IEP 508: Nature in Romantic and European Thought

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

Week 9. Heidegger and nature as physis part 1.

Introduction

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential 20th century philosophers (alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most influential). He is best known for two things:

(1) his rehabilitation of what he calls the question of the meaning of being;

(2) his critique – in his later work – of technology.

He has been a particular source of inspiration to many environmental thinkers and philosophers, partly because of his radical critique of technology and modern science, and partly because of his unease with familiar understandings of ‘nature’ and his concern to investigate deeper conceptions of nature which seem more ecologically sensitive. In this course we are going to focus primarily on his lecture course on Aristotle’s concept of nature, which is the key place where Heidegger explicitly discusses the concept of nature as such. But let’s start by putting this in the context of the development of his thought about nature more generally.

The development of Heidegger’s thought concerning nature

The earlier Heidegger, especially in his Being and Time (1927), seeks to retrieve the forgotten question of the meaning of being – what it means for something to be. In the modern western world, we have forgotten this question in that we tend to think of what it is to be (in German, Sein - being) as itself an entity (a Seiende), a particular thing. But in fact being is fundamentally different from entities – entities, after all, are, they have being, and the deeper question is what it means for them to do so. Heidegger in Being and Time approaches this question by focusing on what it means for one particular type of entity to be: that type of entity which he calls Dasein, which is, very roughly, human beings. He argues that each Dasein (i.e. each of us as humans) is characterised above all by having a ‘world’ – a significant context of meanings and projects that surrounds us. Dasein is therefore being-in-the-world. Within this world, nature appears in two ways:

(1) Most basically, as a resource for us to use. In general, Dasein most basically experiences the world around it as populated with tools or pieces of ‘equipment’ that are handy (‘ready-to-hand’). Natural things feature among these items of equipment.

(2) Secondarily, - when the usefulness of tools breaks down (e.g. when a hammer stops working), Dasein starts to focus on these items as objects (as ‘present-at-hand’, given things). When this attitude is applied to nature, it generates natural science, which views nature as a set of objects.

Heidegger also hints that Dasein has a third sense of a more ‘primordial’ nature that ‘stirs and strives’ – but he doesn’t elaborate on this. His later work elaborates on this sense of nature; partly by examining the notion of the ‘earth’ that always conceals itself; and partly through his reading of central concepts of Aristotle’s Physics such as movement, genesis, and form.

For an excellent summary of Heidegger’s intellectual development in respect of nature, see Michael Zimmerman’s article on Heidegger in Eco-Phenomenology, ed. Brown and Toadvine.

In his much later ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (published in 1954), Heidegger argues that technology is not essentially a means to an end nor does it consist of the particular artefacts and machines that surround us, but fundamentally it is a way of revealing what it is to be – an interpretation of what it means to be. Technology reveals the world as ‘standing-reserve’ – resources to be used by us as humans (Heidegger seems to be criticising his own earlier account of being-in-the-world here).

Heidegger denies the usual view that technology is the application of science. He says, instead, that science is already technological. Science already adheres tothe technological view of nature as mere resources. Without this, it would not make sense to try to calculate and measure nature in a mathematical way (an approach that’s at the basis of modern science).
Heidegger has written in more detail about science (his article ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’ is included in his Basic Writings). He argues that modern science (e.g. Newton and Galileo) conceive of the whole of nature as a fundamentally uniform and homogenous spatio-temporal ‘grid’ within which all natural things are points of mass that move in a uniform, linear, way. This, he thinks, is fundamentally different from the older Aristotelian view that all natural things have their particular ‘places’ in their cosmos that are appropriate to their natures and towards which they essentially move.

Heidegger also believes that modern science is special in being mathematical. He uses this word in a peculiar sense. It means for him that modern science sets up a preconceived ‘plan’ of what nature is like – prior to experience. Experiments and practical procedures are then carried out in light of this plan.
Exercise

You might like to think here about some specific ways in which this scientific view of nature could be said to already be 'technological', i.e. to treat nature as a resource. Can you see affinities between Heidegger's claims about technology and science and other ecological critiques of modern science?

Informing Heidegger’s unease with technology and science is his interest in a quite different view of nature. This can be summed up as the idea that nature ‘loves to hide’. Whereas technology portrays nature as fully there in front of us, resources that are totally on display, Heidegger is interested in a nature that is always receding, withdrawing. One of the texts where he moves towards this idea is the lecture course on Aristotle that he gave in 1939.

Heidegger’s lecture course on physis in Aristotle is the key piece of reading for this block. This is, though, the longest and perhaps hardest text on the course. In what follows, I have provided a summary of the central arguments/claims of Heidegger’s text.

