PATHMARKS
How are these sentences supposed to prove that μορφή goes to make up the essence of φύσις? Nothing is said about μορφή at all. On the contrary, Aristotle begins the demonstration in a wholly extrinsic way with a reference to a way of speaking, one that in fact we still use. For example, we may say of a painting by van Gogh, "This is art," or, when we see a bird of prey circling above the forest, "That is nature." In such "language use" we take a being that, properly considered, is something by virtue of and on the basis of art, and we call this very thing itself "art." For after all, the painting is not art but a work of art, and the bird of prey is not nature but a natural being. Yet this manner of speaking manifests something essential. When do we say so emphatically, "This is art"? Not just when some piece of canvas hangs there smeared with dabs of color, not even when we have just any old "painting" there in front of us, but only when a being that we encounter steps forth preeminently into the appearance of a work of art, only when a being is insofar as it places itself into such an appearance. And the same holds when we say, "That is nature" — φύσις. Therefore, this way of speaking attests to the fact that we find what is φύσις-like only where we come upon a placing into the appearance; i.e., only where there is μορφή. Thus μορφή constitutes the essence of φύσις, or at least co-constitutes it.
[348] Yet the demonstration that such is the case is supported only by our way of speaking. And Aristotle gives here a splendid, if questionable, example befitting a philosophy based simply on "linguistic usage." This is what someone today might say if he or she were ignorant of what λόγος and λέγειν mean in Greek. However, to find the direction our thinking must take in order to grasp the essence of λόγος, we need only recall the Greek definition of the essence of the human being as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον. We can — in fact, we must — translate ἄνθρωπος — ζῷον λόγον ἔχον as: "the human being is the living entity to whom the word belongs." Instead of "word" we can even say "language," provided we think the nature of language adequately and originally, namely, from the essence of λόγος correctly understood. The determination of the essence of the human being that became common through the "definitions" homo: animal rationale and "the human being: the rational animal," does not mean that the human being "has" the "faculty of speech" as one property among others, but rather that the distinguishing characteristic of the essence of the human being consists in the fact that one has, and holds oneself in, λόγος.
What does λόγος mean? In the language of Greek mathematics the word "λόγος" means the same as "relation" and "proportion." Or we say "analogy," taken as "correspondence," and by this we mean a definite kind of relation, a relation of relations; but with the word "correspondence"
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