This making visible was not a matter of objective representation (or symbolization, in the modern sense), but a realization—a recognition that is at once an actualization, or making real. As McEwen writes,

The discovery of a pattern seems ... to be an inherent feature of the human experience of making. Whether he or she thinks about it or not ...a person who makes something implicitly assumes the existence of an order or standard of rightness that transcends all recipes and rules of composition....This pattern can be thought of as a single, immutable template to be traced or copied...or it can be thought of as a mutable rhythm governing a pattern of movement, like the figure of a dance: a rhythm or order (kosmos) that is rediscovered with each new tracing of the figure.¹⁹

As we know, kosmos could also mean adornment or ornament—as in cosmetic, which for us has assumed the connotation of mere superficiality. In Homeric Greek, chros (meaning skin or color) was the word used to refer to the living body.²⁰ As such, the body was understood and experienced as a visible surface, not in the sense in which we regard skin as mere surface, but as the radiance of an inner being.²¹ For the Greeks, epiphaneia meant both "surface" and "appearance," but did not carry the meaning that "epiphenomenal" carries for us. What lay, or rather showed, on the surface was not unreal, nor did it necessarily cover up. As McEwen observes, "when a woman kosmese (adorned) herself, she wrapped her chros in a second skin or body, in order to bring the living surface-body so clothed to light; to make it appear." When, in Homer, female divinities adorn or literally wrap themselves in kosmos in order to go dancing, the implication is that the kosmos of the dance is a reflection of their own kosmos, and vice versa.²² This order, or kosmos, is not one that is imposed on brute matter, but one that emerges reciprocally as the dancer traces the patterns of the dance.

Dance is a craft. So is weaving. In Homeric usage something that is well-crafted, put together or assembled (carefully wrought), was called daidalon. In the Odyssey this word is applied frequently to textiles. Textiles are daidala when they are tightly woven or well-fitted, and display an especially luminous quality—when they "shimmer with dancing light and seem to have a life of their own."²³ Scholars have argued that the iridescent patterns that made a woven cloth daidala were not embroidered on or applied to a material surface that was simply there (like formless matter). They were woven into the surface itself, in such a way that, as the weaver practiced her weaving, "the pattern (kosmos) would have appeared with the surface of the cloth, whose making would have been an activity that entailed great skill and a highly complex pattern of movement of shuttle over loom."²⁴ This physical movement would incorporate its own kosmos, whose display was not experienced as a merely human production, but as the revelation of an order that was not entirely subject to the human will. If anything, it was the order (rather than the surface of the cloth) that was experienced as already there, unseen and waiting to be discovered. The word for weaving, or the actual practice of plying the loom, was hyphainein, which literally means "bring to light." Hyphainein is related to epiphaneia. Weaving was an epiphany, or unveiling.

The order that techne makes visible is not what we would call merely aesthetic. Areros is a very old Greek word meaning well-adjusted or perfectly fitted together. It is the root of harmonia, which in Homer is often applied to the craft of ship-building.²⁵ In ship-building harmonia works, not just insofar as the proper fit or attunement of the joints allows the ship to stay afloat and to trace an orderly course through the water, but also in the way that it makes an otherwise unseen harmony visible. A well-made ship is in visual and functional harmony both with itself and with its surrounding element, whose own kosmos or patterns are revealed in its wake. These elemental patterns are made visible in and by the ship's form even when it is not afloat or literally functioning. Just as the shipbuilder's activity involves working with, rather than simply working on, his material (responding creatively to its grain), the artifact itself stands in a similar relationship to its natural environment. It serves, not only as an instrument of conveyance (for theoroi, perhaps), but as an occasion for revelation and discovery (for theoria). That is, as a revelation of kosmos.²⁶

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