ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF Φύσις
understanding at all Aristotle's interpretation of φύσις; in particular it determines whether we can follow the progression of the new approach, which now follows, toward the conclusive determination of the essence of φύσις.
Before attempting this, we must recall, in its simple coherence, what we have seen up to this point.
According to ἐπαγωγή, φύσει-beings are in the state of movedness. But φύσις itself is the ἀρχή, the origin and ordering, of movedness. From this we may readily conclude that the character of φύσις as origin and ordering will be adequately determined only when we achieve an essential insight into that for which φύσις is the origin and over which it is the ordering power: κίνησις.
[341 {GA 9 271}] Aristotle lets us see this connection with perfect clarity at the beginning of Book III of the Physics, in the first three chapters of which he gives the crucial interpretation of the essence of κίνησις:
Ἐπεὶ δ' ἡ φύσις μέν ἐστιν ἀρχὴ κινήσεως καὶ μετα βολῆς, ἡ δὲ μέθοδος ἡμῖν περὶ φύσεώς ἐστι, δεῖ μὴ λανθάνειν τί ἐστι κίνησις· ἀναγκαῖον γὰρ ἀγνοουμένης αὐτῆς ἀγνοεῖσθαι καὶ τὴν φύσιν. (200 b12-15)
"But now because φύσις is the origin and ordering of movedness, and thus of the change that breaks forth, and because our procedure inquires into φύσις (μέθοδος: the step-by-step inquiry that pursues the subject matter, not our later 'method' in the sense of a certain kind and manner of μέθοδος), in no way must we allow what κίνησις is (in its essence) to remain in hiddenness; for if it (κίνησις) were to remain unfamiliar, φύσις too would necessarily remain in unfamiliarity." [Compare the expression γνώριμον at B, 1, 193 a6, supra, where it was a question of blindness with regard to being and essence.]
But in the present context the point is merely to sketch out the basic outline of the essence of φύσις. Then, in section XV to follow (193 b7), the essence of the κίνησις proper to φύσις is finally grasped, but it is not properly developed. Rather, there it is only differentiated from the other realm of beings, the movedness and the rest of "artifacts."
Φύσις is the origin and ordering of the movedness (κίνησις) of a moving being (κινούμενον), and more precisely it is so καθ᾿ αὐτὸ καὶ μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκός. A φύσει-being, in itself, from itself, and unto itself, is such an origin and ordering of the movedness of the moving being it is: moved of and by itself and never incidentally. Thus the characteristic of standing of and by itself must be accorded in a special way to φύσει-beings. A φύσει-being is οὐσία, beingness, in the sense of the German Liegenschaften, something lying present of and by itself. And for this reason, some thinkers are overwhelmed and deceived by what merely seems to be the case (δοκεῑ),6 namely, that in general the essence of φύσις consists simply in being the
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