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Galiet & Galiet
the foundation, the base, from which activity proceeds. In this sense, it is a source, a springing forth: the source of being in the sense of coming into being.
These two senses, substance and source, becoming and being, do not need to be incompatible. In both cases, φυσις can refer “to all that exists” in the sense that “all that exists” emerges from the source of motion that could simply be “being” or “reality.” Heidegger rejects that φυσις was for the pre-Socratics simply the emergence of everything that exists, since the Greeks did not experience φυσις based on natural processes, but through the inverse: φυσις was revealed to the Greeks according to a fundamental poetic-thinking experience.21 By means of this revelation, they could glimpse at Nature in the strict sense. Φυσις meant, originally, the heavens and earth, stones and plants, animals and humans, and history as the works of humans and the gods; finally, and primarily, the gods in themselves beneath destiny. Φυσις signified the power that emerges and the permanence that falls beneath its empire. In this surging power that is permanence, ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ dwell in the strict sense. Φυσις is the originating (Ent- stehen) from which the hidden appears.” Heidegger links the meaning of original φυσις22 with aletheia23 as presence that ‘appears’ and that, consequently, is ‘hidden’ or ‘concealed’ even in its own appearing, in the Heraclitean sense that “Nature loves to hide.”24 He claims the Greeks regarded being as ‘presence and presence-at-hand’ (Anwesenheit und Vorhandenheit) or phusis.25 “Phusis is not ‘nature;’ it is...what is of its own accord, what subsists in itself.”26 In this sense, Nature (natura) need not be translated as ‘force’ of φυσις, given that it presupposes certain distinctions that had not come into being yet: for example, the distinction between φυσις and τεχνη, φυσις and polis, etc. (distinctions characteristic of many modern conception of Nature). Yet this precisely, and ultimately, equates to recognizing that φυσις could signify reality when it
21 Heidegger’s On the Way to Language in connection to Heidegger’s Poetry, Language and Thought. Heidegger. Poetry, Language and Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.
22 Heidegger insists that the Latin translation of phusis ruins its original force. Heidegger. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. R. Manheim. New York: Doubleday, 1961. Originally published in 1953 on the basis of his 1935 lectures. 10-11 Vol. 54: Parmenides, ed. M.S. Frings (1982), lectures 1942-3/Parmenides. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 57. Please note that all Heidegger’s references, definitions expressed in this paper, appear in Michael Inwood’s A Dictionary of Heidegger. This was the key source of reference on Heidegger for this paper, other than Being and Time, Plato’s Sophist, The Essence of Truth, On Metaphysics, which I have read to a great degree. Some of Inwood’s references were indeed double-checked. The Heidegger texts referred to in his dictionary are included here for further study. Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
23 Heidegger claims that, originally, phusis was not too distinct from aletheia, the unhiddenness into which beings emerge, or from logos, the ‘gathering’ or ‘collection’ of beings in the open. Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
24 “The true nature of a thing tends to hide itself.” Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Heraclitus. F25 in reference to F22B123; KRS 298. 40
25 Heidegger. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. W. Biemel, 1976. 77 Section orally Trans. by M. Voght. From Logic: The Question of Truth. In Transl. T. Sheehan and R. Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
26 Vol. 22: Die Grundbergriffe der antiken Philosophie. Ed. F.K. Blust, 1993. 1926 lectures. 287. See also Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
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