes, abstracts from Dasein's original situation as is revealed in 

its everyday concernful dealings in which finding itself already in a world belongs to 

its Being. The world is not the sum-total of objects that a subject encounters. Nor 

is it something that contains them. Characterizing the world in this way already 

imports the traditional interpretation of Being into an understanding of world. 

World is rather the space of significance (Bedeutsamskeit) by which Dasein orients 

itself in its concernful dealings. There only is a world (Welt) because Dasein, in its 

basic constitution, is worldly (weltlich). Thus, the unitary phenomenon belonging 

to the worldliness of Dasein's Self displaces a subject-object dualism. We should 

emphasize that Heidegger is not denying a fundamental experience of Otherness or 

an ineliminable givenness which is perhaps the most compelling impetus of such a 

dualism. The problem, however, is that the categories of being that sustain such a 

dualism derive from the traditional interpretation of Being and so do not appropriately 

apply to the incommensurate Being of Da-sein. Da-sein does not constitute 

other beings but beings are always already understood in a projected horizon of significance, 

i.e. world, and the experience of givenness or Otherness is, for Heidegger, 

incorporated within the Being-structure of Da-sein. Da-sein's transcendence is constituted 

as a finite transcendence which means that it is a thrown transcendence: 

Da-sein is not the ground of its transcendence. Heidegger refers to this aspect of 

opacity belonging to Da-sein's transcendence as Da-sein's facticity. The important 

point is that Da-sein is not factical because it encounters an opaque givenness of 

entities ("thatness", to use Aristotelian terminology) but instead Da-sein encounters 

this givenness because the Being of Da-sein is inherently factical or finite.6 Further- 

6 This is an important element of Heidegger’s critique of Kant. Cf. Kant and the Problem of 

Metaphysics, translated by Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 

17-23. Also see William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The 

Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1963), pp. 106-158.



more, Da-sein's facticity and transcendence are co-original. Whereas Da-sein's transcendence 

implies that any given being is already understood against a background 

of projected possibilities of interpretation, Da-sein's facticity accounts not only for 

the inherent limitedness of such an understanding but also for the fact that interpretation 

(hermeneuein) is a fundamental need or concern of Da-sein's Being. As 

early as 1923 in a lecture entitled Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 

Heidegger explains that "Hermeneutics is not an artificially devised mode of 

analysis which is imposed on Dasein and pursued out of curiosity...Rather, 

interpreting is itself a possible and distinctive how of the character of Being of 

facticity. Interpreting is a being which belongs to the Being of factical life itself."7 

This last point is crucial. Da-sein's finitude, which according to Heidegger is disclosed 

through the existential mood of anxiety and the recognition of Da-sein's 

own Being-towards-death, functions as the ontological source of Da-sein's 

projection of possibility and so worldliness. While the world is always constituted 

as a space of already determinate meaning, Dasein's thrownness is what makes Dasein's 

understanding of Being intrinsically questionable or an issue for it. Da-sein 

always already projects a horizon of meaning and is, therefore, open to a world 

because Da-sein exists as ‘to be’: something still to be attained rather than as 

something already completed. While anxiety discloses Da-sein's thrownness, a 

recognition of this thrownness is simultaneously the disclosure of Da-sein's own 

indeterminate 'Being-able' (Sein-können). Hence Heidegger's statement, which 

implies a reversal of the traditional view, that "higher than actuality stands 

possibility." (BT, 63) Note that Dasein's finite transcendence, while complexified 

into elements of facticity and transcendence through conceptual analysis, is still a 

unitary phenomenon. The one is not the ground of the other but both are aspects 

of a more primordial whole. Heidegger tries to articulate a single concept, he terms 

‘Care’ (Sorge), that encompasses both aspects. Insofar as Dasein transcends beings 

to Being, Da-sein is 'Being-ahead-of-itself.’ Inasmuch as Da-sein is factical, it is 

‘Being-already-thrown-into-a-world.’ The interplay of these two aspects accounts 

for its already being fallen among entities in a horizon of determinate sense. Thus, 

Heidegger defines ‘Care’, which is the primordial articulation of Da-sein's Being, as 

follows: "The Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the world) as 

Being-alongside (entities encountered within the world)." (BT, 235-241) 

7 Ontology: A Hermeneutics of Facticity, translated by John van Buren (Bloomington, Indiana 

University Press, 1999) pg. 15.



Having clarified the Being of Da-sein as ‘Care’, Heidegger finally reinterprets 

this complex though unified structure in terms of an original interpretation of 

temporality. This notion of temporality is to be distinguished from the concept of 

time developed by Aristotle, who offers the earliest systematic analysis of this 

concept, and which has since remained, mutatus mutandis, the dominant view of 

the tradition. For Aristotle, time is conceived as a linear sequence of 'Nows' and so 

the whole of time, including future and past, is determined by one of its parts, 

namely the present. 8 According to Heidegger this privileging of the present is not 

accidental; it reflects the traditional interpretation of Being as present-at-hand. 

Since this ontological bias is derivative of a more comprehensive understanding of 

Being accessed through an analysis of Da-sein's Being, so is the Aristotelian concept 

of time. It is derivative, in other words, of the original temporal sense of Da-sein. 

Original temporality is a unified phenomenon from which the present emerges out 

of the interplay of future and present. The temporal moments, or ecstases, correspond 

to and reinscribe temporally the moments constituting the complex structure 

of Da-sein's Being interpreted as ‘Care’. Only via an analysis of Da-sein's Being 

which reveals itself as ‘Care’ could this horizon of original temporality open up. 

And having been opened up, temporality furnishes the unity of the sense of Dasein's 

Being that Heidegger seeks to exhibit. The unified process of temporality 

establishes the unity of ‘Care’ and so serves as a more foundational concept with, 

therefore, more explanatory power. 

During his Marburg period, Heidegger characterized his project as a primordial 

science of Being. 9 (BPP, 11-15,320-324/BT, 21-63) As we have already noted, his 

intention was to next work out the temporality (Temporalität) of Being in general 

based on this analytic of Da-sein. However, in Being and Time (1927), his magnum 

opus, as well as the other relevant lectures during this time– The History of the Concept 

of Time (1925-26), which was delivered shortly before Being and Time, and 

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), given six months after– this project is 

not brought to completion. 10 We shall return to this issue in the next section since 

8 Although Heidegger does not deal with Aristole's concept of time in Being and Time, as 

promised, he does develop this analysis in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, pp. 229-274. 

9 Let us note that as early as his 1919 KNS course, given while still in Freiburg and working 

under the tutelage of Husserl, Heidegger calls his project at the time a primordial and pretheoretical 

science. 

10 Thomas Sheehan, "Time and Being, 1925-1927" in Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, 

Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 29-67.



it serves as the background for understanding Heidegger's interpretation of poiesis 

in the 1930s and we will now consider the role poiesis plays in Heidegger's Fundamental 

Ontology. To this end, we will focus on two texts: The Basic Problems of 

Phenomenology and Being and Time. In the first, the concept of poiesis functions 

explicitly as the linchpin of Heidegger's destruction of the Western philosophical 

tradition. In the second, the role of poiesis is not made explicit but nevertheless 

implicitly governs his analysis of Dasein's everyday Being-in-the-world. 11 

In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger tries to demonstrate that the 

interpretation of Being as present-at-hand, which originates in Greek ontology, has 

its source in an understanding of Da-sein oriented by the horizon of production. As 

a result of this orientation, the metaphysical categories of Greek ontology are modeled 

on the experience of productive behavior, i.e. poiesis. The clue which, 

according to Heidegger, demonstrates this orientation to production is that the 

concept of eidos , the ‘look’ that indicates the identity of a thing, is taken to be 

ontologically prior to the morphe, the shape of figure of a thing. If Greek ontology 

took as its guide ordinary perception, then the eidos or look of something, i.e. the 

determination of what something is, would be read off the figure of the thing that 

perception furnishes. 

