The Early Saying of Being as Physis (as Aletheia) 63
rolling trolleys moving about, and a row of low red-brick buildings stand elegantly along the length of the street. Behind and above these buildings are shingled houses and more red-brick buildings, and behind them more still, until the hill reaches the summit.
All is present – city and nature gathered together. The fourfold gathered. Everything unfolded – everything unfolding. A homecoming of all beings and things.
Glimpsed here is what Heidegger glimpsed from the very beginning of his lifetime of thinking: the emerging of all beings and things in the ensemble; their holding and lingering and whiling in appearance, carried along by a great giving stream, a stream not hidden exactly, but difficult to see. This great giving flow, this temporal-spatial letting of all things, is Being – but also φύσις, ἀλήθεια. Indeed, in our relation to φύσις it is no doubt important to keep in view that it is we mortals who bring into language what emerges and lingers and passes away. There is no overlooking ourselves as “the shepherd” and “the guardian” of Being/φύσις. Yet in Heidegger’s distinctive vision and version of “phenomenology,” we are always called to recall that ours is an Entsprechung, a cor-respondence. Φύσις first addresses us, and ever so. Physis calls forth from us language and saying and meaning. Physis opens us so that we may open up a world of meaning. The core matter for Heidegger – and for those inclined to his thinking – is that φύσις is the measure, not Dasein. Nevertheless, this by no means diminishes the human being, not at all. It is simply to recognize the limit of our marvellous λόγος, our comprehensibility (Verstehbarkeit), our taking-as, our meaning-making. Manifestation structurally precedes and exceeds any kind and any level of meaning. There is a depth to manifestation that is never exhausted by sense or meaning – in Heidegger’s own words,
this truth of Being does not exhaust itself in Dasein.12
This is the reserve he so often spoke of as the λήθη of ἀλήθεια or the κρύπτεσθαι of Heraclitus’s saying φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ,