From: "Paul Murphy" <Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com>
Subject: Re: neither/nor (was: Righteous War? Or bluff?)
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 13:32:25 +0100


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


Re: neither/nor (was: Righteous War? Or bluff?)so your attempting to reconstruct what a word might have meant to an Ancient Greek?  Aren't you generalising a great deal?  The word techne probably meant nothing to the majority of Greeks of the time of Plato, who probably had just enough Greek to go about their daily lives and would have had absolutely no grasp whatever of literary or philosophical language.  It meant something to a tiny minority of philosophers, and even then....well, what can we say?  What is your evidence of its usage, and what evidence do you have of the reception that that usage gained?  You should invest some time in reading a book about Greek society, I think you'll find that it was a good deal less enlightened than you suppose, there being a great deal of brutality and downright awfulness.  I think that you're setting these ancient Greeks up on a pedestal rather than viewing their society as a place of horror, bloodshed, slavery, misogyny and constant warfare. But further, it seems that this list is a rather abstract realm, where ideas float about uncontained by very much seeming reality, whatever that is?  Perhaps you should also invest some money in a copy of Aristophanes' 'The Clouds' to see the popular way in which Athen's philososphers were viewed by the more sceptical,  PM
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: michaelP
  To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 1:21 PM
  Subject: Re: neither/nor (was: Righteous War? Or bluff?)


  on 20/2/03 10:43 am, Paul Murphy at Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com wrote:


    where are you getting this from?  Having lived in Greece I know that any typical Greek would look at you sideways for coming out with this.  Techne means art, the rest is psychobabble.  Get a ticket to Athens if you don't believe me....PM


  Sorry, Paul, I thought techne was being referred to in an ancient Greek philosophical context and not (so much) a modern colloquial context. Certainly techne means 'art' in both contexts but art is meant differently in each case too. I do have some Heidegger quotes and references vis-a-vis philosophic reflections on techne if you want...

  regards


    michaelP


      ----- Original Message -----
      From: michaelP <mailto:michael-AT-sandwich-de-sign.co.uk> 
      To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
      Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 8:58 AM
      Subject: Re: neither/nor (was: Righteous War? Or bluff?)

      on 19/2/03 11:01 pm, Paul Murphy at Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com wrote:

      > techne means art in Greek, not technology, although this may be a derivation
      > of techne

      and mP replied:
      For better or worser, Paul, techne for the Greeks means something more like: bringing forth and showing what does not bring forth and show itself by itself; such techne is thus differentiated from physis which is the realm of that which emerges and shows itself by itself. Thus techne is a realm that includes those of 'art', 'handicraft', the 'technical' and eventually 'technology'. The sense of 'making' involved here is not exclusively that of human making/creating; in the same way, physis is not exclusively the realm of what we now call 'nature' and the 'natural'. These days the flattened casting of beings is such that these two realms are now opposed, now combined, the sense of emergence (whether by itself or not) now dimmed (and damned), as we can see in oxymoronic formulations like 'virtual reality' and 'reality TV'. And, even more urgent to take on board now, is Heidegger's hint that the essence (whatness, quiddity) of technology is nothing technological...

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----- Original Message -----

From: michaelP

To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu

Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 1:21 PM

Subject: Re: neither/nor (was: Righteous War? Or bluff?)

on 20/2/03 10:43 am, Paul Murphy at Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com wrote:

where are you getting this from?  Having lived in Greece I know that any typical Greek would look at you sideways for coming out with this.  Techne means art, the rest is psychobabble.  Get a ticket to Athens if you don't believe me....PM

Sorry, Paul, I thought techne was being referred to in an ancient Greek philosophical context and not (so much) a modern colloquial context. Certainly techne means 'art' in both contexts but art is meant differently in each case too. I do have some Heidegger quotes and references vis-a-vis philosophic reflections on techne if you want...

regards

michaelP

----- Original Message -----
From: michaelP <mailto:michael-AT-sandwich-de-sign.co.uk>  
To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 8:58 AM
Subject: Re: neither/nor (was: Righteous War? Or bluff?)

on 19/2/03 11:01 pm, Paul Murphy at Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com wrote:

> techne means art in Greek, not technology, although this may be a derivation
> of techne

and mP replied:
For better or worser, Paul, techne for the Greeks means something more like: bringing forth and showing what does not bring forth and show itself by itself; such techne is thus differentiated from physis which is the realm of that which emerges and shows itself by itself. Thus techne is a realm that includes those of 'art', 'handicraft', the 'technical' and eventually 'technology'. The sense of 'making' involved here is not exclusively that of human making/creating; in the same way, physis is not exclusively the realm of what we now call 'nature' and the 'natural'. These days the flattened casting of beings is such that these two realms are now opposed, now combined, the sense of emergence (whether by itself or not) now dimmed (and damned), as we can see in oxymoronic formulations like 'virtual reality' and 'reality TV'. And, even more urgent to take on board now, is Heidegger's hint that the essence (whatness, quiddity) of technology is nothing technological...