Poiesis

In the Symposium, a Socratic dialogue written by Plato, Diotima describes how mortals strive for immortality in relation to poiesis. In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating or poiesis. In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay. "Such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: (1) Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, (2) poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame, and, finally, (3) poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge."[2]

Whereas Plato, according to the Timaeus, regards physis as the result of poiesis, viz. the poiesis of the demiurge who creates from ideas, Aristotle considers poiesis as an imitation of physis. In short, the form or idea, which precedes the physis, contrasts with the living, which is the innate principle or form of self-motion. In other words, the technomorphic paradigm contrasts with the biomorphic; the theory of nature as a whole with the theory of the living individual.[3]

Martin Heidegger refers to it as a 'bringing-forth' (physis as emergence), using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger's example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another. (These examples may also be understood as the unfolding of a thing out of itself, as being discloses or gathers from nothing [thus nothing is thought also as being]). Additional example: The night gathers at the close of day.

In literary studies, at least two fields draw on the etymology of poiesis: ecopoetics and zoopoetics. As "eco" derives from the root "oikos" meaning "house, home, or hearth", then ecopoetics explores how language can help cultivate (or make) a sense of dwelling on the earth. Zoopoetics explores how animals (zoo) shape the making of a text.

In their 2011 book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly conclude that embracing a "meta-poietic" mindset is the best, if not the only, method to authenticate meaning in our secular times: "Meta-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away."[4]

Furthermore, Dreyfus and Dorrance Kelly urge each person to become a sort of "craftsman" whose responsibility it is to refine their faculty for poiesis in order to achieve existential meaning in their lives and to reconcile their bodies with whatever transcendence there is to be had in life itself: "The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there."[5]

• Allopoiesis, a process whereby a system can create something other than itself
• Autopoiesis, the ability of a system to recreate itself
• Practopoiesis, a kind of adaptive system, a theory of adaptive organization of living systems
• Sympoiesis, collectively producing systems that do not have self defined spatial or temporal boundaries[6]

Look up poiesis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Overview of Plato's Symposium
• Original Transcript of Symposium