ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF Φύσις
must be hard to hold on to in its originality and truth. Otherwise Aristotle would not need to explicitly remind us of it nor attack this blindness to being. And our relation to being is hard to hold on to because it seems to be made easy for us by our common comportment toward beings — so easy, in fact, that our relation to being looks as if it could be supplanted by this comportment and be nothing else but this comportment.
Aristotle's remarks on the desire to prove that φύσις "shows up" play a special role within the whole of his exposition, and we immediately see this role from the following passage:
X. "But for some (thinkers) φύσις, and so too the beingness of beings from φύσις, appears to be whatever is already and primarily present in any given thing, but in itself lacking all form. In this view the φύσις of the bedstead is the wood, the φύσις of the statue is the bronze. According to Antiphon's explanation, this is shown in the following way: If one buries a bedstead in the earth and if the decay goes so far that a sprout comes up, then what is generated (from this sprout) is not a bedstead but wood. Consequently something that has been brought about in accordance with rules and know-how (e.g., the bedstead made out of wood) is certainly something there, but only insofar as it has appeared incidentally. But its beingness lies in that (the φύσις) which abides through it all, holding itself together throughout everything it 'undergoes.' Furthermore, if any one of these (wood, bronze) has already undergone the same process [of having been brought into a form] with respect to yet another — as have bronze and gold with respect to water, or bones and wood with respect to earth, or similarly anything else among all other beings — then it is precisely the latter (water, earth) that are φύσις and that therefore are the beingness of the former (as beings)." (193 a9-21)
[336] From a superficial point of view, it now seems Aristotle moves from clarifying the correct attitude for determining the essence of φύσις as a manner of being over to characterizing the opinion of other thinkers with regard to φύσις. But his purpose here is not just to mention other views for the sake of some sort of scholarly completeness. Nor does he intend simply to reject those other views in order to fashion a contrasting background for his own interpretation. Rather, Aristotle's intention is to explain Antiphon's interpretation of φύσις in the light of his own formulation of the question, and so to put Antiphon's interpretation, for the first time, on the only path that can lead to an adequate determination of the essence of φύσις as Aristotle envisions it. Up to now we know only this much: φύσις is οὐσία, the being of some beings, specifically of those beings that have been seen antecedently to have the character of κινούμενα, beings that are in movement. Even more clearly: φύσις is the origin and ordering (ἀρχή) of the movedness of something that moves of itself.
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