For Greek ontology, however, the founding connection between eidos 

and morphe, look and form, is exactly the reverse. The look is not 

grounded in the form but the form, the morphe, is grounded in the 

look. This founding relationship can be explained only by the fact that 

the two determinations for thingness, the look and the form of a 

thing, are not understood in antiquity primarily in the order of perception 

of something. In the order of apprehension I penetrate 

through the look of the thing to its form. The latter is essentially the 

first in the order of perception. But, if the relationship between look 

and form is reversed in ancient thought, the guiding clue for their interpretation 

cannot be the order of perception and perception itself. 

We must rather interpret them with a view to production. (BPP, 106) 

11 Jacques Taminiaux, "The Reappropriation of the Nicomachean Ethics: Poiesis and Praxis in 

the Articulation of Fundamental Ontology" in Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology 

translated by Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 

111-143; Robert E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, 

Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 137-165.



Why production? Because in production, the artist projects an image of the 

thing, i.e. its intended look, before the thing worked upon comes to embody this 

image. The product, insofar as it eventually fulfills this intention, becomes a likeness 

or imitation of this projected model. This also explains, Heidegger notes, why 

the eidos is also referred to (by Aristotle) as ti en einai : what a thing already was 

(before it actualized ‘this’). (ibid, 107) Heidegger then demonstrates how the other 

Greek categories are also modeled on productive behavior, and this orientation 

towards production proves formative for all subsequent metaphysical categories of 

Medieval and Modern ontology as well. The concept of created versus uncreated 

beings becomes foundational for Medieval ontology, which is carried over by Descartes. 

Even Kant, as Heidegger later shows, adopted the same orientation, since the 

discursive intellect is defined in contrast to the notion of a creative intellect and so 

does not construct its objects but must be given them via the faculty of sensibility. 

(ibid, 147-154) 

How does this orientation to production imply an ontology of presence? Heidegger 

demonstrates this through a closer analysis of the telic nature of production. In 

production, the artisan not only shapes his or her material such that it embodies the 

projected model, but in so doing liberates this material from its dependence on the 

artisan until, when it eventually achieves this likeness, it obtains an independent 

being-in-itself. Until this fulfillment obtains the object is not fully present to itself. 

Since achieving this presence is the telos of production, presence-at-handness Vorhandensein) 

is not only an integral component of the production process but it is 

also the productive intention. Heidegger explains that "In the intentional structure 

of production there is an implicit reference to something, by which this something 

is understood as not bound or dependent on the subject but, inversely, as released 

and independent." (ibid, 114) This also helps explain why the cognitive apprehension 

of Greek ontology is construed as ocular and so theoretical, which implies a 

detached comportment to an object and so an attitude Da-sein can adopt only 

when it has disengaged itself from the activity of production. This detached form of 

seeing or pure intuition (noein) is a modification of the horizonal seeing involved in 

the activity of production. (ibid, 109-110) 

Heidegger's analysis of course raises a deeper question that he must also address: 

Why is Greek ontology oriented by production in the first place? In response to this 

question, Heidegger explains that Greek ontology is ‘naive.’ (ibid, 110) On the one 

hand, Greek ontology is self-reflective and endeavors to transcend an everyday understanding 

of Being-in-the-world in which Da-sein is non-reflectively immersed in 

order to lay bare the structure of intelligibility underlying it. On the other hand,



Greek ontology still remains within everydayness and takes its bearings from it. 

Consequently, it is not reflective enough. By remaining within the ambit of common 

everydayness, it does not succeed in clarifying the Being of Da-sein in a way 

that can interpret more deeply the conditions underlying the sense of its everyday 

Being-in-the-world. For this reason, Heidegger, at least at this time, saw the modern 

turn to the subject as a step in the right direction since it expressed the need to 

clarify the Being of Dasein, even though this modern attempt was still deeply misguided 

by the traditional ontological assumptions it uncritically retains. (ibid, 313) 

This in itself, however, does not sufficiently explain why remaining in an everyday 

understanding of phenomena implies an orientation to production. Heidegger 

explicitly acknowledges that an adequate account must demonstrate the necessity of 

this orientation to production, but he does not satisfy this requirement. (ibid, 116) 

Of course, he later shows how the activity of production presupposes original temporality 

and must be understood in terms of it, yet he fails to exhibit the inner 

necessity of this orientation in the first place. I think that this omission is significant. 

It perhaps suggests that Heidegger is not entirely clear himself at this time 

about the scope of his own insight. This lacuna in his argument indicates, if it does 

not anticipate, the possibility that poiesis might have a deeper source than 

Heidegger perceives at this time. This does not undermine Heidegger's analysis tout 

court. He can still maintain that Greek ontology is oriented towards an everyday 

understanding of production, i.e., one which fails to reflect more profoundly on the 

phenomenon of production. But then we would have to add that a deeper sense of 

production is overlooked by Heidegger as well. 

Both Jacques Taminiaux and Franco Volpi, who work out the details of 

Gadamer’s contention, have examined extensively how Heidegger's ‘Dasein-Analytic’ 

in Being and Time is an appropriation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. 12 

Indeed, we know that Being and Time emerged out of a projected work consisting 

of a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle for which he was offered a position 

at the University of Marburg. 13 It is Taminiaux, though, who treats in depth 


the Articulation of Fundamental Ontology", especially pp. 122-137.; Franco Volpi, "Dasein 

as praxis : the Heideggerian Assimilation and Radicalization of the Practical Philosophy of 

Aristotle", especially pp. 102-129. 

13 Thomas Sheehan, "Time and Being, 1925-27", pp. 31-34. The introduction to this planned 

work on Aristotle, which resurfaced in 1989, was published that same year under the title



Heidegger's appropriation of Aristotle's concept of poiesis, mainly by drawing on 

Heidegger's 1924 lecture course Plato's Sophist. 14 He shows how Aristotle's concept 

becomes ontologized to fit the problematic of Fundamental Ontology and, specifically, 

serves as the paradigm for Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in its inauthentic 

everyday mode of Being-in-the-world. In its everyday mode of Being-in-the-world, 

Da-sein does not encounter entities as things present-at-hand (vorhanden), but as 

equipment ready-to-hand (zuhanden), and so to be used rather than to be brought 

under theoretical scrutiny. Entities only become present-at-hand when there occurs 

a rupture in the context of significance, i.e. the world, in which the equipmental 

entities are assigned their proper function. Thus, the present-at-hand interpretation 

of entities is derivative of the ready-to-hand, since the sense of the former is understood 

as a modification of the latter. The encountering of the ready-to-hand, while 

characterized by an immediate absorption in contrast to the detachment characterizing 

the encounter with the present-at-hand, nonetheless involves a sort of seeing. 

Yet, it is one with a peculiar intentional structure. It involves a peripheral or circumspective 

seeing (Umsicht) of the context which lets the particular entity to be 

taken as this particular piece of equipment with this particular function. In other 

words, it involves a dynamic interplay of protension and retention, which gives 

precedence to the former. By contrast, the seeing involved in the encounter with 

the present-at-hand gives precedence to the entity and does so precisely because it 

detaches itself from the background context. According to Taminaux, Aristotle's 

analysis of poiesis serves as the model for Heidegger’s own. When the artisan produces 

an artifact, he or she constantly, though only peripherally, keeps in sight the 

model towards which working on the material aims. Note: not raising this model to 

explicit awareness is the very condition for working on the material. In parallel 

fashion, not raising the context of significance, i.e. the world, to explicit awareness 

is the condition for Da-sein's finding something ready-to-hand. 

