The ready-at-hand, phusis, and physis

We know that the ready-at-hand is related to things in the world, and we have sort of established what a world is, but we still don't know what the hell Heidegger is up to with his term Vorhanden. We saw Heidegger say the following in my last entry:

The Greeks had an appropriate term for "things:" pragmata--that is to say, that which one has to do with in one's concernful dealings (praxis). But ontologically the specifically "pragmatic" character of the pragmata is just what the Greeks left in obscurity (Being and Time, 96-7).

Essentially, what I was suggesting--though did not really bring to the fore explicitly--was that Heidegger here meant that because the Greeks were closer to the phenomenon of Being, they left the "pragmatic character" of pragmata vague. This is why he thinks that his investigation of things in the world must lay this character out clearly: it must not only bring back the Greek closeness to Being, but also do so more rigorously so as to actually bring it to explicitness. This is also why this is not a return to the Greeks in any way: Heidegger is saying precisely what was left unsaid by the Greeks, and in a more coherent and acute way. But bringing in the Greeks serves a specific function not only for Heidegger, but for us, who understand him. In the end I was getting at this: it is only by seeing Heidegger's analysis of the "ready-at-hand" as this bringing to language of a concealed Greek experience of Being in the pragmata that we fully understand what Heidegger means by his term "Vorhanden," and, I suggested, why he feels he must coin this word rather than adopt a new one. We must take Heidegger's clue that there is a better word for things within the world than the "ready-at-hand," and that the Greeks possessed this word. This will allow us to grasp the central thrust of his remarks as well as the deficiency of the term "Vorhanden." Knowing not only what is signified by this term, but why the term in its current construction is insufficent and odd will fully bring what Heidegger means by it to light.
So, in order to understand what is Vorhanden, what is ready-at-hand--which we remember constitutes the world of Being-in-the-world--we have to look at pragmata. Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics (a seminar at Freiburg in 1935) gives us many clues for interpreting pragmata through his analysis of another Greek word, phusis, and its eventual derivation, physis. Heidegger says that phusis was the early Greek word for Being itself--when they were prompted by Being itself as to give an answer to why they existed, they characterized this prompting as a definite force, phusis. What is phusis, then? Let us look at what Heidegger says:

In the age of the first and definitive unfolding of Western philosophy among the Greeks, when questioning about beings as such and as a whole received its true inception, beings were called phusis. This fundamental Greek word for beings is usually translated "nature." We use the Latin translation natura which really means "to be born," "birth." But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word is destroyed... Now, what does the word phusis 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... phuein [the noun form of phusis] means to grow, to make grow (Introduction to Metaphysics, 14-15).

