Beyond Techne and Physis

Art as an activity by which the ineffable becomes manifest

Photo by A O on Unsplash

There is a paradoxical yet absolutely profound experience in which you are the creator and creation of everything at the same time, with the whole distinction being rendered meaningless by the reality of your experience being both, with any notion of agency and separation being superseded.

I believe the experience of the divine is not one in which you feel you are a god, inflated with delusions of grandeur. But one in which the distinction between techne and physis is obliterated in a unity that is impossible to describe without speaking lies, for language is possible only with the very fundamental divisions you are trying to point out as artificial to the ultimate nature of reality.

This is why “the Tao one can speak of is not the true Tao” (Lao Tzu, in Tao Te Ching) and maybe why “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein, in the last sentence of his Tractatus).

Silence, at least, does not falsify the experience, but it doesn't express it either—art does.

Art is the activity by which the ineffable becomes manifest, and the only art related to speech that can express the ineffable is the one that breaks its rules: poetry. This is why poets will always be superior at expressing truth than philosophers

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, and why Plato was right in his view of artists in his early dialogue Ion.

But which poets can express the ineffable? Only those who are philosophical (e.g. Rumi). Those who are not, are just playing with shadows. Their poetry may be pleasant, but it is not profound.

1. Though, every great philosopher is a Poet by Necessity.