What is significant here, and should be underscored, is the connection between 

everydayness and inauthenticity. Everydayness is inauthentic for Heidegger because 

it is not an original disclosure of Da-sein's own Being. In its everyday mode of 

Being-in-the world Da-sein dwells in a way that conceals its own possibilities and 

"Aristoles-Einleitung" in Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 

and more recently was published in English in Man and World (1992). 


the Articulation of Fundamental Ontology".



takes over the public already defined interpretations. According to Heidegger, 

absorption in the everyday world of concernful dealings is a retreat from the disclosure 

of Da-sein's own indeterminate ‘Being-able’ and finitude, or ‘Being-towardsdeath’. 

In addition to demonstrating the Aristotelian heritage of Heidegger's concept 

of inauthentic Being-in-the-world, Taminiaux as well as Volpi demonstrate 

how Heidegger's concept of anticipatory resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), according 

to which Da-sein accepts its finite Being-towards-death and thereby becomes open 

to its own existential possibility, is an appropriation of Aristotle's concept of 

phronesis, which is the knowledge corresponding to the activity of praxis. 15 Only on 

the basis of this original disclosure of Da-sein's own possibilities is the fleeing from 

it, i.e. losing one's self, possible. The everyday, therefore, does not disclose the 

Being of Da-sein in an originary way but only reveals one mode of its Being. 

Moreover, insofar as it conceals the basis or ground of intelligibility of its everyday 

concernful dealings it is not authentic (eigent-lich): it does not reveal the Being of 

Da-sein that is its ownmost. If Heidegger's concept of inauthentic Being-in-theworld 

is, as Taminiaux cogently argues, an appropriation of Aristotle's notion of 

poiesis, then the latter constitutes the conceptual basis of a non-originary, hence 

derivative, disclosure of the sense of Da-sein's being and, in the framework of 

Fundamental Ontology, the sense of Being in general. Stated otherwise: poiesis, 

ontologically transformed by Heidegger, is not an original site of truth. 

Before concluding this section we should call attention to a seeming inconsistency 

between the two texts examined above. On the one hand, Aristotle's concept 

of poiesis serves as the model of Heidegger's notion of Da-sein's inauthentic Beingin-the-world. 

On the other hand, the concept of poiesis becomes the Archimedian 

point of his critical deconstruction of Greek ontology and the metaphysics of presence 

that determines the former. Prima facie, we might tend to conclude that Heidegger's 

Da-sein analytic is, in conformity with the tradition, overdetermined by 

the notion of production as well. However, in defense of Heidegger we can reply 


the Articulation of Fundamental Ontology". Franco Volpi, "Dasein as Praxis : the Heideggerian 

Assimilation and Radicalization of the Practical Philosophy of Aristotle". Taminiaux's 

and Volpi's accounts must, though, be supplemented by a consideration of the influence that 

St.Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard exercised upon the development of Heidegger's concept of 

resoluteness. For a fine discussion of this issue, see John van Buren's "Martin Heidegger, 

Martin Luther" in Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren 

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 159-174; The Young Heidegger: 

Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 157-202.



that although his starting point is so determined, the direction his inquiry takes 

does not so much as build itself up from this foundation as it bores through by way 

of deconstruction to something more fundamental underlying it and which it presupposes. 

Still, we must not overlook the fact that Heidegger does after all take his 

methodological bearings from this concept of production, and this invites us to 

consider how the role assigned to it in the economy of the Da-sein analytic sets up 

certain internal limitations that bar a deeper understanding of the concept. Heidegger's 

modeling the inauthentic and authentic of Da-sein on Aristotle's concept of 

poiesis and praxis, respectively, entails a disunity of poiesis and praxis which, in 

turn, prevents the incorporation of poiesis into the authentic Being-in-the-world of 

Da-sein. At the same time, there seems to be a sharp tension between this background 

conceptual configuration of poiesis and praxis, on the one hand, and the 

conceptual configuration that gets played out on the surface of the Da-sein 

Analytic. Heidegger's analysis of authentic resolutness is elaborated (purposely and 

with justification) on such a formal level that he is relieved of the ontic issue 

concerning the concrete ways in which Da-sein's ownmost possibilities are 

actualized in its world. Yet, this does not attenuate the ontological problem still 

remaining on the formal level that Da-sein must actualize its ownmost possibilities 

in the world which it never leaves. Indeed, Heidegger himself states this in no 

uncertain terms: "Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one's-Self, does not detach dasein 

from its world...And how should it, when resolutness as authentic disclosedness, is 

authentically nothing else than Being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the Self right 

into its current concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it 

into solicitous Being with others." (BT, 344) 16 In other words, there appears to be 

built into the fabric of the Da-sein Analytic the possibility of a notion of 

production which is the actualization of Da-sein's ownmost possibilities. It is my 

opinion that the contrapuntal, dichotomous configuration of poiesis and praxis that 

Heidegger appropriates from Aristotle during this time prevents a deeper 

understanding of production that could be reconciled with the authenticity of Dasein, 

and it is this overlooked possibility which Heidegger retrieves in his later 

thinking in the 1930s. Moreover, it is my contention that Heidegger's failure to see 

this owes to dogmatically retaining Aristotle's privileging of praxis over poiesis. For 

16 Paul Farwell, "Can Heidegger's Craftsman be Authentic?" in International Philosophical 

Quarterly 29 (1989), pp. 77-90. In this article Farwell develops a fine analysis of this particular 

problem with respect to the issue of artistic production.



Aristotle, praxis is a more perfect mode of Being's disclosure because it is an 

energeia : it does not refer to an end outside itself. Poiesis, by contrast, is a dunamis : 

it does refer to an end outside of itself and so is inherently incomplete until this end 

is fulfilled. Whereas praxis is completely present to itself, poiesis is not. This priority 

Aristotle accords to praxis over poiesis follows from his ontological commitment to a 

metaphysics of presence. What is striking about Heidegger's appropriation of this 

ranking is that what underlies it for Aristotle is the same thing Heidegger is set out 

to deconstruct. 

II 

Thus far I have attempted to show how during Heidegger's Marburg period poiesis 

is not taken to be the site of an original disclosure of truth. I have also suggested the 

inherent possibility of an authentic notion of poiesis and advanced a reasonable 

explanation as to why Heidegger is prevented from seeing this. In this section I 

want to clarify the basis of Heidegger's reinterpretation of poiesis which emerges in 

the 1930s. In my introductory remarks, I claimed that the horizon of this reinterpretation 

is opened up through Heidegger's turn, or re-turn, to the Presocratics. Let 

me first elaborate this hypothesis before I unpack the complex of details which, I 

shall try to demonstrate, support it. My first claim is that Heidegger's discovery of a 

more original sense of poiesis is situated against the backdrop of the discovery of an 

original sense of phusis that he traces back to the Presocratics. Heidegger discovers 

that for the Presocratics phusis was an interchangeable term for Being. Phusis names 

the sense of Being as such and not merely one specific mode of Being, or a part of 

the whole as it was for Plato and Aristotle. This Presocratic notion of phusis moreover 

contains an intrinsic absencing dimension which, therefore, is not reducible to 

pure presence. This is to be contrasted with the notion of phusis that Heidegger ascribes 

to Greek ontology in general which, it bears emphasizing, during his Marburg 

period includes the Presocratic philosophers. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 

and within the context of the discussion we have already examined, 

Heidegger clearly equates phusis with an immutable essence. "The determination 

phusis also points toward the same direction of interpretation of the what...The 

actual thing arises out of phusis, the nature of the thing. Everything earlier than 

what is actualized is still free from the imperfection, one-sidedness, and sensibilization 

given necessarily with all actualization. The what that precedes all 

actualization, the look that provides the standard, is not yet subject to change like



the actual, to coming-to-be and passing-away." (BPP,107) Furthermore, Heidegger 

maintains that this notion of phusis is oriented to the horizon of production. 

