ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF φύσις
attempted to say what movement was. But it was Aristotle who first [314 {GA 9 244}] attained — and thus, first created — that level of questioning where (movement is not considered as something merely given along with other things, but rather where) being-moved is explicitly questioned and understood as the fundamental mode of being. (But this means that defining the essence of being is impossible without an essential insight into movedness as such. Of course this is not at all to say that being is understood "as movement" [or as rest), for such thinking would be foreign to the Greeks and, in fact, absolutely unphilosophical [inasmuch as movedness is not "nothing," and only being, in essence, rules over the nothing and over beings and over their modes].)
According to Aristotle, the fact that all beings from ψύαις are in motion or at rest is evident: δῆλον ἐκ τῆς ἐπαγωγῆς. We usually translate the word ἐπαγωγής as "induction" and, taken literally, the translation is almost adequate. But with regard to the issue, i.e., as an interpretation, it is totally erroneous. Ἐπαγωγή does not mean running through individual facts and series of facts in order to conclude something common and "general" from their similar properties. Ἐπαγωγή means "leading toward" what comes into view insofar as we have previously looked away, over and beyond individual beings. At what? At being. For example, only if we already have treeness in view can we identify individual trees. Ἐπαγωγή is seeing and making visible what already stands in view - for example, treeness. Ἐπαγωγή is "constituting" in the double sense of, first, bringing something up into view and then likewise establishing what has been seen. Ἐπαγωγή, is what immediately becomes suspect to those caught up in scientific thinking and mostly remains foreign to them. These people see in it an inadmissible petitio principii, i.e., an "offense" against "empirical thinking," whereas the petere principium, the reaching out to the supporting ground, is the only move philosophy makes. It is the "offensive" that breaks open the territory within whose borders a science can first settle down.
[315 {GA 9 245}] If we directly experience and intend φύσει-beings, we already have in view both the "moved" and its movedness. But what stands in view here is not yet "constituted" as what it is and how it is present.
Therefore the question about φύσις must inquire into the movedness of these beings and try to see what φύσις is in relation to this movedness. But first, in order to establish clearly the direction of our inquiry, we must delineate, within the whole of beings, the region that we can say comprises beings that are because they are determined by φύσις, namely, τὰ φύσει ὄντα.
Physics B, 1 begins with this delineation. (In the following pages we give a "translation" that is divided into appropriate sections. Since this
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