This is a lot of text, but I feel it gives a sense both of what is to come for us and the correctness of what has already been said regarding the importance Heidegger gives to the Greek understanding of things. That now fully grasped, we can move on to phusis. Let us get a general sense of the assumptions required to grasp its distinctive character before we return to exactly what Heidegger says here.
For the Greeks, what prompted them to exist and answer the question as to their existence was a character of the atmosphere around them itself, an aspect of what was around them always, a place in which they found themselves always: the environment was the means to their answering this question such that they took it alone as this questioning force (that is, as Being, the being of beings, the beingness of beings--this is why Heidegger says the Greek word for "being" as well as "Being" is phusis) itself. Something in the world was what asked the question of Being--it was Being precisely in this sense. A Greek would be maneuvering through her or his environment and doing her or his thing, and would be confronted by phusis such that she or he felt like it was asking them--and not only them but the entirety of the existing itself--a question as to why and how they existed, whether that existence had any justification. This phusis inhered in the environment or atmosphere essentially as its chief characteristic, as what brought the questionability of whatever existed in that place before them most fundamentally.
Now, as we know, for Heidegger the "world" as he uses this term is not this atmosphere or environment. The world for Heidegger is a phenomenon that reflects and offsets the intention of Dasein to answer the question of Being: as such, the world does not really appear as like Being itself--the world is only an answer to Being or a means of answering Being and nothing more. For the Greeks, what was most inherent in the structure of their environment, phusis, was like Being, was Being. Why did they think this?
Well, let's put ourselves in Greek shoes for a second. The environment is what is encountered all the time as that which brings about the question Being puts to us--namely, "why do you exist instead of not?" There is an "environmental" characteristic that all things have within that environment, then, that is essentially like Being, in that it seems to make manifest the question most acutely; that is essentially like Being in that it seems to characterize the phenomenon of existence so much that it would bring that existence into question as perhaps not possible; that is essentially like Being in that it seems to be the most real, and thus allows a conception of the unreal, the non-existent, non-existence itself as an equal possibility for existence such that one can all of a sudden ask "why does one exist instead of not?" Now, there must be a particular characteristic of the things in the environment such that they can make the environment bring up the question of Being in this way. This quality will be phusis.
But what is phusis? As something that is most environmental, it must look like something inherent in things, since things are of the environment. What does this characteristic inherence in things look like? How exactly does it appear to inhere? In what way is it so characteristic? We have not gotten even near answering these questions in merely delineating phusis as what is "most environmental" about the things we encounter in the environment. We'll have to be more specific, especially with respect to how we come across and experience these things.
Now, when we say "things" in the phrase "phusis looks like something inherent in things" and then delineate the Greek "enviornment" as where these things set up, we are talking not about physical things and a physical environment, like a table, lamp, etc. in a three dimensional space like a room. For the Greeks, what was a thing was what was encounterable, claims Heidegger. In fact, a thing was this encounter itself--not in the sense that some subjective viewpoint "created" the thing such as it was in "perceiving" it (a la Berkeley's idealism or even the formative power of Kant's transcendental subjectivity), but rather in that something one happened upon suddenly thrust itself to the fore in a concrete way that was not in that way before (and yet occurred prior to any thematizing thought of it, any perception as such). It was this encounter in that something in it and not in you allowed you to encounter it. To be more clear: one suddenly becomes aware of a thing there, within the field of intention or--since the Greeks didn't really think of "intention"--within the field of action, possibility, potentiality. Something comes before me and I encounter it, it encounters me, it thrusts itself into my field of action and possibility as something to be taken up by myself and engaged with, and at the same time I thrust myself upon it such that it becomes something to be engaged by my action. This moment or rather structure of engaged encountering is the thing in that it is in the distinctive power of the thing to come before me in this specific way. In other words, the thing's being-there makes possible this structure and this encounter as if by itself. What I come across in my environment comes before me in this particular way, and doing so is what is characteristic of the thing itself as a thing in my environment. Thus, what is a "thing" can be said to be that and only that which encounters me: it is never a thing like a table in three dimensional Cartesian space.
If we realize all this--that is, not only the difference between an encounterable thing and a Cartesian thing, but also the distinctive characteristic of something that is encounterable as that which has a vague power to thrust itself at me--if we realize all this we can begin to see why this thing seems like "nature" in the sense of "what grows." And indeed, with this realization we begin to understand Heidegger's entire passage from his Introduction to Metaphysics such that we can begin to explicate it--all the foundations of a basic Greek experience of things has been set up.
What comes before me in such a way that it seems to do this by itself seems to possess a force behind it that impels it towards my field of action, encounters me by coming towards me out of my environment. What comes out of the environment towards me in the mode of an encounter and does so such that it comes out by itself can be said to be what "emerges," as Heidegger calls it in his passage from the Introduction, above. More: it "emerges from itself," emerges by itself, comes before me as a force that is propelled by its own essence towards me. The crucial question in order to define phusis is: What is this essence? Well, we answer with the following: the essence that forces the thing to encounter me and thus to emerge is this essence's being characteristic not of whatever particular thing it is, but characteristic of the distinctive quality of the environment as environment itself. The essence of a thing in the environment is its "environmentality."
Now, this is the key to grasping the Greek sense of emergence that is the essence of phusis, so let us elaborate upon this thought, proceeding slowly and delicately through what it implies.
Whatever comes before me with a force that is not necessarily inherent to the thing itself as whatever particular and individual thing it is, but with a force characteristic of the distinctive quality of an encounterable thing in general--this is what emerges, this is the essence of the emerging-character that is constitutive of a thing as a thing. This is why we said that the encounter itself is the thing: it is what in general is most like the encounter itself that makes the thing most like an encounterable thing, a thing in the environment--and this "what" is what is environmental in a thing. This may not be clear, so we'll use the rough and ready example of Heidegger's in the passage: the rose emerges, emerges by or out of itself. This means that the rose that I come across in my daily activities in a garden does not seem to come before me just as this particular rose and no other. What I encounter is not this rose as opposed to that rose, but the "possibility of roseiness" that constitutes this particular rose as a rose. To what belongs this possibility? Well, to the rose as an environmental thing--that is, not just to the rose itself, as distinct from all things, but to the rose as a realized possibility of that which is most characteristic of the environment, environmentality. Something in the rose seems to thrust itself as a "possibility of rosiness" at me: this is not its particularity as a thing, but its more universal quality of environmentality.
Let's be clearer. The essence of the object is not inherent in its just being there, but in its fundamental abiltity to just be there that announces itself suddenly in its just being there in that particular way--in its being a rose. Now, this essence is not really pertinent to the rose itself but it pertinent to the rose as a thing with possibility: the possibility to be itself. This is the crucial step. As soon as we realize that what is announcing itself in the essence of the rose being there is not the rose but the possibility that is inherent in the rose as a rose, it suddenly seems as if there is a force beind the rose that allows it to be what it is. This force is what allows the rose to emerge, to come to be. In other words, we begin to sense an inner connection between an individual thing as something that is encounterable and the environment that we encounter.
We continue to clarify, however. This force--the force that makes it possible for the rose to emerge--this force we have discerned must be of the envionment, not of the rose, if it is what is in the rose but only as that which makes it possible. Whatever a Greek came upon in the world that encountered him in a definite way made a point of not just being itself but being itself as an environmental thing. It remains itself, but also allows us to grasp the possibility of itself as constitutive for itself. This possibility is not confined to the thing itself, to the rose, but is characteristic of something larger than it--a context that is the environment. The opening up of what is environmental is what characterizes something as not really itself but as "growing into" itself--this is because this opening up of what is environmental is the opening up and bringing forth of the essence of the thing, the rose for example, as including in itself its own possibility--as including in itself the environmental quality of possibility.
This "growing into itself" of the environment in things, then, is phusis. It is what we most generally think of as the "power of nature," or "life," a sort of general force that unites all things in their ability to bring themselves out of the world as living things. But, as Heidegger says, calling this "life" is symptoatic of a really limited view of a much larger and much more definite phenomenon: we only have to show that this sense of the power of nature and of life applies equally to inanimate things and not even to grand sublime scenes that enthrall us: anything in the world as soon as we take notice of it, as soon as it encounters us genuinely and concretely, possesses this force as a thing. What "grows" in the rose is not life, then, or "nature:" it is phusis, the characteristic possibility of things in the world that makes them come to be what they are.
Now that we have a sense of phusis we have to see how this term relates to physis if we are to grasp pragmata as (here we put fort our provisional definition--one that Heidegger himself does not make and that we are making based on an interpretation of his texts) the manipulation of physis.
It is clear from the passage that phusis for Heidegger means not merely "emerging," but is really only encapsulated for him by the phrase "emerging-abiding sway." Why is this the case, and why have we asserted that phusis is adequately defined just by "emerging?" Well, we haven't really asserted this--we have just left "abiding" there as something yet to be interpreted. However, it is important to interpret phusis as "emerging" before anything else (Heidegger's characterization of phusis in the passage itself attests to this), because "abiding" is a phenomenon that is less dependent on the phenomenon of the environmentality of the Greek environment. That is, "abiding" is more of a secondary phenomenon associated with phusis as what comes out of the environment by itself in order to encounter. It really belongs to a fall in the interpretation of the emergence characteristic of phusis that reifies it into the term physis--a fall we will now briefly characterize.

