105. The "Shape" and the Φύσις
The "shape" is not an "optical" "phenomenon": metaphysically it indicates 'being-set-unto itself', it means arising into pure presencing. Therefore, it is not enough, indeed it is even strictly inadequate, to lead the Greek thinking of beings (εἶδος, ἰδέα) back to the "optical".
Rather, the "optical," as what is abstracted, as what comes to a halt, as what is encounterable by an added perceiving, has this distinction because it suits best the sway of φύσις.
The distinction of the countenance (ἰδεῖν, ἰδέα) as well as the formation of θεωρεῖν come later, although they are in accord with ἐὸν. Without referring the perceiving and the gathering to the senses, νοεῖν and λόγος by contrast accomplish more cogently the perceiving and the gathering that make present.
The Greeks emphasize the "optical" because they think being as φύσις. However, as little as "senses as instruments" by themselves can posit anything about the sway of being, just as little does thinking being as φύσις come about because the Greeks are "visually oriented people".
106. Being as Φύσις
To think being in the sense of φύσις means something other than experiencing φύσις (as being) for we can do away with this "as being" because φύσις itself abundantly dominates "everything", that is 'beings in the whole' all the while as φύσις shows itself as the most-being.
It is only in be-ing-historical thinking that already looks ahead into the temporal-spatiality as the domain of projecting-opening metaphysics that φύσις becomes knowable in its sway 'as akin to be-ing' [seynshaft] .
One can ascertain 'historically' — although pretty deficiently - that in Greek thinking the concept of φύσις had a decisive meaning. But that is never enough for enacting the historical mindfulness that shows that φύσις—ἀλήθεια—determined "thinking" into philosophy as "metaphysics". For even there, and above all there where φύσις is not named. it is still thought, especially it is thought there where φύσις has branched out — though not arbitrarily — into a multiplicity of meanings, each of which conceals rather than unveils a significant phase of "metaphysics" (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics Δ 4 ) .