The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics • 15
philosophy. This inception is taken as something that we have left behind long ago and supposedly overcome.
But now we leap over this whole process of deformation and decline, and we seek to win back intact the naming force of language and words; for words and language are not just shells into which things are packed for spoken and written intercourse. In the word, in language, things first come to be and are. For this reason, too, the misuse of language in mere idle talk, in slogans and phrases, destroys our genuine relation to things. Now what does the word φύσις say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance- in short, the emerging-abiding sway. 10 According to the dictionary, φύειν means to grow, to make grow.11 But what does growing mean? Does it just mean to increase by acquiring bulk, to become more numerous and bigger?
Φύσις as emergence can be experienced everywhere: for example, in celestial processes (the rising of the sun) , in the surging of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming forth of animals and human beings from the womb. But φύσις, the emerging sway, is not synonymous with these processes, which we still today count as part of "nature?' This emerging and standing-out-in-itself-from itself may not be taken as just one process among others that we observe in beings. Φύσις is Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable.
It was not in natural processes that the Greeks first experienced what φύσις is, but the other way around: on the basis of a fundamental experience of Being in poetry and thought, what they had to
10. See the discussion of Walten in our introduction.
11. The noun φύσις corresponds to the verb φύειν.