brought forth, so that it may shine out of the unconcealed and ‘be’ in the sense that the Greeks understood it. ὁ τέκτων is the one who brings forth, the one who places-forth and sets-forth something in the unconcealed and sets it into the open. This setting-forth in the manner of bringing-forth is carried out by the human—for example, in building, hewing, and molding. ὁ τέκτων lies in the word ‘architect.’ Something issues and projects-forth from the architect, who is the ἀρχή of a τεκεῖν and who guides it—as in, for example, the bringing-forth of a temple.
All bringing-forth in this larger and richer sense of setting-forth into the unconcealed (properly understood) moves and persists in the realm of unconcealment, which is the realm of all possible realms and is that in which the human stands and falls, walks and rests, climbs and plunges, erects and destroys. This bringing-forth is essentially different from ‘what is brought forth’ by ‘nature.’ To be sure, we say that ‘nature’ brings-forth plants and animals. But this ‘bringing-forth’ is not the characteristically human activity of setting-forth and setting into the unconcealed. ‘Nature,’ especially if we think it in the Greek way as φύσις, is the self-emerging and self-occluding. Given that this is so, we can easily see that φύσις [202] as emerging and occluding stands in relation to unconcealment and concealing, and in a certain sense is unconcealment and concealing themselves, so long as by φύσις we think (as is necessary) ‘nature’ in a more originary sense than we are used to (i.e., only as a special realm to be differentiated from history). These connections between φύσις as emerging into the unconcealed, and unconcealment itself, never became clear and grounded in Greek thinking itself. Indeed, they are still not fully thought through today. The relationship between φύσις and τέχνη and the connection of both to unconcealment has yet to be illuminated. But, rooted in this connection is the uncanny enigma that for the modern human there is a fate concealed within modern technology, one to which he will never be able to respond properly through the merely purported mastery of technology. But what, now, is τέχνη in relation to τεκεῖν, to “bringing-forth”?
τέχνη is what pertains intimately to all bringing-forth in the sense of human setting-forth. If bringing-forth (τεκεῖν) is a setting into the unconcealed (i.e., the world), then τέχνη means the knowledge of the unconcealed and the ways of attaining, obtaining, and implementing it. The essential feature of bringing-forth is τέχνη, and the essential feature of τέχνη is to be the relation with unconcealment and to unfold that relatedness. Thus, τέχνη does not mean a type of activity in the sense of an effecting of bringing-forth, but rather a preparing-beforehand and keeping ready of the respective realm of the unconcealed into which something is brought forth and set-forth: namely, what is to be set-forth. This preparing-beforehand and keeping-ready of the unconcealed (ἀληθές)—that is, of the true—is τέχνη. If we call this particular residing within the true by the name ‘knowledge,’ taken here in a far-ranging and rich sense, then τέχνη is a form of knowledge in the broad sense of illuminating, of making ‘light.’ The conventional translation of τέχνη as “art” is wrong
154 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos