Page 13 - GALIET METAPOIESIS AND TRUTH IV+

Galiet & Galiet
In fact, φυσις corresponds to the verb φυω (infinitive: φυειν), which means, “to produce,” “to make grow,” “to engender,” “to form,” such as in φυειν πτερα “to grow wings” and φυειν ανδρας αγαθους (to produce good (courageous) men; deriving φυσας, “the begetter,” “the one who generates,” “the parent,” that is, “the father.”16 By analogy and translation, Natura in Latin corresponds to the verb nascor (infinitive, nasci) which means, “to be born,” “to begin,” “to be formed,” as in ex me natus est, “he has been born from me.” Hence, φυσις is equated, in great part, with natura and is translated by nature in respect of “what surges,” “what is born,” “what is generated or engendered.” As a result, it has a certain innate quality or property that, belonging to itself, makes Q be Q, or poetically, a rose be a rose be a rose,17 or a herb be a herb be a herb18 in virtue of its own principle.
This term, too, appearing in many different contexts in Grecian philosophy and literature, can be translated in many ways to give sense to its context. V.W. Veazie shows many examples of Grecian literature whereby φυσις can be translated as “power” or “potential,” “inmost power or force,” “innate ability,” “temperament,” “function or nature of a thing,” “character of a person.” Many examples refer to human beings, but others refer to plants, birds, personifications, etc. However, of the many significations, some acquire a certain sense of permanence. Two, in particular, seem pertinent to pre-Socratic philosophy. In one sense, φυσις designates something that has in itself the force of motion that enables something to grow, develop and become, in the same sense of Aristotle and Dylan Thomas’s “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”19 In this sense, as for Aristotle and the pre-Socratics, it signifies reality itself in regards to something primary, fundamental and permanent. Being one and the same with basic reality, it is the fundamental substance of all things. Φυσις, thus, parallels arche or αρχη,20 the first principle of all things. In another sense, it shows the process of “emergence,” of “being born,” if and only if it emerges from itself, from the very being that emerges and comes to be. Φυσις can continue to be a principle but is “a principle of motion” which is also a “principle of being.” It is
16 Liddell & Scott. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1889.
17 Stein, Gertrude. Derived from her poem: A rose is a rose is a rose. Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Sacred Emily, a Poem. Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1933.
18ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας πόρε φάρμακον ἀργεϊφόντης ἐκ γαίης ἐρύσας, καί μοι φύσιν αὐτοῦ ἔδειξε. (So saying, Argeiphontes [=Hermes] gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its nature). Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Collins, 1967. 10.302-3.
19 Thomas, Dylan. The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. Thomas, Dylan. Quite Early One Morning. New York: New Directions Book, 1954.
20 To Ionian philosophers, change and becoming was inapprehensible to reason, this is why it was necessary to postulate the existence of a first principle, whether it be water (Thales), apeiron (Anaximander), or air (Anaximenes). Arche or αρχη as beginning, as principle of reality, had key features: it was thought of as a material substance and permanent entity underlying all changes and explaining both change, opposites and multiplicity. See Miletian philosophers. Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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