"Today, we would call such enthusiasm a "fad."
How true enthusiasm, which I consider one of the most important and rare
human qualities, in comparison with more common- boredom, in societal
progress, could be a 'fad'?
Boris Shoshensky
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Heidegger and techne
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:01:35 GMT
Given every ancient Hellenic artifact available to us today, did Heidegger
really believe that each and every one them exemplified "truth establishing
itself in the work"?
Wouldn't some of them have been reproductions of work that had already been
done -- just as one peasant shoe is quite likely made from a pattern used
many
times before ?
I happen to be a big fan of what are often called "Tanagra figurines" -- i.e.
small ceramic figures made in the 4th C. BCE in the region that includes
Tanagra. (they were first dug up in the late 19th C. and became a big hit
with
European art lovers in the decades that followed. I'm sure that Malraux, for
example, had something to say about them)
Have you ever seen such things ? I spent a few happy hours last year going
through several hundred pictures. They were mass produced from molds, but
more than that, they are often so similar, that evidently some were made in
imitation of others. I.e. -- I very much doubt that "truth was establishing
itself" for the first and
only time in any of one of those figures that I saw.
I happen to have zero aesthetic interest in about 90% of them -- but whether
the ones I like are more original than the others - well, who can say ?
A kind of naturalism was achieved in some ancient Greek sculpture that has
been very important in several periods of European civilization that followed
- but the Tanagra style is no more naturalistic than some earlier
Mediterranean styles that preceded it - or from pieces found elsewhere around
the world: China, Meso-America etc.
Classically educated Europeans of his time shared a Romantic fascination
with
ancient Greece that Heidegger expresses in the quote that Luc has
offered:"In
Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West, the arts soared to the
supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the presence
(Gegenwart) of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings,
to radiance"
Today, we would call such enthusiasm a "fad" - and I'm doubting that all them
(especially Heidegger) looked carefully at very many examples of work --
either from Ancient Greece, or from all the other places that produced
similar
things.
***************
Luc wrote:
>Techne: may I suggest the reading of The Question Concerning Technology by
the
same Heidegger, Harper Torchbooks. 1977.
I quote from page 34:
"In Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West, the arts soared to
the
supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the presence
(Gegenwart) of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings,
to radiance. And art was simply called techne. It was a single, manifold
revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to holding.sway and the
safekeeping of truth. ....
Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that
brought forth, and hither, and therefore belonged within poiesis."
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