This research investigates a possible agency for 'making art'. It focuses on the convergence of 'life' and 'art' by comparing two conceptions of self-understanding: the Heideggerian 'Dasein', and the Stoic quest for the 'virtuous act'. These serve as a paradigm for the possible integration of the 'self of the artist and the 'work' as an 'ethics' of enduring in 'incertitude'. The first aspect of the convergence of 'life' and 'work' is the separation of the 'instrumental' and the 'virtuous'. I refer to Huizinga's research into the concept of the 'agon' and the concept of 'conversion' as elaborated on by Pierre Hadot The second aspect deals with the Stoic therapeutic concept of philosophy, which leads to the third aspect which is the 'comportment' within which questioning is guided by the disposition of 'discretio', a tact towards the aporia of 'knowledge'. Giorgio Colli points to the words of the 'oracle' as the symbol of language, because it discloses and withdraws (truth) at the same time. The concept of 'logos' he develops I relate to Heidegger's 'letting-be' (Gelassenheit) as the originary comportment to beings in the movement of concealment and unconcealment as the site of 'truth'. I argue that the necessary conditions for 'art' originate in the 'agon' as ordeal and action as well as in the psychagogical methodology of 'awareness' (prosoche) which underpins the possibility to interrogate the particular mode of constituted consciousness as it expresses itself in 'comportment', and the concept of 'phronesis, which moderates disclosure and withdrawal, concealment and unconcealment I argue that this mode is itself a 'poiesis', which has as its temporal 'telos' its own existence as the origin of art itself Department (if not found in thesis, you can search online to try and find it).