I have divided the text into 10 short ‘sections’ (following the main steps in his argumentation). You can use this summary, to help you read the text, in several ways. Here are two possible strategies:

(1) You could read the first part of the summary, then – keeping this in mind – read the corresponding pages in Heidegger. You could jot down some notes on Heidegger as you go then go on to the next part of the summary and the Heidegger, and so on. This would mean you'd build up a kind of ‘diary’ of your own reading. You might like to post any of all of this material to the discussion site.

(2) Alternatively, you could read the whole of this summary to get an overall idea of Heidegger’s claims, then focus in on the bits of the text that look like they might be of most interest to you. Rather than reading everything, you could spend more time on these particular bits, trying to get a fuller grip of what Heidegger is saying.

Just two more general comments before you begin. Heidegger’s text is very hard because he is trying to think very unfamiliar thoughts. He reads Aristotle’s lectures on the Physics to help him do this, but many Aristotle scholars would be dubious about the ‘accuracy’ of his interpretation. This needn’t concern us – we’re concerned with what he tries to think via Aristotle. His thoughts are often very strange (partly because they arise at the interface of German and ancient Greek as languages) and he makes many tantalising suggestions which are left not exhaustively explored.

Another feature of Heidegger is that he is at the same time very abstract and very concrete. His arguments often sound abstract until one realises that it is actually our usual ways of thinking that are more abstract, but that Heidegger’s analyses of nature closely follow natural processes in the concrete. So throughout it’s helpful to keep in mind examples of the natural things Heidegger is talking about, e.g. plants, animals.

Glossary

Physis [nature]
Kinesis [motion]
Techne [craft]
Arche [origin]
Eidos [idea]
Ousia [being]
Hyle [matter]
Morphe [form]
Entelechia [entelechy]
Genesis [genesis]

Heidegger's 'On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle's Physics B, I': (1) Opening section: initial discussion of concepts of “nature” and physis.

Heidegger begins by stressing the centrality of the notion of ‘nature’ in western thinking. This concept comes from the Roman concept of natura, which is a translation of the earlier Greek notion of physis. Heidegger does not translate the notion of physis (or any of the other Greek terms he discusses) because he thinks their original meanings got lost in translation into Latin, and that we need to recover the original meanings as an alternative to entrenched – and dominating – ways of thinking about nature.

Heidegger stresses that we generally use the word ‘nature’ to indicate what something is, e.g. when we say ‘it’s in the nature of someone to be like that’. In some way, then, what we generally mean when we say that anything ‘is’ is that it is natural, or is of nature. To think of something as having being is, to some extent, to see it as natural. This is the last ‘echo’, Heidegger claims, of a much earlier Greek view that equated being with physis. That earlier view is particularly found in the pre-Socratic philosophers (writing before Socrates and Plato), but to some extent is preserved in Aristotle’s book the Physics

What Heidegger is ultimately most interested in is exploring this idea that being itself is nature; this is the interest that guides the rest of his study of Aristotle’s concept of physis in his Physics.

Aristotle’s initial idea (Heidegger p. 186) is that ‘the processes of nature are processes of movement’ (187). Or, to be more precise, all beings which are natural (or which ‘are by physis’, are ‘according to physis’) are in a condition of being-moved (kinesis).
What is it to be moved, or to be in a condition of movement? This is a question that Heidegger answers only later in the text, rather frustratingly. He says later that:

(i) being-moved does not just mean moving from one place to another (locomotion) but also includes change and growth. What is common to all these kinds of movement is that they are ways in which something previously absent becomes present (e.g. in growth, a bud appears on a plant that was formerly absent). Heidegger also says

(ii) that being-moved includes both movement (actively moving) and being at rest. He says ‘rest is a kind of movement; only that which is able to move can rest’ (p. 189). How is being at rest a kind of movement? Heidegger says that movement is most fully manifested in rest, because something is at rest when its movement has come to completion or ‘gathered itself’ together into the state of rest.

We need to start the analysis proper, though, by distinguishing amongst all the different types of beings the ones that are specifically natural (or are by physis). What is distinctive of them?
What distinguishes them is their cause, or origin (arche). This origin is physis itself. It is the origin of these beings in the sense that it is ‘that which is responsible for the fact that a being is what it is’ (p. 188).
But we already know that physis-beings are in a condition of being-moved. It is physis that is the origin of their being-moved, their change and growth. This origin, Heidegger says, is distinctive in that it is within the beings themselves – not exterior to them. This will make more sense when we look at the type of beings to which Heidegger now contrasts natural beings – artefacts. These do have their origin outside them (ultimately, in the ‘blueprint’ that exists in the mind of the person who makes them).

