Week 16: Ostrich Fern, Martin Heidegger, Douglas Houghton Campbell

Heidi Brickell, Safe Euphoric Ara with Hine Kōrako (2025).

HEADNOTE#

What IS existing?

As German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) noted,1 this quintessentially philosophical question might seem “primitive” compared to the specificities of modern science as it defines, dissects, quantifies, calculates, and hypothesizes all things based on empirical observations. Today, we might reframe the question as a riddle about neurons and “consciousness”: does the brain simply generate mental experience (materialism) or somehow channel a universal mind-spirit (idealism)?

But for Heidegger, the question of existence was fundamental, and it required a return to ancient ideas, including the pro-Socratic Greek term Physis, or Phusis, derived from the verb phyo (“to bring forth”), and often translated as “nature,” in contrast to Nomos (“law, custom, or convention”). From Physis, we get “physics” as the science of matter and energy. Instead of turning to theorems or mathematical equations, though, Heidegger used this term to refer to our pre-reflective experiences of the world: what we see, feel, touch, or otherwise know before the application of mental interpretations and rational concepts. By postponing cognitive reflection, he attempted to distinguish “beings as such” (the existence of particular cats, people, and objects, which we encounter in physics and other of the natural sciences) from “Being itself” (the presence or revelation of existence in general, as discernible and meaningful to the philosophical tradition of metaphysics). This substratum of existence is not a static substance or representational framework, as modern philosophers sometimes proposed; it is a dynamic event, an unfolding process, through and within which particular beings come to exist or can be encountered as existing. Human “being,” indeed.

Here we’ve entered the realm of strange thoughts, like when we remember that the human body has a resonant frequency, that atoms are quantum clouds of delocalized matter, and that there is a faint glow of ancient radiation saturating the entire observable universe.

This is also the realm of FERNS: primordial (moreso exponentially than even the ancient crocus), flowerless but spore-bearing, tropical-loving and cold-tolerant, sun-optional, sometimes edible, and chaotic to the bone genome. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the unfurling fronds of the tree-like silver fern, or ponga (Cyathea dealbata), embody koru (“loop” or “coil”), a visual leitmotif in art/design representing the emergence of life, the spiral from origin to endless future, and symbolizing the Māori genealogical concept of Whakapapa. Closer to my home, in New England and across the Northern Hemisphere, the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) is one of several species whose slow-rocketing croziers, or fiddleheads, mark the return of spring and the persistence of biological life. Both a being as such and a symbol of existence itself, the fern is older, gentler, queerer—and tastier—even than Heidegger’s metaphysics.

The Matteuccia genus is named after Italian physicist Carlo Matteucci (1800–1868), and the struthiopteris species is from the Greek strouthós, “bird,” plus pteron, “wing” or “feather.” The ostrich fern belongs to the small family Onocleaceae, which contains only five species worldwide and is characterized by dimorphism, or the production of two distinct types of frond: tall sterile ones that carry on photosynthesis and give the plant its plumage-like shape, and smaller modified fronds that hold spore-bearing structures through the winter. The former are what can be cooked and eaten. To distinguish the ostrich fern from potentially dangerous lookalikes—particularly the cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) and the interrupted fern (Osmunda claytoniana), both of which may cause illness if eaten raw—look for the distinctive deep groove, like a small celery stalk’s channel, running along the inside of the stem. Only the ostrich fern has it.

1 Sometimes, two incongruous statements are both true. For example, Heidegger was a wonderfully earnest nature mystic and poet-philosopher. He was also a wretched Nazi stooge, and his attempt to recover a dynamic, organic notion of existence from pre-Socratic philosophy was tangled up in reactionary Folkist mythologies of soil and blood, as well as his own spiritualized admiration for the Third Reich. Arguably, the contemporary right-wing appropriation of Heidegger, the related rise of eco-fascisms around the world, and the “creep” of these ideas into mainstream environmentalism and popular culture make it all the more crucial to understand his ideas now.

Fig. 2. “Ostrich Fern. Sterile Fronds (New Hampshire),” from George Henry Tilton, The Fern Lover’s Companion: A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada (Boston, Massachusetts: 1922), p. 175.

READINGS#

1. 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 as “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 work 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. According to the dictionary, phuein means to grow, to make grow. But what does growing mean? Does it just mean to increase by acquiring bulk, to become more numerous and bigger?

   Phusis as emergence can be experienced everywhere: for example, in celestial processes (the rising of the sun), in the surging of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming forth of animals and human beings from the womb. But phusis, the emerging sway, is not synonymous with these processes, which we still today count as part of “nature.” This emerging and standing-out-in-itself-from-itself may not be taking as just one process among other that we observe in beings. Phusis is Being itself, by virtue of which beings become and remain observable.

   It was not in natural processes that the Greeks first experienced what phusis is, but the other way around: on the basis of a fundamental experience of Being in poetry and thought, what they had to call phusis disclosed itself to them. Only on the basis of this disclosure could they then take a look at nature in the narrower sense. Thus phusis originally meant both heaven and earth, both the stone and the plant, both the animal and the human, and human history as the work of humans and gods; and finally and first of all, it means the gods who themselves stand under destiny_. Phusis_ means the emerging sway, and the enduring over which it thoroughly holds sway. This emerging, abiding sway includes both “becoming” and “Being” in the narrower sense of fixed continuity. Phusis is the event of standing forth, arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000 [1935]), pp. 14–16.#

2. The young leaf grows much more rapidly than the stem, and soon projects beyond it. The multiplication of the cells being greater on the lower side, the leaf begins to curve upward. The cells of the leaf-stalk now elongate rapidly, and after the embryo has broken through the overlying tissue of the prothallium, the leaf pushes up between the lobes of the prothallium, appearing above its surface (Pl. 6, fig. 5).

   The apical cell of the stem divides much more slowly, and follows nearly the same plan at first. The segments later divide somewhat differently, the first division wall of the segment being a radial one, and dividing the segment into two nearly equal cells. The stem is very short at the time the embryo breaks through the prothallium, but the apex is more decidedly conical than is the case in the mature plant.

   The apical cell of the foot soon becomes obliterated by a process entirely similar to that already described, but the cells continue to multiply rapidly with no regular order. By means of the foot, which when complete is large and rounded in shape, the embryo is kept in close connection with the prothallium, and by means of it the embryo is nourished until the first leaf and root are developed.

Douglas Houghton Campbell, The Development of the Ostrich Fern (Boston: Society of Natural History, April 1887), p. 29.#

SUPPLEMENTUM#

• Mike Houlahan, “The Koru - Arguably the Best-Known Maori Symbol,” Otaga Daily Times (December 27, 2018).

• Gordon Walters, Maho (1973); cf. Robert Leonard, “Gordon Walters: Form Becomes Sign,” Art and Australia 44.2 (2006).

• Matthew Sharpe, “Heidegger in ruins? Grappling with an anti‑semitic philosopher and his troubling rebirth today,” The Conversation (April 11, 2023).

• Stacia Brezinski, “Fiddlehead, Ostrich, and Cinnamon: All About Ferns!,” from Maine Audobon (May 6, 2025).

• Alan Bergo, “Fiddlehead Ferns: Identifying, Harvesting and Cooking,” Forager | Chef (March 14, 2023).

Fig. 3. “Development of the Ostrich Fern,” Plate 6 from The Development of the Ostrich Fern, Douglas Houghton Campbell (Boston: Society of Natural History, April 1887).