at the dawn of metaphysics. He belongs to the latter inasmuch as he determines physis as the being of beings in their totality.
Yet he escapes metaphysics in at least a twofold manner: physis does not name any individual being; rather, it names being; the basic words of Heraclitus — "the ever-living fire," "the One," "harmonia aphanès,” "invisible harmony"—articulate nothing but the traits of physis and speak just as strongly of being. For metaphysics, the univocity of the name which designates the being of beings will appear as necessary and evident: being will be ousia, energeia, substance, subject, will to power "and beyond this, nothing." Opposed to this exclusion of Nothingness is in Heraclitus the inclusion of concealment or of withdrawal in the original unity of all things, as well as the inclusion of contraries in the One. "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit or abundance."4 "Natural phenomena" and human events belong on strictly equal footing with the unity of physis, which is called divine.
No doubt there is a more empirical cosmology in Heraclitus; no doubt the word physis more intuitively designates the image of vegetal growth (the flower that blooms, or the plant that emerges from the earth) or the rising of the sun. "This 'rising' is immediately perceptible to us in the sprouting of the seed sown in the earth, in the bursting forth of drives, in the blooming of flowers. And further, the sight of the rising sun points to the essence of blooming."5 But the pure blooming of physis does not need these ontic models and images. It is anterior to them as the condition of their appearance. "In truth, other than the specific connotation of mountains, sea, and animals, physis signifies the pure arising (des reine Aufgehen) in the power of which all that appears appears and thus 'is.'"6 By just naming physis Heraclitus does not make the "gigantic generalization" that Nietzsche attributed to Thales—who therefore was, according to him, the first philosopher—a generalization consisting in transferring to the totality of beings a trait that belongs to a specific number of them. Pure arising is not first ascertained in the domain of what we call nature and then applied to the totality of the world (from stones and plants, passing by way of animals up to man, and even to gods). Rather, the "world" ("cosmos") is thought as "fire," which means as pure emergence, as "light" which from the outset intimately penetrates, like lightning or flame, every being without encompassing it like a container. "Nature" is already grasped as "world" in the phenomenological sense. We will come back to this point.
In his famous reading of Fragment 123 Heidegger brings into relief a kind of interior life, or elementary pulsation, of physis. On the one hand physis occurs according to a correlation or simultaneity of showing-itself and selfwithdrawal. This withdrawal is not simply a hidden dimension, a simple closure, a kind of crypt separated from the broad daylight, but a true reserve that "feeds," so to speak, emergence. One must understand that the withdrawal contains "the essential possibility of emergence,"7 which means preserves it, protects it, maintains it. There is no "nature" without