I will continue this (with the below fragments integrated into the text) in a revision of this either later tonight or tomorrow morning. The key is Heidegger's interpretation of phusis and emergence as appearance or coming-to-appearance, which he is hesistant to embrace because it sounds too Nietzschian and is essentially too wrapped up in a knowledge of Being as presence as opposed to a knowledge of Being as presence defined by time, which is what Heidegger is trying to articulate in his opus... For characterizing the Greek that underlies the ready-at-hand, however, appearance will do fine and holding-in appearance will be a fall away from that, a fall from emerging towards abiding towards physis and the physical. I'll get to this soon.

Things' coming to be what they are is what Heidegger means by "abiding" in the phrase "emerging-abiding." What emerges is also what holds itself as what it is, that is, realizes its possibility such that it becomes itself and stays itself. It is what has come to limit its possibility to take a definite form in its emergence. The rose comes to be itself and remains itself in this coming to be, limiting down its possibilities to what it is. It emerges and abides as emergence, the emergence of the environment.
Thus what emerges is more fundamental to the sense of phusis than what abides. we can see this in the word unfolding that according to Heidegger seems also to characterize phusis and is not related to either emerging or abiding. Unfolding means primarily growing out of itself or emerging, rather than abiding. what unfolds only abides after it has unfolded. no doubt this is a process that is pretty essential to anything that unfolds, but it is secondary. it is the symptom of a fall in the interpretation of phusis.
What encounters seems to grow out of itself: this is why Heidegger calls it an "unfolding that opens itself up." It is an unfolding that is the opening of its own unfolding. In the case of a rose, the unfolding is the rose, but what unfolds most essentially to the rose in the encounter is the unfolding of the unfolding of itself--the possibility of itself inherent in the environment. It seems to "birth" itself by itself--this is the origin of the Latin according to Heidegger. But what is signified by this birth is not the birth of the thing, but the power of the birth of the thing as a thing that is within the environment. It is the environment's birth in the things that appear in the natural environment that characterizes these things most fundamentally as encounterable.