ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF Φύσις
as a goal and posited as a purpose. However, the τέλος, the antecedently envisioned appearance of the bedstead, is what is known by the person with the know-how, and it exists in that person. Only in this way is it the origin of the idea of the thing and the ordering of its manufacture. [322 {GA 9 252}] The εἶδος in itself is not the ἀρχή of the artifact. Rather, the εἶδος προαιρετόν, i.e., the προαίρεσις, i.e., the τέχνη, is the ἀρχή of the artifact.
In the case of artifacts, therefore, the ἀρχή of their movedness — and thus of the rest that characterizes their being-completed and being-made — is not in the artifacts themselves but in something else, in the ἀρχιτέκτων, the one who controls the τέχνη as ἀρχή. This would seem to complete the contrast of artifacts with φύσει ὄντα, for these latter are called φύσει ὄντα precisely because they have the ἀρχή of their movedness not in another being but in the beings that they themselves are (to the degree that they are these beings). But according to Aristotle's explanation, the difference between artifacts and growing things is not at all so simple. Even the structure of the section we are considering gives a hint: ᾗ μὲν - ᾗ δέ: "insofar as artifacts are seen in this way ... insofar as they are seen in another way ..." We can consider the ποιούμενα from two perspectives. In the first perspective we consider the produced thing insofar as it is cited and grasped according to a given way of addressing it: κατηγορία.
Here we run across a use of κατηγορία that goes back prior to its establishment as a philosophical "term." It was Aristotle, in fact, who established the term, but he did so on the basis of the common usage that is operative in the present text. We translate κατηγορία as the "addressing" of something [Ansprechung], but even then we hardly capture the full meaning in the Greek. κατὰ-ἀγορεύειν means: to accuse someone to his face in the ἀγορά, the public court, of being "the very one who ..." From this comes the broader meaning: to address something as this or that, so that, in and through our addressing it, the addressed thing is put forth into the public view, into the open, as manifest. Κατηγορία is the naming of what something is: house, tree, sky, sea, hard, red, healthy. On the other hand, "category" as a philosophical "term" means a special kind of addressing. We are able to address a present thing as a house or a tree only insofar as we have already beforehand, and without words, addressed what we encounter — i.e., have brought it into our open field of "vision" — as something standing-on-its-own, a thing. Likewise, [323 {GA 9 253}] we can address a garment as "red" only if from the outset and without words it has already been addressed in terms of something like quality. Standing-on-its-own ("substance") and quality ("of-what-sort-ness") and the like constitute the
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