Making The Buds Open

"He who can open the bud, does it so simply'' said Ravindranath Tagore. Technology, however, is about making the buds open.

''Technology coerces beings, which are governed by a hidden law of emergence and withdrawal, into perpetual presence." said Heidegger

Animus, 'a philosophical journal of our times' makes interesting reading on the net. Its volume 8 of 2003 is devoted to aesthetics. I particularly liked Sean McGrath's article on Heidegger's thesis.

Interestingly, he discusses technology that allows the beautiful to occur. He has summarized his contention as :

"The ecological problem is an aesthetic crisis. The world is becoming increasingly less beautiful because of technology. Leavening Heidegger with a measure of largely forgotten medieval aesthetics, I maintain that we have forgotten the ontological relevance of the beautiful, and the aesthetic relevance of the ontological. We have allowed our technology to develop without consideration for aesthetic effect. I offer three criteria for a technology that allows the beautiful to occur: fittingness, transparency, and self-containment."

For explaining fittingness he quotes Robert Grosseteste as: “Beauty is a concordance and fittingness of a thing to itself and of all its individual parts to themselves and to each other and to the whole, and of the whole to all things [italics mine].”

Putting forth the criterion of transparency, he argues thus, " To be beautiful in a technical way is to let nature show itself through technology.."

Describing self-containment, he aptly explains Heidegger's notion of "sparing":

"A self-contained technology lets form shine without eclipsing nature. Like the painter who knows when to leave a detail at the level of suggestion, the writer who knows when to leave something unsaid, the architect who resists the inclination to ornamentation, a technology that allows the beautiful to occur holds back and lets be. Heidegger calls this “sparing.”

Those who have had even a slight brush with Philosophy, will enjoy the article immensely.