provoke us into thinking about whether being lights itself in what Heraclitus calls τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε in such a way that we also stand in this light, even though it, as only an [101] evaporating vapor, obscures and darkens the horizon of human existence.
Through the course of our preceding elucidation, we have translated the combination of words τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε in various ways: first as “the not ever submerging thing”; then, we resorted to the purely verbal sense, “the not submerging, ever”; then, we contracted the two words between which δῦνον is set—μή and ποτέ—into the familiar Greek expression μήποτε, and translated it as “the never submerging”; finally, we gave this negative expression a positive twist and replaced “the never submerging” with “the perpetually emerging.”
Through this process of rendering the Greek into German, we recognized the original meaning of the Greek word φύσις, which is the foundational word of inceptual thinking.
In order to think-after its inceptual meaning to the greatest possible extent, we must forestall a common prejudice: namely, the customary equating of φύσις with ‘nature.’ In the course of this equating it is of little importance how this latter concept (nature) is defined, whether it is taken in the sense of nature as opposed to Spirit, or whether ‘nature’ is meant in the broader sense of ‘essence,’ such as when one speaks of ‘the nature of a matter.’ Even when we consider that the Greeks had an essentially different ‘view of nature’ that cannot be compared with the contemporary one; even when, according to this incompatibility of an equating of φύσις and ‘nature,’ we determine φύσις otherwise, we nonetheless still remain [102] constantly caught in the prejudice that φύσις means for us so-called ‘nature’ (earth and heaven, sea and mountain, plant and animal), although now thought in a Greek sense. Moreover, this means that the human and the gods have also been thought, in a Greek sense, from out of this φύσις -concept and in accordance with it: that is, they have been thought ‘naturally.’
This prejudice is just as fatal as the first. In truth, φύσις means the pure emerging in whose prevalence any appearing thing appears and thus ‘is,’ without specifying any particular being such as mountain, sea, or animal. However, even with
76 The Inception of Occidental Thinking