it becomes serious. But the upbringing itself and its essential ground—namely, philosophy as the friendship for the to-be-thought—for their part establish themselves upon the fact that the to-be-thought, which from ancient times has been called ‘being,’ is in itself pervaded by a favor and a granting. So says, in any case, Heraclitus’s saying: φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.

[130] (There is nothing to dispute here. Also, we should not here suppose what might easily occur to someone: namely, that Heraclitus superimposes ‘personal’ and altogether human ‘lived experiences’ onto φύσις—as if it were clear what ‘lived-experiences’ are, and as if it were not in fact the case that these ‘lived-experiences’ themselves receive their origin from out of the essence of life, and thus from out of ζωή, and therefore from out of φύσις.)

However, whatever we understand φύσις to be, the saying φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ makes it sound as though, with φιλεῖ, a human attitude is being attributed to nature, and that thereby something that is in itself objective is ‘felt’ to be something subjective. With this very widely held argument we act as though it were the case that everything that has the manner of favor and bestowal were the special right and property of the ‘subject,’ and as if the determination of the human into a ‘subject’ were the most obvious thing in the world, when in fact such a determination is scarcely three hundred years old (though certainly during this time, as an incomprehensible frenzy of history, this determination has taken the essence of the human into its will). Only since that time when the human became a ‘subject’ has ‘psychology’ existed; and the prerequisite for the formation of the passion for psychology is Christianity. There is no ‘psychology’ in the ancient Greek world. Aristotle’s treatise περὶ ψυχῆς has nothing to do with ‘psychology.’ In its consummation, metaphysics becomes the metaphysics of ‘psychology’: psychology and anthropology are the final word of metaphysics. Psychology and technology belong together like right and left.

That is why to us living today, even the possibility of the following thought is entirely strange, let alone the thought itself: namely, the thought that what we straightaway claim as ‘our experiences’ could in their essence perhaps not belong to us. Within our sphere of thinking, we have no place for the possibility that the so-called ‘subjective’ along with the corresponding ‘objective’ (and the relationship between them) [131] might not be principal and originary, but rather might be an especially question-worthy ‘issue’ and consequence of a more inceptual essential comportment.

The view that Heraclitus ‘anthropomorphized’ the world in a naïve-primitive way of thinking when he attributed φιλεῖν to φύσις—a view that is not even simple-minded, but just merely stupid—will certainly one day collapse under the weight of its own helplessness: for, within the assertion that the saying of Heraclitus’s carries out an anthropomorphizing of ‘nature,’ there lies buried the arrogant pretense to possess an authoritative assessment regarding both the world itself and, above all, the human. Instead of insisting upon our subjectivity and the