...The other point
that we should
observe with regard
to
techne is even more important. From earliest times until
Plato the word
techne is linked with the word episteme. Both words are
names for knowing
in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in
something, to understand and be
expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an
opening up it is a revealing.
Aristotle, in a discussion of special importance
(Nico-machean Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4),
distinguishes between episteme and techne and indeed with
respect to what and how
they reveal. Techne
is a mode of aletheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and
does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn
out now one way and
now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a
sacrificial chalice reveals
what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives
of the four modes of occa-
sioning. This revealing
gathers together in
advance the aspect
and the matter
of
ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisioned
as completed, and from
this gathering determines the manner of its construction.
Thus what is decisive in
techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in
the using of means, but
rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing,
and not as manufacturing,
that techne is a bringing-forth...link
