IEP 508: Nature in Romantic and European Thought

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 10 Heidegger and Nature as Physis
part 2.

The concept of morphe

As we saw at the end of the last section, Heidegger in his reading of Aristotle on nature has introduced the idea that ultimately Aristotle understands nature not as a mixture of matter and form but solely in terms of form. But what is meant by form? This is the question to which Heidegger now turns.

[bottom of p. 209 down to bottom of p. 219 ‘Therefore, now more than ever…’]

The concept of morphe has to be understood in its original Greek meaning – not just assumed to be the same as the Latin forma. Morphe must be understood in relation to eidos – the appearance of a being, the appearance which a being has by virtue of having become present (e.g., a flower, in growing, comes to be there with a certain appearance for us – an appearance that’s available for us to see, if we look at the flower).
Heidegger therefore says that morphe is a way of presencing, a way of becoming-apparent or in his phrase of ‘placing itself into the appearance’ (p. 211) – giving itself a perceptible aspect. But morphe is a way of presencing that is particular to the natural: ‘we find what is physis--like only where we come upon a placing into the appearance’ (p. 212).

Because morphe is a change – a process of coming into appearance – it seems to be an instance of the condition of movement, kinesis (which, let’s remind ourselves, is not just change of place but covers all kinds of movement – growth, change). ‘Morphe is the placing into the appearance, i.e. it is kinesis itself’ (p. 219). As we saw earlier, natural beings are those beings that are in a condition of movement by themselves (they do not depend on anyone outside them to put them into movement). Now, it turns out, their movement is morphe – coming into appearance. Are we really learning anything here, or is the analysis just moving in a circle?
(However, since we originally encountered the notion of movement (kinesis), we have at least learnt that Aristotle’s enquiry is an ‘ontological’ one, so that he is interested in understanding movement (or being-moved) as a way of being, and, in particular, of coming into presence. The name for movement as a way of presencing is entelechia, a term that Aristotle invented.)
Heidegger’s analysis begins to come together more definitely as he moves on to the next point: which relates the concept of physis to that of genesis.

Genesis and two kinds of generation

[top of p. 220 to mid p. 221 ‘Furthermore…’]

Heidegger starts with Aristotle’s comment that humans are generated from humans, but beds don’t come from other beds. Natural beings and artefacts are generated in two different ways.
Artefacts are generated through making. What is specific to being-made is that although the initial eidos of the thing, its appearance (or blueprint), is the origin of the thing, this initial appearance does not itself ‘perform the placing into the appearance’ as Heidegger rather obscurely says – i.e. the anticipated appearance is not by itself directly able to come into presence. The anticipated appearance guides the technical know-how of the craftsperson, but without that craftsperson’s activity it would never come to presence. It needs the craftsperson to make it become present.

Whereas, with respect to physis, ‘It is also possible that an appearance … can directly present itself as what takes over the placing into itself. The appearance places itself forth’ (p. 221). In any natural being, its appearance directly becomes present. The appearance is not, as in artefacts, a blueprint that makes itself become present (that would be the idea of the self-making artifact again). For example, Heidegger says, an animal does not need to know about zoology in order to make its appearance become present. That appearance just becomes present spontaneously. An animal reproduces others of its kind, or a plant reproduces parts of itself: here the ‘appearance’ – the new animal or plant that presents itself to us – just emerges without having to be anticipated and enacted beforehand. This is what genesis is – this unanticipated emergence [notice how this still squares with what we tend to think of as meant by the genesis of something].

But this coming into presence, into appearance, is morphe. So what physis---beings essentially are is morphe, the process of coming into presence.

Natural beings as ‘on the way to themselves’

[middle of p. 222 to middle of p. 224, ‘And so…’]

Heidegger now goes back to looking at morphe or genesis as a kind of movement and saying what kind of movement this is. Quoting from Aristotle, ‘physis, … as genesis … is (nothing less than) being-on-the-way towards physis’ (p. 222). This is in contrast to forms of technical know-how such as medicine. The exercise of medicine as an art doesn’t aim to bring about more of itself but to bring about health (and therefore, hopefully, medicine will make itself redundant). Natural beings, on the other hand, don’t go to bring about anything other than more of themselves.

What does this mean, concretely? Take the example of a plant. A plant as a natural being is defined by the process of coming into appearance. In putting forward new buds, though, the plant is not putting forward anything that is different from itself as a process of coming into appearance. The buds are not a fixed ‘thing’ that the plant makes come into being (as a kind of artifact). In some way, they are just another phase in the ongoing process of coming into appearance. The thought here seems to be of a process that never comes to an end – whereas with the production of artefacts, the process ends when the artifact is successfully produced.
‘[T]he self-placing is itself wholly of a kind with the self-placing thing to be produced’ (p. 223). As Trish Glazebrook says about Heidegger’s point, the process of nature’s coming-into-appearance has no clear end point.

