And only therefore do their architecture and sculpture display the nobility of the built and the shaped. These "works" exist only in the medium of the word, i.e., in the medium of the essentially telling word, in the realm of the legendary, in the realm of "myth."
It is therefore that poetizing and thinking have a priority, one which to be sure is not grasped if we represent it "aesthetically" as a priority of one class of art over others. Similarly, in general art is not the object of a "cultural" or lived drive but is the setting into work of the unconcealedness of Being out of the holding sway of Being itself.
In μῦθος the δαιμόνιον appears. Just as the word and "having the word" sustain the essence of man, i.e., the relation of Being to man, so in the same range of essence, i.e., in relation to the whole of beings, the δαιμόνιον determines the basic relation of Being to man. Therefore in later Greek antiquity, with Plato and Aristotle, a word was still essential, one that named this relation of Being to man. That word is εὐδαιμονία.
Through the Roman-Christian translation as beatitudo (i.e., the state of the beatus, the blessed one) εὐδαιμονία was, of course, transformed into a mere quality of the human soul, "happiness." But εὐδαιμονία means the holding sway in the appropriate measure of the "εὐ"-the appearing and coming into presence of the δαιμόνιον.
This is not a "spirit" dwelling somewhere within the breast The Socratic-Platonic talk of the δαιμόνιον as an inner voice signifies only that its attuning and determining do not come from the outside, i.e., from some being at hand, but from invisible and ungraspable Being itself, which is closer to man than any obtrusive manipulatable being.
Where the δαιμόνιον, the divine which enters into unconcealedness, the uncanny, must be said explicitly, there the saying is a legend, a μῦθος. The conclusion of the Platonic dialogue on the essence of the πόλις speaks of a δαιμόνιος τόπος. We now understand what this name means.
Τόπος is the Greek for "place," although not as mere position in a manifold of points, everywhere homogeneous. The essence of the place consists in holding gathered, as the present "where," the circumference of what is in its nexus, what pertains to it and is "of" it, of the place The place is the originally gathering holding of what belongs together and is thus for the most part a manifold of places reciprocally related by belonging together, which we call a settlement or a district [Ortschaft]. In the extended domain of the district there are thus roads, passages, and paths. A δαιμόνιος τόπος is an "uncanny district." That now means: a "where" in whose squares and alleys the uncanny shines explicitly and the essence of Being comes to presence in an eminent sense.