Initial discussion of artefacts

[section 320, on p. 191, down to bottom of p. 194 (paragraph beginning ‘On the basis of…’)]

Obviously, in one sense, the contrast between artefacts and natural beings is quite familiar. But Heidegger wants us to think more carefully about what this contrast really consists in.
He says that artefacts do have a kind of movement – the movement by which they come into existence. They are not just ‘there’. However, the origin of their coming into existence is techne, (human) skill or craft, practical knowledge. In particular, the craftsperson has a blueprint of the thing in mind (e.g. a bed) – an idea of how it should appear – and this blueprint or idea (eidos) is the purpose (telos) of the skilled activity of making the object. Ultimately it is this idea which is the origin of the artifact. So the origin is not in the artifact itself – the artifact would not come into being except for the person who makes it.

The absolute distinction between physis--beings and artefacts

So far, this might all sound rather obvious, but Heidegger insists that actually, we tend most of the time to think of physis-beings by analogy with artefacts. We see them as a kind of self-making artifact. That is, when we think about e.g. the growth of a plant, we tend to think that the plant has a kind of inner blueprint for how it ought to be when fully grown, and that the plant progressively makes itself become like the blueprint, so that it is the artifact of its own productive activity.
Interestingly, Heidegger says that this view of natural things as self-making artefacts is embedded in our concept of ‘organisms’. The notion of the organism arose in the 18th century. We now usually see an organism as something opposed to a mechanism (like a watch) – something that grows and develops in itself, not through the efforts of some outside agency (like the watchmaker).

But Heidegger thinks the concept of an organism is just of a mechanism that constructs and regulates itself – that is, an artifact, just a type of artifact that makes itself. Importantly then for Heidegger, we can’t oppose mechanistic ways of thinking by instead emphasising the notion of the organism. This is still really a mechanistic concept. This is why we need to return to the notion of physis, because when we see beings as physis-beings (rather than organisms) we really are seeing them as radically distinct from artefacts.

Think

(1) What is the distinction between artefacts and physis-beings for Heidegger?

(2) Given this distinction, why does Heidegger think it is wrong to see natural beings as self-making artefacts?

(3) On p. 197, Heidegger has a very interesting discussion of how in the modern world life itself is on the way to becoming a technically producible artifact. What is he saying here? Does what he says have anything helpful to offer in assessing technologies of genetic modification, for example?

The question of being

[middle of p. 198 to top of p. 203 ‘Aristotle’s remarks…’]

Heidegger emphasises that Aristotle’s study of physis is an ‘ontological’, not an ‘ontic, enquiry [cf. the distinction from Being and Time that was introduced above]. Aristotle is interested in what it means to be from physis. He is not just classifying the various natural beings (e.g. identifying different species of birds). Aristotle thinks there are different ways in which beings can be (different ‘branches’ of being): e.g. by being artefacts, by being from physis. These are different types of being which ‘are’ in different ways. He wants to identify what these different ways of being consist in.
In saying that all these different types of being ‘are’, though, Aristotle has a more basic understanding of what it is to be just as such. (i.e., what is common to all the different ways of being) What it is to be, for Aristotle, is to be present – to come into presence as a state of being there, given, available to be discovered.
Consequently, physis has to be understood as a particular way of being-present or becoming-present (‘presencing’). Or, what it is to be natural is to become present in a specific way.
Heidegger returns later to this understanding of physis as a particular way of being. For now, he goes on to look at Aristotle’s criticism of another Greek philosopher of nature, Antiphon.

The criticism of Antiphon’s account of nature as matter (hyle)

Antiphon shares the idea that what it is to be is to be constantly present, and this leads him to identify nature as a constantly present substratum underlying superficial changes – as material elements (elementary particles) that underlies changes in form. Heidegger objects to this: (i) that it overlooks that presence involves becoming present; (ii) that Antiphon equates what it is to be with a particular set of beings – the material ‘elements’.

Aristotle seems also to think that Antiphon’s mistake is to equate nature with only one of its aspects, matter (hyle). He seems to say that we need to take form (morphe) into account as well, and that he will go on to look at both hyle and morphe and construct a ‘double concept’ of nature better than that of Antiphon. However, Heidegger says, Aristotle’s actual discussion takes a different direction than the one he has led to expect (specifically, Aristotle’s discussion shows that morphe alone, not hyle, is essential to natural beings). At this point, Heidegger says, Aristotle’s discussion starts to shift through a series of deepening levels of analysis of the concept of nature. Heidegger’s exposition follows these levels step-by-step. We will work through these in the following sections.