PATHMARKS
each step of the actual constructing and governs the choice and use of materials. Even when the house "is standing," it stands on the foundation that has been laid for it; however, it never stands from out of itself, but always as a mere construction. As long as it stands there — in Greek terms, as long as it stands forth into the open and unbidden — the house, due to its way of standing, can never place itself back into its ἀρχή. It will never take root in the earth but will always remain merely placed on the earth, built upon it.
But let us take an example: What if someone were to hit himself in the eye and injure the eye by a clumsy movement of his own hand? Certainly both the injury and the movement of the hand are ἐν ταὐτῷ, "in" the same being. However, they do not belong together but have simply happened together, come together συμβεβηκός, incidentally. Therefore, in determining the essence of the φύσει ὄντα, it is not enough merely to say they have the ἀρχή of their movedness in themselves. Rather, we are required to add this special determination: in themselves, specifically inasmuch as they are themselves and are in and with [bei] themselves.
[This word "specifically" does not restrict matters but requires us to look into the vast expanse of the unfathomable essence of a mode of being that is denied to all τέχνη because τέχνη renounces any claim to knowing and grounding truth as such.]
Aristotle concludes the first stage of his characterization of the essence of φύσις by what seems to be merely a superficial [329] clarification of the meaning of the concepts and expressions that gather around the essence and the concept and the word φύσις:
VIII. "Φύσις, therefore, is what has been said. Everything that possesses this kind of origin and ordering 'has' φύσις. And all these things are (have being) of the type called beingness. Φύσις is, in each case, such as lies present of and by itself, and is always in a thing that lies present in this way (constituting its lying-present). In accordance with φύσις, however, are these things as well as everything that belongs to these things in themselves, of and by themselves, as, e.g., it belongs to fire to be borne upward. In point of fact this (being borne upward) is not φύσις, nor does it possess φύσις, but it certainly is from φύσις and in accordance with φύσις. So now it has been settled what φύσις is, as well as what is meant by 'from φύσις,' and 'in accordance with φύσις.' " (192 b32—193 a2)
It may strike the reader that even at this point we continue to leave the basic word φύσις untranslated. We do not call it natura or "nature" because these names are too ambiguous and overburdened and, in general, because they get their validity as names for φύσις only by means of a peculiarly oriented interpretation of φύσις. In fact, we do not even have a word that
198