Techne: From Head to Hand (From Counterpoint to Thumb)

GOTZON ARRIZABALAGA

Through technique, human beings demonstrate the spectrum of their needs and expectations. They start controlling nature and thus introduce ideals into the sensible world (a classic idea appearing in Hegel’s aesthetics). Art (techne) appears as the expression of the aesthetic aspect of human nature, which leaves traces of their craft in the natural world. Every process, method, and innovation can be explained as a function of this project, and this project needs to gain knowledge of the general rule that governs the being of things and phenomena (as it appears in the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics). Only when this universal knowledge (which is the knowledge of causes) is accessed is the certainty of mastery that implies having a technique, an art, acquired.