Ἀρχή and αἴτιον do not limit φύσις to physical materia. But the dominant paradigm that came after Aristotle carries this reduction, in such a way that it still dominates our understanding of “nature” as something physical.

(My observation is that some of today’s quantum physicists understand that this limitation leaves much out of the picture and that these physicists in their honesty begin to think how the way things are in the universe involves something that is not limited to physical substances. With this move within quantum physics, the cutting-edge thinking by some physicists moves outside the limiting realm of Greek φύσις as “merely” nature or physical nature. But, even as they move beyond the limitation of a dualistic physical world, they are often hampered by the language that they as physicists have at their disposal when thinking-saying this “beyond.” (David Bohm is a possible exception, with his notions of holomovement and enfolding and “the immeasurable.”) Is it possible that we philosophers can help the physicists name the physics that goes beyond the merely physical? That we can help them see how already in Greek thinking there is this opening, which today’s physicists are seeing for the first time? That we can help them in their retrieval?)

But what if the Greeks in general, including Aristotle, were on to something “beyond” the physical and more like the no-thing dynamic of emptiness – or Heidegger’s beyng? What if theirs was a thinking that was not limited to or defined by what is static/ inert or dualistic (over against mind or ψυχή) – and what if philosophers and scholars who came after the Greek thinkers “read into” the Greek words, thereby reducing them so that they referred to merely physical things? To say it another way, what if, while saying that everything is water or fire or air, we can retrieve the possibility that these word-images in early Greek thinking come from a thinking that is not limited to the physical and the dualistic?

Let us return to the dictionaries. As I said, φύσις is “nature,” “natural order,” “outward form.” But φύσις is also: growth, originating power, origin, force, birth. These meanings go way beyond φύσις as physical nature and thus way beyond what φύσις has become as “physics.”

A refreshing and rethinking retrieval of Greek thinking - Kenneth Maly