ON THE ESSENCE AND CONCEPT OF Φύσις
exercises originating and ordering power (ἄρχει) primarily in itself and from itself and toward itself and thus never in such a way that the ἀρχή would appear (in the being) only incidentally." (192 b20-23)
Here, simply and almost severely, Aristotle sketches the essential outline: φύσις is not just the origin and ordering of the movedness of a moving being, but also belongs to this moving being itself in such a way that this being, in itself and from itself and toward itself, orders its own movedness. Hence the ἀρχή is not like the starting point of a push, which pushes the thing away and leaves it to itself. Rather, something determined by φύσις not only stays with itself in its movedness but precisely goes back into itself even as it unfolds in accordance with the movedness (the change).
We can illustrate the kind of essence that is meant here by the example of "growing things" in the narrower sense ("plants"). While the "plant" sprouts, emerges, and expands into the open, it simultaneously goes back into its roots, insofar as it plants them firmly in the closed ground and thus takes its stand. The act of self-unfolding emergence is inherently a going-back-into-itself. This kind of becoming present is φύσις. But it must not be thought of as a kind of built-in "motor" that drives something, nor as an "organizer" on hand somewhere, directing the thing. [325 {GA 9 255}] Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion that φύσει-determined beings could be a kind that make themselves. So easily and spontaneously does this idea suggest itself that it has become normative for the interpretation of living nature in particular, as is shown by the fact that ever since modern thinking became dominant, a living being has been understood as an "organism." No doubt a good deal of time has yet to pass before we learn to see that the idea of "organism" and of the "organic" is a purely modern, mechanistic-technological concept, according to which "growing things" are interpreted as artifacts that make themselves. Even the word and concept "plant" takes what grows as something "planted," something sown and cultivated. And it is part of the essential illogicality of language that in German we nonetheless speak of greenhouses as Gewächshäusern (houses for what grows) instead of as Pflanzenhäusern (houses for what has been planted).
In the case of every artifact, however, the origin of the making is "outside" the thing made. Viewed from the perspective of the artifact, the ἀρχή always and only appears as something "in addition." In order to avoid misunderstanding φύσις as a kind of self-producing and the φύσει ὄντα merely as a special kind of artifact, Aristotle clarifies the καθ᾽ αὑτό by adding καὶ μὴ κατὰ συμβεβηκός. The και here has the meaning of "and that is to say . . ."
195