"Phuein means to let grow, procreate, engender, produce, primarily to produce 

itself. What makes products or the produced product possible is again the look of 

what the product is supposed to become and be."(ibid) Now my second claim is 

that since phusis is ultimately determined by production according to Heidegger's 

early thinking, and yet Heidegger later sees that a more original sense of phusis he 

discovers in the Presocratics is no longer compatible with this account, Heidegger is 

led to rethink the sense of production or poiesis. It compels him to re-examine, that 

is, the ancient quarrel between the poets and philosophers famously noted by Plato 

in the Republic. 

The question concerning the genesis of Heidegger's revised interpretation of poiesis 

must be answered by setting our sight, then, on a deeper question: What motivates 

Heidegger's turn to the Presocratics and the discovery of a more original 

notion of phusis? The details which lead to both are difficult to reconstruct in a 

strictly linear fashion since the path is carved out by a confluence of different interplaying 

sources. Indeed, the early 1930s constitute one of the most intricate and 

eclectic periods of Heidegger's intellectual formation. It can scarcely be denied that 

Heidegger's intensive reading of Hölderlin and Nietzsche at the time which he presents 

in a series of lectures between 1934-1936, as well as his ongoing dialogue with 

Hegel and his confrontation with Jünger are all important contributing factors. 17 

Nietzsche should perhaps be singled out especially. Already in An Introduction to 

Metaphysics (1935), Nietzsche is everywhere present in the first chapter and in 

chapter four we find an explicit critique of Nietzsche's interpretation of the traditional 

and, according to Heidegger, misguided polarization of Parmenides and 

Heraclitus. (IM,126) In fact, in an earlier lecture given in 1931 on Aristotle, Heidegger 

cites a passage from Nietzsche's essay Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the 

Greeks. 18 This is especially significant because in this essay to which Heidegger 

refers not only does Nietzsche exalt the Presocratic philosophers but he also draws a 

sharp distinction between them and the tradition beginning with Plato and 

Aristotle. Nietzsche views this transition as a decline, which is a view Heidegger 

17 See Michael Zimmerman’s Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art 

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) for a detailed treatment of the Heidegger- 

Jünger dialogue. 

18 Aristotle's Metaphysics: ETA 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, translated by Walter 

Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pg. 15.



himself endorses in An Introduction to Metaphysics. Still, without downplaying the 

influence of Nietzsche (and Hölderlin) on Heidegger's interpretation of the 

Presocratics, I believe it is incomplete. Not only had Heidegger been reading these 

two poetic thinkers since his early youth 19 but it does not in itself explain the 

emphasized theme of phusis that is so central to Heidegger's appropriation of the 

Presocratics. I believe, in other words, that there lies a deeper motivation behind 

Heidegger's turn to the Presocratics which Nietzsche and Hölderlin help him 

articulate. This consists in a discovery of a more original notion of phusis. 

But what led Heidegger to rethink the concept of phusis? Here I want to show 

that, first, Heidegger's re-interpretation of this concept turns on certain developments 

internal to Heidegger's project involving his so-called Kehre and which seem 

to become first apparent in his Freiburg inaugural lecture entitled ‘What is Metaphysics?’ 

and become explicit in a lecture given the following year called ‘On the 

Essence of Truth’; second, this prompts Heidegger to re-examine Aristotle's notion 

of phusis; lastly, this second concern leads Heidegger to a reassessment of the 

Presocratics. 

We noted earlier that Being and Time was never completed. The subsequent lecture, 

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which, as Heidegger indicates in a footnote 

to the introduction to this lecture was supposed to complete Being and Time, 

is likewise incomplete. 20 The unpublished Third division of Being and Time was to 

demonstrate how the temporal sense of Da-sein's Being opens the fundamental 

horizon for an interpretation of all beings. Now, Heidegger did not fail to meet a 

deadline; he purposely withdrew this third division from publication, and much of 

Heideggerian scholarship has tried to understand why. One of the most prominent 

responses offered by Heideggerians is that Heidegger's earlier thinking during his 

Marburg period still remained entangled in the paradigm of transcendental subjectivity. 

21 The fact that Heidegger chose not to publish the remaining sections of 

Being and Time seems to lend support to this assessment, and this view is further 

strengthened by the fact that there appears to be a decentering of Da-sein in his 

later writings. But there are other factors which militate against this conclusion if 

19 John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King , pp. 62-64. 

20 Thomas Sheehan, "Time and Being, 1925-1927". 

21 Otto Pöggeler, "Metaphysics and the Topology of Being in Heidegger" in Heidegger: The 

Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, Inc., 1981), pp. 

171-183.



left unqualified. First, Dasein is not a subject but is Being-in-the-world. Second, 

Da-sein is thrown, which eliminates a notion of self-grounding. Third, while Heidegger 

claims in section 44 that without Da-sein there would be no truth (disclosure), 

he also makes clear that Da-sein is not the sufficient condition for truth: Dasein 

"lives in truth...It is not we who presuppose 'truth'; but it is 'truth' that makes 

it at all possible ontologically for us to be able to be such that we 'presuppose' anything 

at all." (BT, 270) Perhaps the main difficulty is that, on the one hand, Heidegger 

himself is critical of this first attempt, and yet, on the other hand, his selfcriticism 

is obscured by his simultaneous insistence upon the continuity between 

this early attempt and his later thinking. This ambiguity does not owe to mere 

equivocation but is symptomatic of a deep tension in Heidegger's early project. 

This tension is clearly evident in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1943). There 

Heidegger strenuously denies that Dasein is a transcendental subjectivity, but also 

explains that the third division of Being and Time "was held back because [this 

earlier] thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning (Kehre) and did not 

succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics."22 

Da-sein is not reducible to transcendental subjectivity. Yet, the fact that Heidegger 

strains so hard to disentangle an understanding of Da-sein from Husserlian 

transcendental subjectivity in Being and Time is one indication that he still retains a 

residual element associated with transcendental subjectivity, namely, a voluntarism. 

This in part helps explain, I think, why Nietzsche, among others, becomes so 

important for Heidegger to enter into dialogue with in the 1930s. 23 This element of 

voluntarism manifests itself, I believe, as a tension in Heidegger's systematic intentions. 

On the one hand, Heidegger characterizes his project as a primordial Ur-science. 

The aim is to show how temporality (Temporalität) serves as the foundation 

for all regional ontologies. Thus, he refers to his project as a transcendental 

‘Temporal Science’. (BPP, 460) At this time, Heidegger is trying to establish, like 

Kant, a metaphysica transcendentalis while moving beyond Kant who still did not 

arrive at– or, as Heidegger more dramatically puts it, shrank back from– a notion 

of original temporality. On the other hand, according to Heidegger Da-sein is 

characterized by its historicity, which is a corollary of its finite factical 

22 ‘Letter on Humanism’ in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, pg. 231. 

