ABSTRACT
Nanotechnology is an aesthetic pursuit in a fundamentally important way, as human comprehension of and intervention at the molecular scale requires not just technologies of atomic manipulation, but also technologies that can mediate between the molecular scale and the human senses, primarily human vision. In other words, the machines used in nanotechnology must provide the invisible with an illusion of visibility, creating a 'realistic' representation of something that has no 'real' appearance. The neo-Platonic tradition of Western aesthetics depicts art as mediating between the physical and particular, and the immaterial and universal. For Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, aesthetics was the study of how the beauty of art could communicate Truth through the senses. According to Hegel, art was 'the first middle term of reconciliation between pure thought and what is external, sensuous, and transitory, between nature with its finite actuality and the infinite freedom of the reason that comprehends'.
