ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF Φύσις

without ἀλλοίωσις. Or something can be moved in the sense of withering and yet at the same time be moved in still another way, namely, by being altered: on the withering tree the leaves dry up, the green becomes yellow. The tree that is moved in this twofold sense of φθίσις and ἀλλοίωσις is simultaneously at rest insofar as it is the tree that stands there.

If we perceive all these overlapping "appearances" as types of movedness, we gain an insight into their fundamental character, which Aristotle fixes in the word and the concept μεταβολή. Every instance of movedness is a change from something (ἐκ τινος) into something (εἴς τι). When we speak of a change in the weather or a change of mood, what we have in mind is an "alteration." We also speak of "exchange points" where commercial goods change hands in business transactions. But the essential core of what the Greeks meant in thinking μεταβολή is attained only by observing that in a change [Umschlag]⁴ something heretofore hidden and absent comes into appearance. (In German: "Aus-schlag" [the breaking out of, e.g., a blossom] and "Durchschlag" [breaking through so as to appear on the other side].)

(We of today must do two things: first, free ourselves from the notion that movement is primarily change of place; and second, learn to see how for the Greeks movement as a mode of being has the character of emerging into presencing.)

[320] Φύσις is ἀρχὴ κινήσεως, origin and ordering of change, such that each thing that changes has this ordering within itself. At the very beginning of the chapter, φύσει-beings were contrasted with other beings, but the second group were not expressly named and characterized. There now follows an explicit and definite, and yet curiously narrow, delineation:

Iv. "However, a couch (bedstead) and a robe and any other kind (of such things) that there is insofar as it is cited and grasped according to a given way of addressing it (e.g., as a robe) and inasmuch as it comes from a productive know-how, (such a thing) has absolutely no impulse to change arising from itself. However, insofar as it also pertains to such things (in a given instance) to be made of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have in themselves an impulse to change, but they have it only to this extent." (192 b 16-20)

Here, such beings as "plants," animals, earth, and air are now contrasted with beings such as bedsteads, robes, shields, wagons, ships, and houses. The first group are "growing things" ["Gewächse"] in the same broad sense that we employ when we speak of a "field under growth ." The second group are "artifacts" (ποιούμενα), in German, Gemächte, although this last term must be stripped of any derogatory connotations. The contrast achieves its

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