You could pause here and try to think through in more detail – perhaps with a concrete example – what it means to think of physis as ‘on the way to itself’ whereas techne is ‘on the way to something other than itself’. This is a very suggestive idea, but Heidegger can hardly be said to have fully developed it. What do you think this might mean?

The twofold character of morphe

[from middle of p. 224 to top of p.228, ‘Re (4)…’]

Why, if Aristotle thinks physis is essentially morphe (i.e., that what it is to be natural is essentially to be in a process of becoming-apparent, of genesis), did he suggest that he saw physis--beings as made of both morphe and hyle (matter)? Heidegger explains that Aristotle sees morphe as having two aspects, and one of these aspects can be wrongly understood as a stable material substratum (of the form). So Antiphon’s error in seeing nature as underlying matter derived from misunderstanding this second aspect of morphe.

The first aspect of morphe is that it is presencing (as we’ve seen).

The second aspect is that in every case of this presencing, we have the sense at the same time of an absence. E.g. when a blossom comes to presence, we sense the absence of its leaves which have dropped off to make way for the blossom. When a fruit comes along to supersede the blossom, we sense the disappearance of the blossom. In every presencing, an absence also becomes present (the absence is itself a kind of presencing, it is something that appears and makes itself knowable to us). Heidegger says ‘The self-placing into the appearance always lets something be present in such a way that in the presencing an absencing simultaneously becomes present’ (p. 227).

Through this process, any physis-being continually returns aspects of itself to a state of being hyle, matter. What were leaves are cast aside as dry, dead matter. These are in a sense the ‘left-overs’ from the inevitable absencing that is an aspect of presencing in nature. This matter can then be misunderstood as something constant and stable, underlying change (as if we took the skeleton of a dead person to have been a constant substratum within them that was never really ‘alive’).

‘Nature loves to hide’

[top of p. 228 onward]

Aristotle sees physis as just one way of being among other ways; whereas the earlier Greek thinkers thought physis was being. Yet an echo of this view persists in Aristotle:

The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus suggested that ‘Being loves to hide’. The essence of being, of what it is to be, is to emerge into presencing, but in so doing to conceal something at the same time, to hold back. But this is what it is to be natural (in the sense of physis) – to come into presence, but inevitably making an absence felt at the same time. So, for the pre-Socratics: ‘Being is the self-concealing revealing, physis in the original sense’ (p. 230).

This is Aristotle’s view of the second aspect of morphe (presencing as the presencing of absencing). On this point, then, he preserves the pre-Socratic concept of being/physis.

A summary of the key features of Heidegger’s analysis of physis

1. Nature as physis is a way of being, i.e. of coming to presence
2. Nature is essentially morphe – morphe is coming into appearance (as part of coming to presence)
3. Morphe is a kind of movement, but one that comes from within nature itself (not from any exterior source)
4. Thus, morphe is essentially genesis, the spontaneous process whereby appearance emerges into the ‘light of day’
5. Nature as genesis does not aim to bring forth anything other than more of itself as a process of emergence
6. Consequently, its presencing is always also an absencing (of the previous phase of its process)

7. In contrast, artefacts have a different way of coming into being – through being made by a craftsperson who uses skill to realise a pre-existing blueprint
8. The movement (into presence) of artefacts does not come from themselves but from this pre-existing idea, aided by the craftsperson

So, in nature, appearance emerges through a spontaneous (and rather mysterious) process, whereas in artefacts, their appearance pre-exists them as a blueprint which the craftsperson uses existing natural things and/or artefacts to realise.

Heidegger’s key aim could be said to be to distinguish between natural beings and artefacts, to stress how incommensurable their basic ways of being are. Derivatively, though, this enables him to challenge what he takes to be our usual concept of nature (as natura). The usual idea is that nature is a self-making artefact. It is understood by analogy to artefacts. This is a way of thinking that Heidegger wants to utterly reject. He believes that even attempts to stress, e.g., that nature is organic don’t really challenge this familiar view.

Some broader questions about Heidegger
The difficulty with relating to Heidegger, above all, is one of understanding him. There is little point leaping in with criticisms when what he says is so enigmatic and often deeply strange. Nonetheless, a couple of general questions you might find it helpful to think about a bit are these:

(1) How does Heidegger relate to the previous thinkers we’ve looked at? In particular, what about Kant’s idea that nature has purposiveness without purpose. Is this just the idea of nature as a self-making artifact again – or is it an anticipation of Heidegger’s criticism of that idea?

(2) Can the natural/artificial distinction still be sustained as strongly as Heidegger wants? Or we have succeeded now – as he feared – in making life itself an artifact (e.g. with cloning)? What might a ‘Heideggerian’ perspective on new genetic technologies look like?

Web notes by Alison Stone updated April 2005