How have the ancient Greek concepts of enthusiasm and techne influenced modern art?

This article discusses how the concepts of enthusiasm (passion) and techne (skill), which originated in ancient Greece, have been considered the origins of artistic creation, and how they have been changed and reinterpreted from Plato’s criticisms to Romanticism and realism.

 

When we think of art, we usually think of works of beauty, such as dance, poetry, music, architecture, painting, and sculpture. These works of art have been considered important vehicles for expressing human emotions and ideas, and sometimes for conveying social and political messages. However, it was the philosophical ideas of the ancient Greeks that led them to realize that art is more than just an expression of beauty. They believed that dance, poetry, and music came from enthousiasmos, and architecture, painting, and sculpture from techne. In general, enthousiasmos means “enthusiasm” or “enthusiasm” and techne means “technology” or “production”. Enthusiasm and techne have been considered the origins of artistic creation since the time of the ancient Greeks, and their value has varied depending on one’s view of art.
For the ancient Greeks, enthousiasmos was a frenzied state of communion with the gods during religious ceremonies, when priests would try to get messages from the gods. They valued the moments when humans could commune with the divine and believed that these divine experiences fueled the creation of art. They saw this state not only in the priests, but also in the people who participated in religious events. The ancient Greeks believed that they could achieve entousiasmos, a state of communion with the gods through their priests, by immersing themselves in activities that expressed emotions and impulses through gesture, language, and melody and rhythm, and that dance, poetry, and music came out of these activities. Thus, art was not just a means of entertainment, but was seen as intimately connected to the divine experience.
For the ancient Greeks, techne was the intellectual ability of humans to create things, independent of divine beings. Techne represented the process of following a set of rules, but combining them with creative ideas to produce a better result. In this process, the meaning and message of the work played an important role in addition to its technical perfection. In other words, techne referred to a conscious intellectual production that was carried out according to a set system of rules. The ancient Greeks thought that architecture, painting, and sculpture could be the outcome of this techne. However, they considered architecture to be the production of the real thing, while painting and sculpture were the imitation of the real thing. And since painting and sculpture were imitations of the real thing, they thought that this imitation could be an exact image of the real thing, or it could be an imitation using distortion, or it could be an illusion.
However, Plato took a critical view of entusiasmos and techne based on his own philosophical thinking at the time. He saw human “reason” as an important capacity to grasp the transcendent world’s ideas. (Ideas are the archetypes of real things that we sense. It is the transcendent reality on which all existence and perception is based, the eternal and immutable essential archetype of things.) Based on this perspective, he viewed entousiasmos as a state of human alienation from ‘reason’, and hence the arts that stemmed from it as harmful to humans, especially poetry, which he strongly criticized. In addition, Plato assigned the highest value to the Ideas, the essence of the real world, and said that the real world cannot have a lower value than the Ideas because it was created in imitation of the Ideas. Based on this view, Plato also took a critical view of the products of technological imitation of the real world, such as his criticism of painting and sculpture. Like the ancient Greeks of his time, Plato considered architecture to be an object of the real world, but he argued that painting and sculpture were objects that imitated the real world once more, imitating the Idea, and therefore had a lower value than the real world itself. In particular, the fact that this second process of imitation can create illusions through distortion is an important basis for Plato’s critical view of painting and sculpture.
Plato’s criticisms have had a profound impact on Western philosophy and art theory ever since. However, in various post-Platonic discourses on art, enthousiasmos and techne have regained importance. Especially in the modern era, it was Romanticism that highly valued enthousiasmos, because Romanticism rejected human rationality in art and emphasized the expression of emotion. Romantic artists sought to transcend reality through the power of emotion and imagination, and enthusiasm was an important artistic driving force in this process. However, whereas in ancient Greece, enthousiasm was emphasized in relation to divine beings, in the Romantic era, it was emphasized in relation to the human imagination, the unconscious, and so on. Thus, Romanticism showed a tendency to freely express human emotions through art.
In the modern era, the value of techne is emphasized by realism. Since realism sought an exact imitation of the real world, it emphasized the value of techné, that is, the ability to create accurate images, without the creation of illusion. Through techné, realist artists sought to faithfully recreate reality and, in doing so, convey a deeper understanding and emotion to the reader or viewer. In this process, the work of art becomes more than a mere imitation, but a means of exploring and expressing the depths of human experience.
In the end, enthousiasmos and techne have played an important role in defining and valuing the nature of art in different ways at different times. From this perspective, art is not simply an aesthetic expression, but the result of deep reflection and exploration of human existence and the world.