...
The question concerning technology is the question concerning the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the essential unfolding of truth propriates.
But what help is it to us to look into the constellation of truth? We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.
Through this we are not yet saved. But we are thereupon summoned to hope in the light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and now and in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.
The essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing-reserve. Human activity can never directly counter this danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it. But human reflection can ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.
But might there not perhaps be a more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining-forth in the midst of the danger that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself?
There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called techne.
There was a time when the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful was also called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne.
At the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece, the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They illuminated the presence [Gegenwart] of the gods and the dialogue of divine and human destinings. And art was called simply techne. It was a single, manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding sway and the safekeeping of truth.
The arts were not derived from the artistic. Artworks were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity.
What was art--perhaps only for that brief but magnificent age? Why did art bear the modest name techne?Because it was a revealing that brought forth and made present, and therefore belongered within poiesis. It was finally that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name.
The same poet (Holderlin) from whom we heard the words
But where danger is, grows/ The saving power also...
says to us:
...poetically man dwells on this earth.
The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of essential unfolding into the beautiful.
Could it be the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found our new version of, and trust in, that which grants?
Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may unfold essentially in the propriative event of truth.
Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.
Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning.
Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the essential unfolding of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the essential unfolding of art. Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.
The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways of the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought.
joe justice (justicej@odc.edu): Artists are anti American I say cut of there funds, and let them clean the sewers.