23 Heidegger's essay "The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’", translated by William Lovitt in 

The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 

1977), pp. 53-112. In this essay, Heidegger argues that despite Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome 

metaphysics, he continues this tradition by making the will a metaphysical arche.



transcendence. It is thus difficult to see how this feature of Da-sein's temporality 

can be reconciled with the systematic intentions of Being and Time. 24 I do not want 

to suggest that Heidegger is unaware of this seeming inconsistency, but only that at 

the time he thinks that the historicity of Da-sein is compatible with a primordial 

science provided his ontological inquiry is mediated by a destructive retrieve. In 

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger acknowledges that "Because the 

Dasein is historical in its own existence, possibilities of access and modes of 

interpretation of beings are themselves diverse, varying in different historical 

circumstances." But he adds that "it is for this reason that there necessarily belongs 

to the conceptual determination of being and its structures...a destruction— a 

critical process in which the traditional concepts...are destructed down to the 

sources from which they were drawn. Only by means of this destruction can 

ontology fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of the genuine character of 

its concepts." (BPP, 21-23) 

The fact that in the 1930s Heidegger replaces the question of the sense of Being 

with an examination of the History of (the sense of) Being (Seinsgeschick) and the 

notion of a ground (Grund) is replaced by an abyss (Ab-grund) demonstrates a recognition 

of this problem. At the same time, this immanent criticism does not imply 

a discontinuity between Heidegger's early and later thinking. Heidegger maintains 

that the shift in approach his thinking undergoes after Being and Time is merely a 

deeper penetration of the issue with which his earlier thinking engages and so it, in 

fact, gets incorporated into his later thinking. What does this deepening of 

approach, i.e. Heidegger's Kehre, consist in? In the period after Being and Time 

Heidegger attempts to overcome what I have called the voluntaristic tendency of 

this project. In so doing, he assumes a different perspective though does not go in a 

different direction. In Being and Time Da-sein is clearly no Cartesian Cogito, but 

still Heidegger attempts to gain access to the horizon of Being in general through it 

and, as such, Da-sein serves as the ground for opening up this horizon. Now, we 

can see, I think, how Heidegger's analysis of Da-sein simultaneously is fundamentally 

at odds with and works internally against this tendency, and so helps us better 

understand why Heidegger in hindsight maintains that what he was trying to show 

was constrained by the conceptual language in which he tried to express it. Without 

24 Joseph Kocklemans, "Heidegger on Time and Being" in Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, 

Vol. 1, edited by Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.150-154; 

Thomas Sheehan, "Time and Being, 1925-1927", pp. 47-50.



the Da— the topos in which Da-sein transcends beings to Being— the sense of 

Being would not be disclosable. Yet, Da-sein is thrown transcendence which means 

it does not constitute this topos but finds this topos revealed to it and itself as the 

site of this topos. Otherwise expressed: without Da-sein the unconcealment of 

beings in their being would not occur but the possibility of this disclosure, i.e. this 

disclos-ability, is not grounded in Da-sein. Heidegger's later thinking consists in 

probing this primordial event (Ereignis) which first opens up the space in which 

there can be a Da of Sein. 

Typically, Heidegger's Kehre is described as a reversal from an analysis of the 

Being-sense of Da-sein to the sense of Being in general. 25 The problem with characterizing 

it in this way is that it can be misleading. It could imply a shift in ground: 

from the ground in Da-sein to the ground in Being. Yet, Heidegger is forced to give 

up the notion of ground altogether. If temporality provides the sense of Being, the 

question is whether temporality can be conceived as a ground at all. The very 

notion of a ground itself would not seem ascribable to temporality which 

intrinsically contains an absencing dimension of future and past. Original 

temporality is a temporalizing process, or event, which dynamically discloses the 

sense of Being. As an event it does not merely conceal its ground, but rather is 

essentially groundless. For this reason, Heidegger begins to focus not on the sense of 

Being but the truth of Being: the dynamic process of unconcealment itself. In so 

doing, the issue of the concealment inherent in the process of unconcealment 

becomes thematized. Concealment is not only equiprimordial with unconcealment 

as he argued in section 44 of Being and Time . He now understands it as prior to 

unconcealment. In his 1930 essay ‘On the Essence of Truth’, Heidegger claims that 

"The concealment of beings as a whole, untruth proper, is older than every 

openedness of this or that being. It is also older than letting-be itself, which in 

disclosing already holds concealed and comports itself towards concealing [my 

25 This characterization of Heidegger’s ‘Turn’ has been justifiably seen as vastly oversimplified 

in recent years due to the publication of a host of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses. 

Kisiel’s as well as van Buren’s ground-breaking work has demonstrated that Heidegger’s 

‘Turn’ in the late 1920’s should in fact be seen as a return or resumption of his earlier project 

begun in Freiburg in 1919. This displaces the shema introduced by Richardson between 

‘Heidegger I’ and ‘Heidegger II’. See Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and van Buren’s The Young Heidegger for a 

detailed development of this more encompassing perspective as well as helpful commentaries 

on many of Heidegger’s early lecture courses.



emphasis]." 26 Simply put: the Being-question emerges as the non-Being-question. 

Heidegger's analysis revealed that Temporality is the sense of Being, and this 

revealed, in turn, another question: How is time? Although he does not explicitly 

return to the question concerning Being and Temporality until a lecture given in 

1962, this question about temporality implicitly guides all of his reflections on the 

unconcealment/concealment of Being in the interim. As early as 1929 in the 

aforementioned inaugural lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’ we clearly see that this 

reconfiguration in Heidegger's thinking has already taken place. There Heidegger 

gives up describing his project as a science and it becomes clear that the question of 

Being points to a more primordial question: the Nothing. He writes that "For 

human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such. The 

nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather, it originally 

belongs to their essential unfolding as such." 27 

Now, in a 1928 unpublished lecture course ('Phenomenological Exercises: Interpretation 

of Aristotle's Physics II') Heidegger re-examines Aristotle's concept of 

phusis. 28 Fortunately, we have a modified version of this in the form of an essay first 

published in Wegmarken entitled 'On the Being and Conception of Physis in Aristotle's 

Physics B, 1'. Moreover, Heidegger offered a lecture course in 1931 concerning 

Aristotle's concept of dunamis (potentiality), which defines the mode of Being 

belonging to phusis. 29 This indicates that this concept of phusis became very important 

for Heidegger's problematic. 30 In the Physics, Aristotle examines the Being of 

phusis. Phusis is the term Aristotle uses to refer to those beings that have an internal 

26 ‘On the Essence of Truth’, translated by John Sallis in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings , ed. 

David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), pg. 130. 

27 ‘What is Metaphysics?’, translated by David Farrell Krell in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings , 

pg. 104. 

28 Thomas Sheehan, "Time and Being" pp. 62-63. 

29 Aristotle's Metaphysics: ETA 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force , translated by Walter 

Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 

30 My analysis here is greatly indebted to Thomas Sheehan, who is, to the best of my knowledge, 

the only Heidegger scholar who has seriously examined Heidegger's appropriation of 

Aristotle's concept of phusis. For a much more detailed analysis of this issue see "On the Way 

to Ereignis: Heidegger's interpretation of Physis'" in Continental Philosophy in America, ed. 

