Poiesis
Making or creation — the act of bringing something into existence that was not there before, encompassing craft, poetry, and all productive activity.
The Meaning of Poiesis
Poiesis (from poiein: to make) named all productive activity — the craftsman making a pot, the god making the cosmos, the poet making a poem. For Aristotle, it was distinct from both theoria (contemplation) and praxis (action leading to action): poiesis produced an external result, a made thing, that existed independently of the maker's ongoing activity. The highest form of poiesis for the Greeks was poetry itself — the verb poiein gave the noun poiētēs (maker, poet) and the thing made: poiēma (poem). The association of poetry with making rather than, say, expression or emotion was characteristically Greek: the poem was a crafted object, subject to the standards of craft. Heidegger revived the term in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology," arguing that poiesis in its original sense was a mode of revealing truth — bringing forth into presence — and that modern technology was a degenerate form of poiesis that had lost its truth-disclosing character. Plato's Symposium has Diotima use poiesis in its broadest sense: all creation — biological, artistic, philosophical — was poiesis, the mortal soul's attempt at immortality through making.
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Symbols
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth. See our full guide to English words from Greek mythology.
Explore Further
Muse
💭 conceptLanguage and creativity
An English word meaning a source of artistic inspiration, derived from the nine Muses of Greek mythology who presided over the arts and sciences
Demiurge
💭 conceptphilosophy, cosmology
The craftsman-creator of the universe in Platonic cosmology — a divine craftsman who fashions the material world using eternal Forms as models.
Techne
💭 conceptThe knowledge of how to make and do things
The systematic art of making — the knowledge possessed by craftsmen, doctors, poets, and generals that transforms raw material into something purposeful.
Neoplatonism
💭 conceptPhilosophy
A late antique philosophical system teaching that all reality emanates from a transcendent, ineffable One
Apollonian and Dionysian
💭 conceptPhilosophy and aesthetics
A philosophical dichotomy introduced by Nietzsche contrasting the rational, ordered, and formal qualities associated with Apollo against the ecstatic, chaotic, and primal forces associated with Dionysus
Eros
💭 conceptThe primordial force of desire that drives all creation
In Hesiod's cosmogony, Eros was not a cherub but a primordial force — the desire that compels all things to come together and create.
Pleroma
💭 conceptphilosophy, religion
Fullness or completion — the state of total completeness, applied to the divine realm in Platonic and Gnostic thought.
Philosophy
💭 conceptLanguage and thought
An English word for the study of fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, and ethics, derived from the Greek philosophia meaning love of wisdom
Chaos
💭 conceptThe primordial void before creation
The first thing to exist — a vast, formless void from which all of creation emerged. Chaos was not disorder but the gap, the yawning emptiness that preceded everything.
Enthousiasmos
💭 conceptReligion and Inspiration
The state of being possessed by a god, the original meaning of divine inspiration in Greek religion.
Kosmos
💭 conceptphilosophy, cosmology
Order, ornament, and the universe — the Greek word that named the world as an ordered whole and gave English the word cosmos.
Nous
💭 conceptPhilosophy and Mind
The Greek concept of pure intellect or mind, the highest faculty of the soul and the organizing principle of the cosmos.