The memory remains when I was twelve or thirteen years old. That memory shimmers, a glow of experience from a time which by and large I cannot recall. The Engineering School at Duke University sponsored an annual open house for an evening. The community was invited to observe and to admire the work which students were doing to learn the principles of applied physics, the science of materials. I would think that in some cases professors and students illuminated the unknown, achieved new knowledge of the possible. My time spent wandering and wondering while moving from exhibit to exhibit has remained clear to me for these many years.

Engineering is applied physics to build, to make all kinds of things. Bridges to span canyons, roadways, circuit boards and memory chips, etc., etc. For the entirety of my life my surroundings have been engineered, as is nearly everything near at hand.

To leap ahead, anticipating that a reader will follow: Consider if you will — That border line, a boundary, a time and space where applied science, engineering becomes, is revealed as fine art? Contemplate with me an automobile conceived, with all of the subsystems, including the body aerodynamics, the integral safety systems, power source, materials selected and composed to become a revelation of excellence, not a mere tool, but an expression of passion and heart! Now consider housing along those same lines, and even interior office spaces…

I believe such experience is being explored by Heidegger’s reference to the Athens of Pericles, Greek civilization with the Parthenon sheltering the gold and ivory statue of Athena created by Phidias (480-430 BCE).

There was a time when technology and technique was no mere mechanization in meaning. Techne referred to art, a revealing of truth and beauty. Like the composition of a poem… And as such the human and the divine intersected.

Can such a condition, such a way of life ever happen again?

Now is the time when we need to ask ourselves: Why not?

Why the hell not!

There was a time
when it was not technology alone that bore the name technē.
Once the revealing that brings forth truth
into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called technē.

Once there was a time
when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful
was called technē.
The poiēsis of the fine arts
was also called technē.

At the outset of the destining of the West, in Greece,
the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them.
They illuminated the presence of the gods and the dialogue of divine and human destinings.
And art was called simply technē.

It was a single, manifold revealing.
It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding-sway and the safekeeping of truth.

The arts were not derived from the artistic.
Artworks were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity.
What was art perhaps only for that brief but magnificent age?

Why did art bear the modest name technē?
Because it was a revealing that brought forth and made present,
and therefore belonged within poiēsis .

It was finally that revealing
which holds complete sway in all the fine arts,
in poetry, and in everything poetical that obtained poiēsis as its proper name.

Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology,
the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.

The closer we come to the danger,
the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine
and the more questioning we become.

For questioning is the piety of thought.

The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. Edited by
David Farell Krell. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977