disclosing of beings as such, in the manner of a knowing guidance of bringing-forth. Now, since the manufacture of utensils and the creation of artworks each in its way inheres in the immediacy of everyday existence, the knowledge that guides such procedures and modes of bringing-forth is called τέχνη in an exceptional sense. The artist is a technitēs, not because he too is a handworker, but because the bringing- forth of artworks as well as utensils is an irruption by the man who knows and who goes forward in the midst of φύσις and upon its basis. Nevertheless, such "going forward," thought in Greek fashion, is no kind of attack: it lets what is already coming to presence arrive.
With the emergence of the distinction between matter and form, the essence of τέχνη undergoes an interpretation in a particular direction; it loses the force of its original, broad significance. In Aristotle τέχνη is still a mode of knowing, if only one among others (see the Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. VI). If we understand the word "art" quite generally to mean every sort of human capacity to bring forth, and if in addition we grasp the capacity and ability more originally as a knowing, then the word "art" corresponds to the Greek concept of τέχνη also in its broad significance. But to the extent that τέχνη is then brought expressly into relation with the production of beautiful things, or their representation, meditation on art is diverted by way of the beautiful into the realm of aesthetics. What in truth is decided in the apparently extrinsic and, according to the usual view, even misguided designation of art as τέχνη never comes to light, neither with the Greeks nor in later times.
But here we cannot show how the conceptual pair "matter and form" came to be the really principal schema for all inquiry into art and all further definition of the work of art. Nor can we show how the distinction of "form and content" ultimately came to be a concept applicable to everything under the sun, a concept under which anything and everything was to be subsumed. It suffices to know that the distinction of "matter and form" sprang from the area of manufacture of tools or utensils, that it was not originally acquired in the realm of art in the narrower sense, i.e., fine art and works of art, but that it was merely transferred and applied to this realm. Which is reason enough to be dominated by a deep and abiding doubt concerning the trenchancy