this clarification we could now still easily succumb to an additional prejudice by thinking that φύσις is the pure emerging in whose openness and brightness everything appears. Mountain and sea, plant and animal, house and human, god and heaven are thus all things that appear, and do so in the manner in which we nowadays conceive such beings. We may make eff orts to take φύσις in the appropriately Greek sense of the pure emerging: however, even when we do so, we treat it like a gigantic, all-encompassing container into which we stuff those things that we currently conceive of as beings. When we do this, we thereby fail to grasp what is decisive: for φύσις, as the perpetually emerging, is not an inert receptacle, a so-called ‘container’ in the manner that a lampshade spreads over the lamp in such a way that the lamp remains what it is whether the shade ‘contains’ and ‘covers’ it or not. The pure emerging prevails throughout the mountain and the sea, the trees and the birds: their being itself is determined through and as φύσις and is only experienced in that way. Neither mountain nor sea nor any being needs the ‘container,’ for each being, insofar as it is, ‘is’ in the manner of emerging.
If we consider the above-mentioned and intrinsically convoluted result of the prejudices that stand over against the inceptual meaning of φύσις ; if we further consider that these prejudices are hardly recognized, let alone sufficiently thought through; if we even further consider that [103] our insight into the hitherto dominant prejudices that stand over against the inceptual meaning of φύσις is only the preparatory step for entering into the correspondent experience of φύειν itself; if we consider all of this, then we surely cannot expect that, even in light of the superior instruction regarding the matter that has just taken place, we will all henceforth refrain from translating φύσις superficially as ‘nature,’ but will instead say ‘the pure emerging.’ This empty substitution of words is almost worse than the stubborn retention of the customary interpretation: for when one now no longer translates φύσις with ‘nature,’ like common people do, one thereby believes oneself to be a superior human being. The same situation exists when, as has been the case for some time now, one no longer translates the Greek word ἀλήθεια with “truth,” but rather with “unconcealment” and even “openness,” and yet betrays in the very next sentence that one is indebted to a conception of the essence of truth that can be obtained from any textbook of modern epistemology, while in fact this conception of truth is and will forever remain untouched by the essence of ἀλήθεια.
However, the inconspicuous modification of the translation of the words φύσις and ἀλήθεια, when truly executed, is nothing other than a sign of the change of our fundamental stance toward being itself. The abiding within this alteration is something that may only be historically prepared in thinking, and neither forced nor contrived. Without this experienced relation to being, the modification of the meaning of the above-mentioned word dissolves into an unimportant historiographical reckoning of derivative concepts.