about nature and the Metaphysics about being, even if including the being of nature. It might, in a sense, be possible to speak, in Heideggerian terms, of the being of nature, but then the “of” would have to be understood as genitive rather than objective. That is, one would have to mean the belonging together of being and nature. To speak of the being of nature in the latter, objective sense would be to fall prey to a notion of nature as constituting a region of beings alongside other regions of beings such as those constituted through τέχνη. Indeed, Aristotle does often use the term in this sense. But the ambiguity of the notion of φύσις in Aristotle, which resonates both as a word for being in general and as a word for a particular region of beings, is the exact problematic Heidegger wishes to address in the 1939 essay. Therefore, rather than the being of nature, Heidegger speaks of the essence of nature. One might well translate “Wesen der Φύσις” as “the nature of nature.” Remembering the oft-argued Heideggerian claim that for the ancient Greeks essence meant presencing, perhaps we could say that the topic of Heidegger’s essay on the meaning of φύσις in Aristotle is: how does nature come to presence? What is the presencing of nature?
I want to take a different tactic in the next two chapters, commenting on this text of Heidegger’s in a somewhat splintered way. Rather than a holistic approach, I am going to try to proceed here in a more piecemeal fashion, akin to the strategy Werner Marx used some years ago in introducing some of the key elements of a Heideggerian reading of Aristotle’s ontology, emphasizing basic terminology and summarizing Heidegger’s basic way of understanding these Aristotelian terms.3 This will mean that the forest will be presupposed as we look at the trees. But of course Heidegger never writes outside of a vision of the whole that guides his study. So, it will for the most part remain implicit that the guiding insight of the whole of Heidegger’s essay is that, for Aristotle, φύσις is the name for the twofoldness of being and, furthermore, φύσις is the name Aristotle gives for the double movement that belongs to this way of being. This will become clearer when we approach Heidegger’s discussion of genesis and στέρεσις toward the end of the next chapter.
The Meaning of Φύσις
In the introductory passages of this essay, Heidegger points to an etymological connection between γένεσις, as one of the Greek words for the meaning of φύσις, and the Roman word natura (from nasci), which means
3. Werner Marx, The Meaning of Aristotle’s Ontology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954).