for thinking the identity of the non-identical, the event-like identity of concealing and unconcealing: originary time.
Heidegger's interpretation of the fragment by Heraclitus usually translated as "Nature loves to hide"22 may help clarify this identity. The interpretation proceeds by a number of exclusions. To understand the temporality operative in Heraclitean φύσις is to understand the impossibility of confining time to manifest phenomena (facts of 'nature' and facts of 'consciousness' alike); the impossibility of seeking to account for time as originary, while ignoring the absence, the hiddenness, from which this category bespeaks emergence; the impossibility of some zenithal manifestation without concealment; as well as, lastly, the impossibility of occultation without appeal, of a fall outside time, of forgottenness without return. These exclusions thematize the temporal difference in terms of a twofold absence. The stage of any order of presence is drawn by the peripheral (or ontic) absence of entities excluded from it by an original epochē. But at the center of that stage occurs the (ontological) pull toward absencing which makes for the motility of originary emergence.
What is decisive in the categorial function of φύσις is that the self-manifestation of the variables in an epochal order is nothing but the event of their very conjoining, their coming together, as differing from such an order's (present or absent) components or constitutents. During the paradigmatic economy23 before the classical age, this "appearing out of hiddenness" received the name φύσις.24 From the viewpoint of the fields whose succession makes up the 'history of being', φύσις is the differential factor in the indefinite multiplicity of ways things enter into the play of interaction. Originary presencing differentiates itself according to synchronically as well as diachronically adjacent territories.25 On Platonic terrain, for example, the self-manifestation of entities in general is narrowed down to the proper 'aspect' of this or that specific entity.26
Before Parmenides "uttered ἐόν as the basic word for Western thought," the basic words were φύσις, λόγος, Μοῖρα, Ἔρις, ἀλήθεια, ἕν.27 However, Moira, the 'des tiny' of the difference between presencing and the present, and Eris, the 'wrestling' between arrival and withdrawal are both names that designate φύσις.28 They do not constitute categories since they add no trait of their own.
Later, when Aristotle declares: "Among things that exist, some are by nature (φύσει), others by other causes,"29 φύσις ceases to be the name of originary presencing and comes to designate one species of substances, namely, those that grow by themselves, opposed to substances moved by another or fabricated. With the Academy, this second category in turn becomes operative subterraneously, not only in Aristotle's Physics, but also when the Medievals oppose the natural to the supranatural, when the moderns define nature as the thing extended or as "the connection of appearances determining one another with necessity according to universal
22. Frag. 123 (VA 270 f./EGT 113 f, and Wm 370 f./Phy 269).
23. It is paradigmatic since, as I have said, every inception contains what will eventually emerge from it and to which it remains superior.
24. VS 69.
25. It is neither "for all time," nor everywhere "in the same way" that present things "presence" (WhD 143/WCT 235 f.).
26. Phusis is, "at the inception of Western thought, the rise of the concealed into unconcealment"; with Plato, on the other hand. a thing's aspect "determines what can then still be called unconcealment" (Wm 139/PDT 267).
27. Hw 324/EGT 38 f.
28. Hw 325/EGT 39. For Moira, see also VA 255/EGT 100.
29. Physics II, 1; 192 b 7 (cf. Wm 315 and 358 f./Phy 226 and 259 f.; FD 63-66/WTh 82-85).