Physis (φύσις) — the Greek term translated as “nature,” designating at once the totality of natural things and the process by which they sprout, grow, and develop through an impulse of their own. The word derives from the verb phyein (“to sprout,” “to bring forth”), so that physis is not an inert thing but a coming-to-be: that which produces itself out of itself, in contrast to what is made by craft or technique (technē). Among the pre-Socratic thinkers, to inquire into physis meant to seek the originary and immanent principle (archē) of all reality — water in Thales, the boundless (apeiron) in Anaximander, fire in Heraclitus. Hence the traditional title On Nature ascribed to many of those works. The Sophists shifted the sense by opposing physis to nomos (law, convention, custom): what exists by nature would be universal and necessary, whereas what exists by convention would be variable and instituted by human beings — a distinction decisive in ethical and political debates about justice. Aristotle, in the Physics, fixes the classical definition: nature is the internal principle of movement and rest proper to beings that exist by physis, distinguishing them from artifacts, whose principle of change is external. A seed that becomes a tree illustrates this inner unfolding. In the twentieth century, Heidegger recovers the pre-Socratic sense and reads physis as emergence, the vigor through which being manifests and discloses itself.
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