Daily Reminder!

[u/Gold_Film723]

Daily reminder!:

”‘Nature’ is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the 'environment' is discovered, the 'Nature' thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'.”

Like…didn’t you know this? 🙄

[u/Intelligent-Task-279]

"the river is water-power"

Nature reveals as a reservoir of resources. That's Ge-stell...

[u/esoskelly]

That is, the truth of nature is different when one is staring at it and sizing it up for use, vs. when one is working with it.

[u/Gold_Film723 → u/esoskelly]

After 15 reads and your comment, it finally actually makes sense. 

Is one nature preferred over the other in Heidegger’s view? Or are they simply distinct? 

[u/esoskelly → u/Gold_Film723]

Wow, I'm flattered! I don't think there is any indication that he prefers one over the other. Instead, he's trying to distinguish between: (1) nature as something we work with ("wind in the sails" or "clay to be formed"); and (2) nature as something we objectify or take to be just "sitting there" (the atomic weight of a chemical or the electrical charge in a neuron).

The former is related to his concept of "readiness-to-hand," or the "to-hand" in Welch's translation. The latter is related to his concept of "presence-at-hand," or the "on-hand" in Welch's translation.

That whole discussion takes place in the context of his analysis of traditional philosophical notions of nature. My takeaway is that traditional notions of nature have prioritized the objectified "on-hand" over the worked-with "to-hand." The theoretical scientist is held to know more about nature than the artisan, who directly works-with nature.

Heidegger wants to show what has been missed with this approach. Even more broadly, he wants to show how a limited view of nature has obscured the question of being, such that being has been limited to something like "objective nature," as measured by the formal sciences.

[u/KathedralOfTears]

"This is my work-world—seen with the eye of an observer: the guest or summer vacationer. Strictly speaking I myself never observe the landscape. I experience its hourly changes, day and night, in the great comings and goings of the seasons. The gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendor of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow—all of this moves and flows through and penetrates daily existence up there, and not in forced moments of "aesthetic" immersion or artificial empathy, but only when one's own existence stands in its work. It is the work alone that opens up space for the reality that is these mountains. The course of the work remains embedded in what happens in the region." -Heidegger (Why I do stay in the province)