/lit/ - Literature

>What Heidegger’s analysis begins to suggest, then, is that the Greek relation to technics emerges from a cosmology, and that knowledge of technics is a response to the cosmos, an attempt to ‘fit’ or to strive for 'fittingness’, or perhaps in form only’. What characterizes this fittingness? In particular, a parallel reading of Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander as a philosopher of Being and Vernant’s interpretation of Anaximander as a social-political thinker reveals something peculiar regarding the role played here by the Greek ’cosmotechnical’ relation to geometry. For if we refer to the ancient Greek moral theory, law (nomos) is closely related to dike in a geometrical sense. Dike means something can be fitted into the divine order, which suggests a geometrical projection: the nomoi, the body of rules introduced by the legislators, are presented as human solutions aimed at obtaining specific results: social harmony and equality between citizens. However, these nomoi are only considered valid if they confirm to a model of equilibrium and geometric harmony of more than human significance, which represents an aspect of divine dike.

>This synthesis of Heidegger’s understanding of the original meaning of technics in relation to the dike of Being and Vernant’s analysis of the relation between social structure and geometry, points to the fact that geometry was foundational for both technics and justice— and we shouldn’t forget that geometry was considered essential training in the school of Thales. Kahn reminds us that for both Anaximander and Pythagoras, ’the ideas of geometry are embedded in a much larger view of man and of the cosmos.’ This fittingness is not given as such; it is revealed only in the confrontation between the overwhelming of Being and the violence of techne. So should we see Heidegger’s return to the original techne as a quest for the spirit of the ancient Greek cosmotechnics?