Pedersen (2020:3-4) – vida como movimento

A determinação básica que opera no movimento dos seres vivos é a determinação se algo é benéfico ou prejudicial. Na verdade, o "mundo no em ser-aí natural — não é um fato de que eu tome conhecimento; não é uma atualidade ou realidade. Pelo contrário, o mundo existe, na sua maior parte, no modo benéfico e prejudicial, daquilo que eleva ou perturba o ser-aí" (GA18  :47-48/34). Como veremos, ele pensa que a atividade humana é mais complicada, mas é construída a partir deste fundamento básico.

In several lecture courses in the early- to mid-1920s, Heidegger devotes considerable time to analyzing Aristotle  ’s definition of life. The essential feature of life for Aristotle   is movement. In his early lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle  , in the winter of 1921-1922, he claims, [3] “Elsewhere, people speak of process, stream, the flowing character of life. This latter way of speaking is motivated by and follows a fundamental aspect in which we encounter life, and we take it as a directive towards the ensemble of the basic structures of life as movement, motility” (GA61  :113-115/85). Two years later, toward the very beginning of his 1924 lecture course, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger emphasizes that, for Aristotle  , the basic aspects of the soul (psyche), that which makes living beings alive, are “krinein and kinein—the ‘setting apart and determining’ and the ‘moving-itself’ in the world, the moving about in the world” (GA18  :44-45/32). Going forward another two years, at the end of the 1926 lecture course Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, Heidegger briefly discusses Aristotle  ’s conception of life (zoe) in De Anima. There, he gives the following general definition of a living being: “We say something is living where we find that: it moves in an oriented way, i.e., in a way oriented by perception; it moves itself and can stop itself; it was young and ages; it takes in nourishment and grows; etc.” The basic determination operative in the movement of living beings is the determination of whether something is beneficial or harmful. Indeed, the “world in natural being-there is not a fact that I take notice of; it is not an actuality or reality. Rather, the world is there for the most part in the mode of the beneficial and the harmful, of that which uplifts or upsets being-there” (GA18  :47-48/34). As we will see, he thinks that human activity is more complicated, but it is built from this basic foundation.

In the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy lecture course, Heidegger broadens the claim that animals experience the world in terms of the harmful and beneficial by stating that the “world is there in living in such a way that living, being-in-itself, always matters to it in some way” (GA18  :50-51/36). In the later 1926 lecture course, Heidegger repeats this language when he goes on to further clarify what is meant by moving in an oriented way, as he says that the motion of living beings is “different than the change of place to which lifeless things are subject . . . to move oneself toward something which matters to life in one way or another; an oriented motion in the respective surrounding world.” It is now not just that living beings are oriented in their movement by what is harmful or beneficial but rather they are oriented by this broader notion of things that matter. Here the key determination of life is oriented motion understood as motion toward something that matters. The self-orienting ability possessed by animals, krinein in the Greek, or the capacity for distinguishing, is aisthesis (perception). “The aisthesis of animals,” Heidegger states, “is not a theoretical capacity; on the contrary, it exists in a context of pursuit and flight.” Again, he is making it clear that animals immediately perceive the environment around them in terms of what matters—what is beneficial to them or what harms them. Perception is this fundamental capacity to distinguish things from one another in the environment that allows for oriented movement.