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In Homer, the spectacles that are described as thauma idesthai (wonders to behold) are all daidala—beautifully wrought artifacts. What makes them so marvelous is the unseen order they bring to light. This could be seen as the source, not only of the creative process, but of life itself. Things that are thauma idesthai are often so described because they seem to have a life of their own. This is not a life that the craftsman alone bestows. Art or craft is related to giving birth (as techne is related to tiktein) but is, as Heidegger suggests, an "occasion" rather than a cause. The craftsman is not the source of the order that lives in the artifact, but rather "lets it come forth into presencing."27 The pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaximander, was a "theorist. " He was also a craftsman, and is credited with making a map, a globe, and a sundial. If, in fashioning a sundial, the craftsman succeeds in making a temporal order visible, he owes his success to something he does not make. What the craftsman does is provide the occasion for the sun to cast the shadow that allows kosmos to appear. He can only create order by acknowledging its ultimate source. What the craftsman makes in fashioning the sundial is not all of what is made visible. He gives form to the artifact, arranging its parts in a certain way. The kosmos that he makes visible through his work is one that is not of any human being's making. The "bringing forth into appearance" of techne, and the "reverent paying heed" of theoria—the beautiful and the divine—are thus joined.
IV.
If theoria involves an attentive seeing, with wondering eyes, of a divine or beautifully made thing, techne involves the making visible of something that is seen as divinely made, even if it is man-made. The skilled craftsman was himself a theoros. His making is grounded in and provides an occasion for contemplative seeing.
The convergence of these sources (theoria and techne, theory and craft) can help us to understand the deeper sense in which contemplation involves practice. Theoria is rooted in wonder, and we are unaccustomed to thinking about wonder as something that is practiced—either as an activity that is performed regularly, or as one that requires preparation. A craft, or skill, is practical in both of these senses, in addition to being useful. It is routinely practiced, and it takes practice. If we fail to understand the practicality of contemplative seeing, it is because we fail to understand how it is originally related to craft—not in the way that it produces a useful result, but in the way that techne itself was originally understood as both a revelation and a realization of the divine.
Just as the theoros beholds a spectacle, but is not a detached spectator, the artist or craftsman (the technician in the original sense of techne) is not a mere doer. The Greek word that was used to designate a craftsman's function was ergon (task, work, deed). Ergon does not refer merely to the particular actions performed by the individual who builds a ship, weaves cloth, dances, or makes music. Nor does it refer merely to the finished product. Like kosmos—which can mean, not only order or arrangement, but ordering or arranging—ergon comprises both the working and the work (the means and the end) and holds them together in the way that the English word still does, when we use it to refer to an artist's work.28 Ergon refers to an activity from which process and product cannot be separated out—a process whose end is contained within it.
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