task assigned to their thinking? Can we be so presumptuous as to dare to decide this question? For even if we simply invoke what the Greeks accomplished in matters of thinking, this accomplishment might have been a deviation from their actual destiny. Fortunately, what is at issue here is not the “results” of their philosophy but the very character of their thinking, their way of questioning, the direction from which they pursued an answer to their questioning. Their destiny was something into which they were compelled ever anew, something their thinkers, despite being basically different, nevertheless understood as the same, something that for them was therefore a necessity. Every necessity lays hold of man out of a need. Every need becomes compelling out of, and within, a basic disposition.
These directives delineate the path that might lead us to reflect on what was meted out to the Greeks as the task of thinking and might thereby lead to a reflection on the beginning.
The destiny and task of thought of the Greeks was not to think this or that but to begin thinking itself and to establish it on its ground. Thinking, as the form of the act of philosophy, here means that eruption and that procedure of man thanks to which he is established in the midst of beings, in face of beings as a whole, and knows himself as belonging to these beings. The basic work of this thinking is therefore the question of beings themselves, what they are as such and as a whole.
How did the Greeks answer this question? What sort of basic determination did they force upon beings or, better, what character of beings as such did the Greeks allow to be ascendent over themselves, so that these same Greeks might emerge and rise up in themselves?
In the context of the present lectures, we can speak about these matters only by way of certain formulas. Beings as such are φύσις. Now we must immediately put out of play all later interpretations and translations of this first, more reticent than expressive, designation of beings. That is, we must set aside all those interpretations that understand φύσις as “nature,” whereby nature itself, depending on its sense in later antiquity, in Christianity, or in modernity, means quite different things, though always belonging to one single context.
Being, as such, impressed the Greeks as the constant, that