Poiesis
In
Etymology
Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term
Overview
Meta-poiesis
In their 2011 book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that embracing a "meta-poietic" mindset is the best, if not the only, method to authenticate meaning in the secular era: "Meta-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away."[4] Furthermore, Dreyfus and Dorrance Kelly urge each person to become a sort of "craftsman" whose responsibility it is to refine their faculty for poiesis in order to achieve existential meaning in their lives and to reconcile their bodies with whatever transcendence there is to be had in life itself: "The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there."[5]
See also
- Allopoiesis, a process whereby a system can create something other than itself
- Esthesic and poietic
References
- ^ Donald Polkinghorne, Practice and the Human Sciences: The Case for a Judgment-Based Practice of Care, SUNY Press, 2004, p. 115.
- ^ Robert Cavalier, "The Nature of Eros," http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/Cavalier/80250/Plato/Symposium/Sym2.html
- ^ Ludger Honnefelder, "Natur-Verhältnisse" in Nature als Gegenstand der Wissenschaften (Freiburg, 1992, pp. 11-16
- ^ Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, "All Things Shining", 2011, Simon & Schuster, p. 212.
- ^ Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, "All Things Shining", 2011, Simon & Schuster, p. 209.