/lit/ - Literature

>Techne is thought to derive from the Indo-European root tek, meaning ‘to fit together the woodwork of [...] a house’. For the Presocratics, the meaning of techne is closest to this root, and as Heidegger says, ‘each techne is correlated with a quite determinate [bestimmte] task and type of achievement’. Jorg Kube notes that, in Homer, the word techne is only used in relation to the god Hephaestus, or to carpentry, but not any other work, probably because other practices such as medicine, fortune-telling, and music had yet to become independent professions. In Plato, we see a significant modification of the sense of the word, and it becomes closely related to another word, arete, meaning excellence’ in general, ‘virtue’ in particular. Vernant remarks that the word arete had started undergoing a shift already in the time of Solon (640-558 BC), where its relation to the warrior in the aristocratic milieu had been transferred to another conception of self-control belonging to the religious milieu? correct behaviour resulting from a long and painful askesis and which aims to resist koros (greed), hybris (excess) and pleonexia (avarice), the three follies. The 'human cosmos’ (the polis) is conceived to be a harmonious unity in which the individual arete is sophrosyne (temperance), and dike is a law common to all. As Vernant says, ‘with Solon, dike and sophrosyne descend from heaven to earth, to be installed in the agora’. Virtue-techne constitutes a core enquiry in Plato’s quest for a techne of all technai that can be learned and taught, and for dike as the virtue of all virtues.

>Each techne is a remedy for overcoming chance occurrences (tyche) and errors that crop up in the process of making, as Antiphon says: ‘we conquer by techne things that defeat us by physis’. This motif is repeated many times in Plato’s dialogues. Notably, in Protagoras Socrates admires the figure of Prometheus, and agrees with Protagoras in affirming the necessity of measurement (metretike techne) as a way to restrict hedonism, as well as the elimination of tyche.

>The relation between the cosmos (order) and geometry is clearer in the later passages in the Gorgias when Socrates tells Callicles that, according to the wise man who had made a study of geometry,

>partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order [...] You have failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice get ting the greater share. That is because you neglect geometry.

interesting, no? it touches on sloterdijk stuff too, anthropo-technics. what’s the point of all of this tech if it turns us into worthless slobs?
>b/c you like being a worthless slob girardfag. you like cheeseburgers and vidya. you sir are a clownmonkey. you neglect geometry
>this is true inner self