Bios, Techne, and Logos - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 2

ideologies. Perhaps it is confusing to think that poetry, or more generally, artistic
creation, agrees with technique. Doing so, how could “ creativity ” ever continue
to “ be ahead of the times in which it creates ” [2]? If technique is the normal
course of things, why should great creators, those who capture what others flee
from, place themselves second? Moreover, would such an idea of technique also
introduce less of any form of social or political meditation, or even “social revo-
lution”, in the future [1]? In fact, it would no longer be necessary to lavish any-
thing on ourselves due to our conviction in a particular lifestyle, since technolo-
gy would become the instrument for satisfying any human need . Thus, there is
no need to convince someone regarding an attitude of life, since everything can
be conceded and humans can, finally, concretely satisfy their own needs.
But what acceptance of “technique” are we talking about? According to
Severino, it is not possible to understand the authentic sense of “technique”
guided by modern science, if we do not go back to the oldest Western body of
thought—Greek philosophy—and if, together, we are not able to sense the deep
unity that links technique to philosophical thought in the last two centuries.
Technique in our time is the “ most radical form of techne ” [1]. The word
techne expresses the way in which the Greeks thought about human actions;
thought that, by its nature, was founded on “becoming,” on the oscillation of
things between being and nothing. The concept of the transformation of nature
as the work of humans that we discuss today therefore has these profound
roots. For Heraclitus , “ becoming ” is the substance of a being since each thing
is subject to time and transformation. Even what seems static to our senses is,
in reality, dynamic and changes continuously. This concept is realized in the
thesis that identifies fire as the beginning of all things. Fire symbolizes move-
ment, life, and destruction. “Becoming” is therefore the immutable law, logos ,
since “ everything mutates, except for the law of mutation ” [3], which regulates
the alternation between birth and death. “Becoming” is composed of opposites
that coexist within things.
Aristotle goes beyond Parmenides's noted oppositions to “becoming”
(“ what is, is and cannot not be; the nonbeing is not and cannot, in any way,
be ” [3]) and the so-called pluralist, materialist philosophers, such as
Anaxagoras, who likened “becoming” to being , starting from the certainty,
given as evidence, that sensing beings were continually subject to “becoming”
(and therefore to corruption and death) and moving. Therefore, Aristotle occu-
pied himself with movement—intended as the passage from a certain type of
being to another certain type of being—time, and physical phenomena in gen-
eral, providing one of the first complete studies of physics.
Among modern philosophers, anchorage to the Greek sense of becoming,
with some adjustments, was pursued by Hegel and Bergson, and it is notably
through Emanuele Severino that a return to Parmenides is made, in a dramat-
ic countertrend [4]. At this point, we cannot dwell on anything other than the
philosophy of the sense of being with its references to becoming or mutating.
It is interesting, however, to highlight that techne , which represents the actions
of humans, is not extraneous to this comparison.