Hugh J. Silverman, John Sallis, and Thomas M. Seebohm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University 

Press, 1983), pp. 131-164; "Getting to the Topic: The New Edition of Wegmarken" in Radical 

Phenomenology , ed. John Sallis (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1978), pp. 299- 

316.



principle (arche) of movement (kinesis). As essentially kinetic, such beings while still 

undergoing change are always incomplete and refer to an absent telos in order to be 

what they are. In order to examine the Being of phusis Aristotle must first show that 

it is intelligible to talk about kinesis , the principle of phusis, and so must address 

the Parmenidian notion of Being that excludes kinesis on the basis that it implies 

non-Being. Because Aristotle is able to define kinesis, i.e. give a logos of this 

mercurial phenomenon by means of the concepts of dunamis and energeia, he is 

able to incorporate motion into Being. He is able to demonstrate that, in spite of its 

essential incompleteness, kinesis, and therefore phusis, nonetheless is. Still, for 

Aristotle phusis is only one mode of Being. Being is a polysemic concept of which, 

for Aristotle, ousia constitutes the focal or unified sense because all the others 

ultimately presuppose it. Phusis is oriented towards the stable presence of ousia 

because the former is a privative modality of the latter. Drawing on his 1939 essay 

Heidegger develops a critique of Aristotle by reversing this priority. In fact, 

Heidegger assembles evidence for what he takes to be an equivocation on Aristotle's 

part. "In the Physics", he writes, "Aristotle conceives of phusis as the beingness 

(ousia) of a particular (and in itself delimited) region of beings: things that grow as 

distinguished from things that are made...But this same treatise of the Metaphysics 

[I, 1003a27] says exactly the opposite: ousia (of the Being of beings as such in 

totality) is something like phusis." 31 I shall not consider whether Heidegger is doing 

violence to Aristotle's text and instead elaborate on its significance. 

First, Heidegger finds in the concept of phusis a structural analogue to the disclosive 

event of Being. The disclosive intelligibility of phusis is made possible by that 

which remains concealed and must remain concealed as long as the intelligibility of 

phusis is disclosed. A dimension of absence (steresis) makes possible this presencing, 

which re-expresses the temporalizing of temporality out of which the presence is 

made possible through the interplay of future and past. Absence is prior to 

presence; possibility is higher than actuality. 

Second, Heidegger discerns in Aristotle's alleged equivocation a vestigial indication 

of an earlier thinking in which phusis was not a mode of ousia but the name of 

the Being-process itself. "This barely adequately expressed assertion [of Aristotle] 

that ousia is phusis is an echo of the great beginning of Greek philosophy, the first 

31 ‘On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle's Physics, BI’, translated by Thomas Sheehan 

in Pathmarks ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 

228-229.



beginning of Greek philosophy. In this beginning Being was phusis, such that the 

phusis that Aristotle conceptualized can be only a later derivative of originary phusis." 

32 The "great beginning" refers to the Presocratics, and Heidegger closes his 

essay by citing a well-known fragment of Heraclitus: phusis kruptesthai philei 

(Nature loves to hide itself). According to Heidegger, this fragment does not merely 

claim that phusis is difficult to comprehend, which is how it is usually understood. 

Instead, it says, he contends, that "Self-hiding belongs to the predilection of Being. 

And the essence of Being is to conceal itself, to emerge, to come out of the unhidden. 

Only what in its essence unconceals and must unconceal itself can love to conceal 

itself. Only what is unconcealing can be concealing. And therefore the concealment 

of phusis is not to be overcome, not to be stripped from phusis." 33 

To sum up, then, whereas in Being and Time Da-sein is taken to be the ground 

of ontology whose ultimate sense is temporality, Heidegger later penetrates more 

deeply into the event which first appropriates Da-sein. He inquires into the prior 

conditions of Da-sein's finite transcendence. Since Temporality is constituted by an 

intrinsic absencing dimension, he must abandon the notion of ground altogether. 

Heidegger finds in Aristotle's concept of phusis a way to articulate this notion but, 

in so doing, reverses Aristotle's prioritizing of stable ousia over the ambiguous concept 

of phusis. This privileging owes to Aristotle's ontological committment to a 

metaphysics of presence. This simultaneously opens the horizon for Heidegger's 

turn to the Presocratics for whom phusis named the event of Being itself. This discovery 

disrupts his earlier view of Greek ontology. No longer can the Presocratics 

be grouped together with Plato and Aristotle but rather a decisive transformation 

occurs in the latter. Finally, this discovery of 'two beginnings' also forces Heidegger 

to re-think the concept of poiesis. No longer can the understanding of production 

provide the sense of phusis for Greek ontology as a whole, because the notion of 

phusis itself underwent a transformation in Greek ontology. With this more original 

notion of phusis Heidegger attributes to the Presocratics the question arises: Is there 

a more original sense of poiesis ? 

32 ibid 229. 

33 ibid 229-230.



III 

Earlier we examined how the understanding of phusis in Greek ontology was, 

according to Heidegger in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, oriented to the 

horizon of production and this orientation to production was, moreover, taken to 

be symptomatic of the entrenchment of Greek ontology within the everyday. We 

also remarked that Heidegger fails to explain precisely why remaining in the everyday 

entails an orientation to production and suggested, first, this gap in his argument 

indicates that perhaps the phenomenon of production had a deeper origin 

than Heidegger was aware of at the time and, second, his failure to consider how 

anticipatory resoluteness might become the basis of an authentic form of production 

seems to reveal a dogmatic acceptance of the Aristotelian hierarchical ordering 

of praxis over poiesis. Now, in the 1930s poiesis becomes integrated into what 

belongs authentically to the Being of Da-sein. Poiesis becomes a constitutive feature 

of Da-sein's Being. 34 As a result, Heidegger must broaden his earlier position. 

Greek ontology, which now excludes the Presocratics, was oriented towards a 

distorted understanding of production, i.e. one which fails to grasp its true 

ontological significance. 35 The reason why Plato and Aristotle overlooked the 

original sense of poiesis, dovetails with the reason why Heidegger now distinguishes 

the Presocratics in this conceptual-historical revision. It is not simply the case that 

the Presocratics had comprehended this more original sense of poiesis. Rather, Plato 

and Aristotle failed to grasp this Presocratic understanding of poiesis, because they 

covered over the Presocratic understanding of phusis. Losing the sense of the 

Presocratic understanding of phusis prevented a deeper understanding of the sense 

of poiesis. Their orientation towards an inadequate understanding of the nature of 

production did provide a conceptual scheme to articulate phusis in an intelligible 

way. Yet, their understanding of production was, in turn, determined by an 

inadequate interpretation of phusis which covered over its original sense that we 

find in the Presocratics. In this last section, we will clarify this Presocratic 

understanding of poiesis and try to discern how it is informed by their 

understanding of phusis. In so doing, we will also consider how the Presocratic 

34 Michael E. Zimmerman's, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, pg. 223. 

35 Jacques Taminiaux draws this distinction between what he terms a higher and lower form of 

techne in his article "The Origin of 'The Origin of the Work of Art'" in Reading Heidegger, 

ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 395-397.



concept of phusis is transformed in Plato and Aristotle and, furthermore, how this 

metamorphosis determines their understanding of poiesis as a mimesis. 

In his 1931-32 lecture course on Plato (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit/Zu Platons 

Höhlengleichnis und Theätet) we encounter a first indication of Heidegger's reappropriation, 

or better rehabilitation, of poiesis. This theme is later reiterated in his 1933 

Rectoral address. 36 In both Heidegger assigns to art the power of an original 

ontological disclosure. However, it is not until the 1935 lecture An Introduction to 

Metaphysics that Heidegger really develops this theme in any great detail. 

This lecture begins with a question first formulated by Leibniz and already raised 

in ‘What is Metaphysics?’: Why are there beings rather than nothing? Expressing 

the leading question in this way, Heidegger tells us, "prevents us in our questioning 

from beginning with an unquestionably given [being] and...from continuing on to 

another expected [being] as a ground. Instead, this [being], through questioning, is 

held out into the possibility of nonbeing. Thereby the why takes on a very different 

power and penetration. Why is the [being] torn away from the possibility of nonbeing? 

Why does it not simply keep falling back into nonbeing?...Now a ground is 

sought which will explain the emergence of the [being] as an overcoming of nothingness." 

