PATHMARKS
was already composed. (Cf. also Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, p. 296, originally published in 1923· For all its erudition, this book has the single fault of thinking through Aristotle's philosophy in the modem Scholastic neo-Kantian manner that is entirely foreign to Greek thought. Much of Jaeger's Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles, 1912, is more accurate because less concerned with "content.")
But even so, this first thoughtful and unified conceptualization of φύσις is already the last echo of the original (and thus supreme) thoughtful projection of the essence of φύσις that we still have preserved for us in the fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides.
[313 {GA 9 243}] In Book Two, chapter one, of the eight books of the Physics (Physics B, 1, 192b8-193b21), Aristotle gives the interpretation of φύσις that sustains and guides all succeeding interpretations of the essence of "nature." Here too are hidden the roots of that later determination of the essence of nature wherein it is distinguished from spirit and determined through the "spirit." In saying this we mean to intimate that the differentiation of "nature and spirit" is simply foreign to the Greeks.
Before we follow the individual steps of Aristotle's determination of the essence of φύσις, let us look at two sentences that Aristotle pronounces in the first and introductory book (A):
ἡμῖν δ' ὑποκείσθω τὰ φύσει ἢ πάντα ἢ ἔνια κινούμενα εἶναι· δῆλον δ' ἐκ τῆς ἐπαγωγῆς.
"But from the outset it should be (a settled issue) for us that those beings that are by φύσις, whether all of them or some of them [those not in rest], are moving beings (i.e., determined by movedness). But this is evident from an immediate 'leading toward' (that leads toward these beings and over and beyond them to their 'being')." (A, 2, 185 a12ff.)
Here Aristotle explicitly emphasizes what he perceives to be decisive for the projection of the essence of φύσις, namely, κίνησις, the state of movedness. And therefore the key issue in the question about "physics" becomes one of defining the essence of movement. For us today it is merely a truism to say that the processes of nature are processes of movement - in fact, it is a tautology. We have no inkling of the importance of Aristotle's sentences just cited, nor of his interpretation of φύσις, unless we know that it was through and for Aristotle that what we take for a truism first entered the formative essential insight of Western humanity. Certainly the Greeks before Aristotle had already experienced the fact that sky and sea, plants and animals are in movement, and certainly thinkers before him had already
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