The “Greek Experience” of Nature–Physis–Being 43
effort to think the originary, unifying, and fundamental meaning of Being. We must ever endeavour, he tells us in OIA, to return to the “originary meaning of nature as physis” that prevailed among the ancient Greeks, and, accordingly, this means understanding Nature-physis as the “emerging-and-letting-come-to-presence of what is present” (260). Thereby Heidegger recalls for us once more that the Greeks experienced the power of the emergence of all things, the opening and showing of all things to us. As he looked upon the Greek island of Kos from aboard his ship in the Aegean, he was reminded of “the last great Greek lyric poet Theocritus,” who in the Idyll, The Harvest Festival, “celebrated the life and beauty of nature on this island.” Heidegger highlights the following lines from the last part of this Idyll:
Eucritus and I and pretty Amyntas turned aside
To the farm of Phrasidamus, where we sank down
With pleasure on deep-piled couches of sweet rushes,
And vine leaves freshly stripped from the bush.
Above us was the constant quiet movement of elm
And poplar, and from the cave of the Nymphs nearby
The sacred water ran with a bubbling sound as it fell.
Soot-black cicadas chattered relentlessly on
Shady branches, and the muttering of tree-frogs
Rose far off from the impenetrable thorn bush.
Larks and finches were singing, the turtle-dove moaned,
And bees hummed and darted about the springs.
Everything smelt of the rich harvest, smelt of the fruit-crop.
Apples and pears rolled all around us, enclosing
Our bodies with plenty; branches reached to the ground
, Bent with the weight of plums. Men broke for us
Four-year-old seals from the mouths of their wine jars. (269)9
This lovely pastoral scene clearly moved Heidegger (as it has so many others over the centuries), and he also saw in it confirmation that the Greeks enjoyed a special relation to Nature-physis. The Greeks did not have merely a subjective “feeling” or “sentiment” for nature, which he suggests is the prevailing characteristic of the modern Romantic relation to nature.10 Nor did the Greeks