(IM, 28) In fact, Heidegger calls into question whether this sought after 

‘ground’ which first makes possible the unconcealment of beings should be conceived 

as a ‘ground’ at all. "Since this question is a question, it remains to be seen 

whether the ground arrived at is really a ground, that is, whether it provides a foundation; 

whether it is a primal ground (Ur-grund); or whether it fails to provide a 

foundation and is an abyss (Ab-grund); or whether the ground is neither one nor 

the other but presents only a perhaps necessary appearance of foundation— in 

other words, it is a non-ground (Un-grund)." (IM, 3) That Heidegger should begin 

with this question is quite significant. In Being and Time Heidegger begins by citing 

a passage from Plato's Sophist which he translates: "For manifestly you have long 

been aware of that you mean when you use the expression 'Being'. We, however, 

who used to think we understood it, have become perplexed." (BT, 19) There is no 

reference to non-Being in this passage Heidegger selects, yet the dialogue from 

which it is extracted is above all concerned with the problem of non-Being first 

articulated by Parmenides. In fact, much of the dialogue engages with this Eleatic 

problem— indeed the ‘Stranger’ who undertakes this examination is himself from 

36 Jacques Taminiaux, Le théâtre des philosophes (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), pp. 175-182 

for an analysis of the transformation in Heidegger's interpretation of art in these two texts.



Elea— and attempts to carve out a space for the meaningful reference to non-Being 

in a qualified sense. Thus, the leading question of An Introduction to Metaphysics no 

longer takes its bearings from Plato, the Post-Socratic, but rather implicitly refers to 

Parmenides, the Presocratic. 37 

Although non-Being is impenetrable to the thought of Da-sein according to 

Parmenides, Heidegger explains that the experience of its impenetrability— its 

essential concealment— is the juncture at which thinking begins. Da-sein is overpowered 

by this primordial experience and thrown into question. Indeed, it is this 

experience of concealment which, in the language of Being and Time, accounts for 

Da-sein's thrownness. The insoluble question, "Why are there beings rather than 

nothing?" first opens the space for the Being-question. Heidegger explains that 

Parmenides' fragment in which he outlines the three paths of non-Being, Being, 

and appearance, "provides perhaps the oldest philosophical statement to the effect 

that along with the way of Being the way of non-Being must be specially considered 

, that it is therefore misunderstanding of the question of Being to turn one's back 

on nothing with the assurance that nothing is not. (For that nothing is not an 

essent does not prevent it from belonging to Being in its own way)." (IM, 111) 

This is just another way of expressing that the Presocratics experienced (the event 

of) Being as phusis. Phusis names the event of the un-concealment of beings out of 

concealment. For his part, Heraclitus referred to this event as a polemos : the 'strife' 

between unconcealment and concealment. (ibid, 61-62) 38 This polemos is not a 

conflict that can be overcome by an Hegelian aufhebung. Rather, the emergence of 

an entity into presence, its self-blossoming into the space of unconcealment 

simultaneously conceals an aspect of itself which cannot in principle be disclosed. 

Therefore, appearance is not an aspect of an entity which is to be divorced from its 

real Being, but rather dis-closing an appearance of itself which does not exhaust its 

possibilities of appearing belongs intrinsically to the Being of an entity. 39 Heidegger 

writes: "Because Being, phusis, consists in appearing, in offering an appearance and 

views, it stands essentially and hence necessarily and permanently, in the possibility 

37 Jean-François Courtine, "The Destruction of Logic: From Logos to Language" in The 

Presocratics After Heidegger, pg. 34. 

38 Heidegger will later in the 'Origin of the Work of Art' refer to this primordial polemos as the 

strife between 'world' (unconcealment) and 'earth' (concealment). 

39 We are reminded here of Husserl's discussion of immanent and transcendental perception in 

the Ideas, in the context of which he attempts to show how it belongs intrinsically to the 

'object' to give itself in shadings (Abschattungen).



of an appearance which precisely covers over and conceals what the [being] in truth, 

i.e. in unconcealment is." (ibid, 104) Inasmuch as the Presocratics named this event 

of Being phusis they remained faithful to this primordial and overpowering 

experience of concealment which at the same time opens up a space of disclosure. 

They lingered in the intrinsic unstability of the concealing/disclosing event and so 

did not erase it. 40 

The Presocratic understanding of phusis, Heidegger argues, is reflected in their 

understanding of the phenomenon of thinking (noein). Heidegger cites Parmenides' 

famous fragment: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai. This is usually translated— 

and we should note that Heidegger himself translated this fragment in The Basic 

Problems of Phenomenology 41 — to read: ‘Being and Thinking are the same’. He 

explains that translating it in this way misunderstands the sense intended by 

Parmenides and is a projection of modern epistemological convictions, specifically, 

those of German Idealism. (IM, 137). In particular, it assumes that Being (einai) 

and thinking (noein) enter into an external relation from which we might infer, by 

drawing on this fragment, that Being is something subjective, determined by the 

structure of thought. 42 According to Heidegger, Parmenides is instead claiming that 

Being and thinking belong essentially together. Yet, this belonging-together is no 

Hegelian identity-in-difference. Whereas this relation does constitute a ‘unity...of 

antagonisms’ there is not a reconciliation since Being both discloses and conceals. It 

is this opening up which allows beings to appear that first claims Da-sein to think 

and thereby enables Da-sein to be the being it is. The event of Being overpowers 

40 Although Heidegger in this lecture focuses primarily on Heraclitus and Parmenides, in a later 

lecture he focuses on the one extant fragment attributed to Anaximander. In this fragment, 

Anaximander writes about the emergence of beings out of the apeiron, usually translated as 

'the indefinite'. As 'indefinite' it is not reducible to that which emerges of it and so inherently 

conceals itself. Thus, Heidegger finds one of the earliest expressions of what he calls the 

'Ontological Difference' in Anaximander. 

41 See the second part of footnote #4. 

42 We should note that in this lecture 'thinking' becomes thematized for the first time. (See 

William J. Richardson's Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought pp. 259-297) This is 

not to say the topic of thinking is absent in his writings before this lecture. Yet, there it takes 

the form purely of a negative critique of the traditional understanding and privileging of 

thought. Resoluteness is there the fundamental authentic mode of disclosure of Da-sein. In 

An Introduction to Metaphysics, a more original understanding of thinking is retrieved via the 

Presocratics and gets incorporated into resoluteness. In this lecture, Heidegger develops a 

detailed analysis and critique of the traditional understanding of thinking and the transformation 

it undergoes from the Presocratics to Plato and Aristotle (pp. 115-196).



and first calls Da-sein to think, so conceiving of thinking as a faculty that belongs 

to Da-sein prior to its appropriation misunderstands the nature of thinking. 

"[Thinking] is not a function that [Dasein] has as an attribute, but rather the other 

way around: [Thinking] is the happening that has [Dasein]." (IM, 141) Insofar as 

Da-sein thinks it wrests Being from concealment in an attempt to bring the 

unstable appearances to a stability. Still, Da-sein does not assume merely a passive 

role. While the concealing disclosure of appearances grants the site for Da-sein to 

Be, the event of Being needs Da-sein for these appearances to Be. The event of 

Being encompasses both Da-sein and this original concealing disclosure. 

Now, in Plato and Aristotle this original understanding of phusis and, therefore, 

of thinking became lost. The idea or eidos replaced phusis as the name for Being. 

