On Creating Meaningful Art

of the term τέχνη (cf. τίκτω, τεκεῖν) referred to art, skill, device, craft, cunning. 6 As each subsequent epoch borrowed from the previous, this Greek lemma maintained its influence on human thought throughout the development of the Western tradition. It communicated a variety of ideas, such as skills in producing any material form, handicraft, trade, occupation, or employment; and, it eventually made its way into our English vernacular in the form of words like technical and technique. In any case, as the dialogues of Plato indicate, τέχνη already carried with it a semantic range of its own early in our human experience. For example, in Euthydemus, Socrates’ philosophical pursuit creates a need to distinguish between the various nuances of art when he attempts to make a distinction between the art of lyre-making and the art lyre-playing (he does this with a variety of other arts as well). From his discussion with Crito, Socrates concludes the art they are looking for is actually a third kind of art, one that “uses as well as makes.” 7 As this example illustrates, before there is adequate technical language to discuss the idea, in some of its earliest recorded usages, art (τέχνη ) is innately loaded with a variety of meanings. It may be helpful to digress, briefly, to point out that when discussing any topic, particularly topics of great nuance, one must depend on the curious medium of language to accomplish the task. On the one hand, the ability to use language to articulate nuanced ideas is one of the primary attributes separating human beings from the non-rational animals; yet, as many philosophers have discovered, it is very often a lousy medium for communicating these ideas. It is quite the paradox, for certain. Hans Gadamer, the elusive German philosopher, noted in his famed academic work on hermeneutics, Truth and Method : “The human word is essentially incomplete. No human word can express our mind completely . . . the human word is not one, like the divine word, but must necessarily be many words.” 8 Thus when it comes to articulating an idea or concept—especially if it is an abstract or complicated one, like art and beauty—it is usually necessary to assign modifiers, employ metaphors, or even create neologisms to help distinguish between all the related ideas that might fall within the spectrum of meaning assumed in any given word or expression. But, even then, language is such that adding any number of modifiers, metaphors, or neologisms may only get us barely closer to an adequate definition or understanding of a concept under consideration. To return to the task, this is precisely the case with art, beauty, the concepts related to them.

6 Georg Autenrieth, ed. Isaac Flagg, trans. Robert P. Keep, A Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 268.

7 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great books of the Western World: Plato , vol. 7 (Chicago: W. Benton, 1952), 74.

During the epochs subsequent to the Athenian philosophers, the Romans advanced the idea of τέχνη or ars “beyond the sphere of the common pursuits of life into that of artistic and scientific action.” 9 Said another way, the idea of art was extended to include even more relat-

8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 442.

9 Ibid., 74.