What does Heraclitus say about φύσις? Even before we have thought through the first saying in its entirety, we already hear yet another saying. However, with the quotation of the following saying, and as was the case with the first saying, we abandon the typical ordering of the fragments, taking instead fragment 16 as the first and, from now on, fragment 123 as the second. The latter fragment reads:
φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.
Emerging to self-concealing gives favor.
We are astonished to hear such a thing regarding φύσις. φύσις as “the perpetually emerging,” as the “never submerging,” is obviously the same as the “never going into concealment.” The perpetually emerging is indeed what is purely concerned with emerging and only with this. The perpetually emerging constantly rejects submerging from itself: it is averse to entering into concealing. If the perpetually emerging, φύσις, at all turns away from something and indeed turns itself against it; if, further, the perpetually emerging in its very essence does not know one particular thing and is not permitted to know this thing, then surely this thing would be concealing and going-into-concealment. Yet, now Heraclitus says: “emerging gives favor to self-concealing.” Accordingly, emerging belongs in its very essence to self-concealing. How does this square with the essence of φύσις ? Here, it seems, Heraclitus contradicts himself. Conventional understanding always ‘feels’ a deep satisfaction when it discovers that a thinker has contradicted himself. For example, one has hardly even ‘read’ (if you could even call it ‘reading’) [111] the first pages of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before making the discovery that Kant ‘in fact’ contradicts himself.
τέχνη is what pertains intimately to all bringing-forth in the sense of human setting-forth. If bringing-forth (τεκεῖν) is a setting into the unconcealed (i.e., the world), then τέχνη means the knowledge of the unconcealed and the ways of attaining, obtaining, and implementing it. The essential feature of bringing-forth is τέχνη, and the essential feature of τέχνη is to be the relation with unconcealment and to unfold that relatedness. Thus, τέχνη does not mean a type of activity in the sense of an effecting of bringing-forth, but rather a preparing-beforehand and keeping ready of the respective realm of the unconcealed into which something is brought forth and set-forth: namely, what is to be set-forth. This preparing-beforehand and keeping-ready of the unconcealed (ἀληθές)—that is, of the true—is τέχνη. If we call this particular residing within the true by the name ‘knowledge,’ taken here in a far-ranging and rich sense, then τέχνη is a form of knowledge in the broad sense of illuminating, of making ‘light.’ The conventional translation of τέχνη as “art” is wrong
84 The Inception of Occidental Thinking