In continental philosophy and semiotics, poiesis (/pɔɪˈiːsɪs/; from Ancient Greek: ποίησις) is the process of emergence of something that did not previously exist.
Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιεῖν, which means "to make".
Examples of physis are the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, and the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt; the last two analogies underline Heidegger's example of a threshold occasion, a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another.
In their 2011 book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that embracing a "meta-poietic" mindset is the best, if not the only, method to authenticate meaning in the secular era: Meta-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form.
Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away.