42 Heidegger’s Way of Being
human being.7 Furthermore, the presence of things to us is never exhausted by meaning: a friend, the sea, the tree, the flower — all that present themselves to us — are always more than how we present them. Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than sixty times by several accounts, but never once did he think he had exhausted its showing, its manifestation. Similarly, we, in turn, can never say enough about even one of Cézanne’s paintings of the mountain! All things show themselves to us and address us — again and again — and they are always more than their sense or meaning. Presence (Anwesenheit) always exceeds, overflows, meaning and therefore is not reducible to meaning. Sein is not reducible to Sinn.
For Heidegger, aletheia, as a name for Being itself, speaks to the power of the presencing, the “truthing,” of all “beings” (Wesen, Lebewesen, what is living, natural) and all “things” (Dinge, what is crafted by humans) — altogether, physis in the originary, fullest, and richest sense. Being (physis) is the presencing of all “beings and things” together in the ensemble — the village in the valley, the barn by the pasture, the windmill in the meadow, the sailboat on the sea, the lighthouse at the shoreline, the footbridge over the stream, the steeple against the sky, the road through the woods, the stone wall along the hillside, the hut among the trees, and so forth.
These images bring to mind the rich Western tradition of “pastoral” poetry, literature, music, and art, and the later Heidegger recognized the affinity of his thinking with this tradition, which reaches back to the ancient Greeks and to the Greek poet Theocritus in particular. Heidegger’s reflections on his first trip to Greece in 1962, published as Aufenthalte (Sojourns), are perhaps familiar to many, but not so his observations on a later trip (May 1967), which are gathered in a shorter piece titled “On the Islands of the Aegean” (OIA).8 In this later philosophical travelogue, he reprises several themes from Sojourns, but in OIA he attends more closely to the matter of the Greek understanding of physis. The importance for Heidegger of the Greek Ur-word physis cannot be overstated – it remained at the heart of his lifelong