While the Presocratics never lost sight of the concealing dimension of the disclosive 

event of Being even in their attempt to stabilize the appearances, to bring the appearances 

into an eidetic structure of intelligibility, Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger 

contends, seized only upon the stability and not the concealment. Heidegger writes, 

Actually it cannot be denied that the interpretation of being as idea 

results from the basic experience of Being as phusis. It is, as we say, a 

necessary consequence of the essence of Being as emerging Scheinen 

(seeming, appearing, radiance). And herein there is no departure, not 

to mention a falling-off from the beginning [of the Presocratics]...But 

if the essential consequence is exalted to the level of the essence itself 

and takes place of the essence, what then? Then we have a falling-off, 

which must produce strange consequences. And that is what happened 

[in Plato and Aristotle]. The crux of the matter is not that phusis 

should have been characterized as idea but that the idea should have 

become the sole and decisive interpretation of Being. (IM, 182) 

In Plato the eidos or idea becomes the invariant structure of the appearances. It 

becomes the pure appearance in contrast to the mere variable appearance. As Heidegger 

puts it, "It was in the Sophists and Plato that appearance was declared to be 

mere appearance and thus degraded. At the same time being, as idea, was exalted to 

a supersensory realm. A chasm, chorismos, was created between the merely apparent 

essent here below and real being somewhere high." (IM, 106) Mere appearance 

only is insofar as it is a copy of the eidos . This means that appearance is entirely 

severed from the essence of Being, which is an implication ultimately of 

overlooking the concealment intrinsic to the disclosive event of Being. Moreover,



because the Being is identified exclusively with stable presence, the visible, thinking 

itself becomes understood as ocular. 43 It is easy, then, to see why productive 

behavior becomes an attractive model for the ontology of Plato and Aristotle: Just 

as the appearance is insofar as it is a copy of the idea, so the material upon which 

the artisan is working is inasmuch as it imitates the envisaged model. 

If the metamorphosis of phusis into the idea explains the Platonic-Aristotelian 

orientation to a mimetic notion of poiesis, how does the Presocratic understanding 

of phusis determine a more original sense of poiesis? As we mentioned in our introductory 

remarks, Heidegger retrieves this sense of poiesis through an interpretative 

analysis of the first chorus in Sophocles' Antigone. To begin, he finds in Sophocles' 

description of human being as to deinotaton, which he translates as the most un-athome 

(unheimlich), a poetic transcription of the Presocratic understanding of Dasein. 

The term deinon, he further explains, is ambiguous: it denotes violent overpowering 

(gewaltig) in the sense of both being violently overpowered and the one 

who wields power and violence. (IM, 149-150) This word, he says, names the overpowering 

disclosure of Being that appropriates Da-sein, thereby casting it into the 

unfamiliar and also Da-sein's attempt to master this power and find its home, a 

world, in this opened space. This primordial polemos is "represented with supreme 

purity in Greek tragedy", Heidegger notes, because it exposes the internal limits of 

Da-sein which, in contrast to Hegel's interpretation of the Antigone, does not 

achieve a higher reconciliation. Da-sein cannot achieve complete mastery because 

"its violence shatters against one thing. That is death." (IM, 158) That Dasein, to 

repeat the claim of Being and Time, is from the very beginning ‘Being-towardsdeath’ 

is that which Da-sein cannot overpower and so sustains its homelessness and 

is the mark of its thrownness. Now, it is in this context of an analysis of Da-sein's 

violence, its power, that Heidegger articulates an original sense of poiesis. Heidegger 

points out that Sophocles names the knowledge of this mastery of the overpowering 

event of Being's disclosure techne. While phusis names the event of unconcealment 

43 We can compare this Platonic notion of thinking with the account of original thinking 

which is constituted by an internal negativity described in ‘What Calls for Thinking’ in 

Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. There Heidegger writes: "Once we are so related and drawn 

to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore 

mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking— 

even though he may still be far away from what withdraws. All through his life and right into 

his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and 

maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote 

nothing." (pp. 381-382)



which overpowers Da-sein Techne is the knowledge constitutive of Da-sein to look 

beyond the given appearances which conceal themselves and bring Being to stand. 

Techne, therefore, names Da-sein's transcendence. Heidegger writes: "Knowledge is 

the ability to put into work the being of any particular [being]. The Greeks called 

art in the true sense and the work of art techne, because art is what most immediately 

brings Being (i.e. the appearing that stands there in itself) to stand, stabilizes it 

in something present (the work). The work of art is a work not primarily because it 

is wrought, made, but because it brings about Being in a being; it brings about the 

phenomenon in which the emerging power, phusis, comes to shine." (IM, 159) 

Thought in a more original sense, poiesis does not, then, consist in an imitation of a 

projected model of stable presence. Rather, poiesis is a response to an overpowering 

experience of absence and instability, i.e. the concealing disclosure of phusis, which 

it attempts to overcome by setting Being into work. In so doing, the artwork first 

opens up a world of stable intelligibility and so orients Da-sein. 

Through this retrieve of techne in Sophocles' tragedy, Heidegger attempts to 

show how art, poiesis, is an original site of truth, i.e. the disclosure of Being to Dasein. 

Here it is important to emphasize that inasmuch as poiesis is an original site of 

the disclosure of Being, poiesis, like noein, is not merely a expression of subjectivity; 

poiesis is a constitutive feature of Da-sein's Being-in-the-world. The site of poiesis is 

the open clearing, the ‘Da’ in which Da-sein dwells, but the source of poiesis is the 

overpowering event which first appropriates Da-sein into this clearing. This means 

that techne and phusis belong essentially together. In a later essay entitled "The 

Question Concerning Technology" (1953), Heidegger underlines this crucial 

point. He explains that the bringing-forth of Being involved in human production 

is ultimately grounded in the bringing forth of phusis. But he also goes further. 

Since phusis is a ‘creative’ event which first brings beings out of concealment it, too, 

is a poiesis.44 It is through the experience of the poiesis of phusis that human 

production takes its bearings and distinguishes itself. Heidegger writes: 

Not only handicraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing 

into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing forth, poiesis. 

Phusis, also, the rising of something from out of itself, is a bringingforth. 

Phusis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences 

by means of phusis has the irruption belonging to bringing- forth, e.g., 

44 Cf. Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 

1961) pp. 139-143.



the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself. In contrast, what is 

brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g. the silver chalice, has the 

irruption belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another, in 

the craftsman or artist. 45 

Heidegger's claim that phusis is a poiesis in the original ("highest") sense carries a 

lot of weight. First, it helps clarify our remark at the beginning of this discussion 

that poiesis is the basis for the kinship between the poet and philosopher. For if 

phusis is a poiesis in the original ("highest") sense, then thinking, while qualitatively 

different from human production, is at bottom still a poiesis. Thinking "bringsforth" 

Being in the medium of language and human production brings-forth Being 

in the medium of the visible appearances. Both, though, open up a world and shape 

the way Da-sein understands itself in that world. Second, it provides the basis for 

explaining why Plato and Aristotle would draw on the experience of productive 

behavior to illuminate their understanding of phusis, even if they were not aware of 

the internal unity of these concepts. Indeed, their interpretation of phusis as idea 

prevented them from seeing the 'poietical' dimension of phusis and so the original 

unity of poiesis and phusis. As we have tried to show, Heidegger, in his Marburg 

period, also lacked this deeper understanding of phusis and, therefore, could not, or 

at least did not, see why Greek ontology was oriented to production. If he had, 

then he might have seen, as he later came to see, that the work-world of Da-sein's 

inauthentic everyday Being-in-the-world is a derivative mode of authentic Da-sein 

which first opens up a world through the resolute setting-into-work of Being. In 

other words, he might have seen that not only the praxis of the Aristotelian phronimos 

reveals the site of Being's original disclosure, but so does the poiesis of the 

'Sophoclean' technites. 

45 ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, pg. 317.

The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger's An Introduction to ... - IWM

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