The Place of Being and Becoming

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.^[1]
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics.

Image 01: ‘Phusis’ – the natural existent which has in itself the reasons for being and becoming. The natural existent, as well as any physical existent, is the place of being and becoming: without place, things or entities couldn’t be or become what they are. Ultimately, without place — that is, without a region where processes unfold — things or entities couldn’t even exist.

I take that ‘emerging-abiding sway’ for ‘place’: primarily, ‘place’ is the event that defines the ‘emerging-abiding sway’ of nature (phusis), of its beings.^[2] It describes what emerges, unfolds into beings, and endures against the assault of not-Being. Then, this place does not merely define the basic processes that enable beings (rocks, flowers, animals, societies, cathedrals, paintings, etc.) to exist — to be — and become what they are according to their nature, appearance, and duration, which is to say, according to their Being. More fundamentally, this place defines the basic processes that allow Being to emerge, reveal its presence, persist in appearance, come into beings, and abide in them with constancy.^[3]

‘Place’ defines the basic processes that allow Being to emerge, reveal its presence, persist in appearance, come into beings and abide in them with constancy

To come into being is to becoming. As Being is, at first, what appears, and, eventually, what comes into beings, then Being and becoming are inherently linked to the essence of what there is, appears and becomes. Being and becoming are inherently connected to place: they belong to place from within—they are components of place, not merely in the sense that they happen in a realm, domain, or substrate that we call ‘place’, but in the sense that Being and becoming are constitutive of that realm, domain or substrate-as-place. So, ‘place’ is both the Being of beings and their becoming. Being and becoming. Or Being( )becoming, to emphasize their seamless opposition and unity, in the Heideggerian and early Greek sense (Heraclitean). The existent — that which exists or all that exists — is a place: a place in itself, and a place for the other selves. Then, initially, everything has a single designation: ‘place’, which simultaneously defines the delimitation of Being, its actualization into specific beings, as well as their possibility for becoming. ‘Place’ is the ἀρχή — archē —, the principle containing the Being of beings as well as the becoming of beings; the finite, or definite, as the actualization of beings in the present now, and the not-yet definite — in the sense of universal and potential — as the manifold possibilities for the actualization of the Being of beings in the immediate or distant future. But there is more: in the process of becoming, the abiding presence of Being (i.e., the Being of beings) keeps together its present, future, and past dimensions, or states, allowing us to assert that Being (as place) encompasses the entire dimension of time — emerging from its current state, projecting itself into the future, and, consequently, defining its past conditions, once and for all. It is properly this continuity (from the Latin cum+tenere, meaning ‘to keep together’) that provides a standing, a continuous standing to Being, which unfolds as a constant presence in the present, including future and past dimensions: this standing, which keeps together past, present, and future dimensions, I define as ‘place’. Or, which is the same, the event that keeps together Being — the Being of beings — in its present, future and past dimensions, I refer to as ‘place’.

‘Place’ is Being( )becoming

An event can be defined as a ‘succession of processes’; ‘place’ is one thing with processes, it happens contextually to processes — it is not a precondition for them (there is not an absolute place). Place and processes belong together.

These brief thoughts on the nature of place build upon the arguments I have extendedly developed in Being as Place: An Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two, which are grounded in a summary and ‘placial interpretation’ of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (2000). I redirect the interested reader to those articles.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried, and Richard Polt (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000), 15.

[2] In the broadest sense, the Greek term ‘phusis’ means ‘nature’. Through my determinations of place, as outlined here and in other sections of RSaP-Rethinking Space and Place (e.g., see: What is Place? What is Space? , On the Structure of Reality, Being as Place: An Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two), I aim to revive the original, ‘natural’ meaning of place expanding the fundamental sense of bounding and bounded condition found in Aristotle’s concept of place — which is definitely a ‘natural place’ (Aristotle is the first man who gave a definition of place, topos) — to encompass the original sense of nature-as-phusis, expressed by the ancient Greeks, at the dawn of Western philosophy, as explained by Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics.

[3] Following Heidegger’s interpretation of Being in Introduction to Metaphysics, here, ‘to come into beings’ means that Being unfolds into beings (essents) as an internal possibility, and not as an acquisition — an act of conquest — of something external; there are not beings without Being: Being precedes beings as their intrinsic possibility to be, beyond time contingencies.