Introduction: The Organic vs. The Mechanical
“From the standpoint of Taoist philosophy natural forms are not made but grown, and there is a radical difference between the organic and the mechanical.
Things which are made, such as houses, furniture, and machines, are an assemblage of parts put together, or shaped, like sculpture, from the outside inwards.
But things which grow shape themselves from within outwards—they are not assemblages of originally distinct parts; they partition themselves, elaborating their own structure from the whole to the parts, from the simple to the complex.”
Alan Watts, 1958
Alan Watts (1915–73), English philosopher and Zen monk, was a Buddhist in a very 1960s sense. He was a master of theology, a priest, and the ...
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