thought literally, means emerging in the sense of coming out of the closed and veiled and simple one-folded. (φύσις is the foundational word in the saying of the inceptual thinkers.) This ‘emerging’ becomes immediately clear to us through the emerging of the seeds sunken in the earth, the sprouting of shoots, the emerging of the blossom. Additionally, the spectacle of the emerging sun points to the essence of emerging. All of this, however, is different from the sort of emerging one sees when the human being, gathered into view, arises from out of himself; or how the emerging world unveils itself to the human through speech and thereby, at the same time, unveils the human himself; or how the mind, through gesture, displays itself; or how, in play, the essence of the human shows itself transparently; or how, in simple presence, the essence of the human reveals itself. To say nothing here of the greetings of the gods, [88] there is everywhere a reciprocal unfolding-toward-one-another of all ‘essences’ and, within that unfolding, appearance in the sense of the emanating self-showing. That is φύσις. Therefore, it is fundamentally erroneous to hold that what this foundational word φύσις names in the saying of the inceptual thinkers was first of all gleaned from the emerging seed, the emerging plant, or the emerging sun, and was only then accordingly extended to all so-called natural processes, and then finally conferred upon humans and gods, and in such a way that, from the point of view of φύσις, ‘gods and humans’ are also presented as being in a certain sense ‘natural.’ As if it were not in fact the case that what we call ‘nature’ first obtained its determination only through a lack of understanding of φύσις. φύσις, pure emerging, is neither merely abstracted from out of the narrow sphere of what we call ‘nature,’ nor is it subsequently assigned to humans and gods as an essential characteristic. Rather, φύσις names that prior emerging within which earth and sky, sea and mountain, tree and animal, human and god emerge and thereby show themselves as what emerge, so that they, in light of this emerging, are known as ‘beings.’ What we call ‘natural processes’ first became visible to the Greeks in the way of their ‘emerging within the light of φύσις.’
By contrast, modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause-and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern [89] natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than