Ponder modern architectural design. It uses a limited vocabulary to express itself: sharp corners; concrete; steel; glass; a color palette limited to gray, brown, white and black. With these ingredients, you know you’ll get something like a box with windows resembling a spreadsheet or a crystal-like monstrosity that destroys a neighborhood before you can say ‘modernism.’
Now, I embrace forms of minimalism in things like coding, writing and even design. But at some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, am I being minimalist because it’s called for or because I just don’t know any better? Think again of the modern architect, could he design a classic arched roman-style building? I think not. The best you’ll get is a kind of stripped-down vector-representation of a raster image. In the spirit of minimalism, he has been schooled to shed as many tools and traditions as possible. The symbolic language of historic architecture has been lost. What’s left is but a limitation, in essence an incompetence or illiteracy, informed and sanctioned by a cult of minimalism.
To get to the core issue, we first need to differentiate between objects that are used as tools and objects that are not. Arguably, tools, to a degree, benefit from a minimalist design. Think along the lines of the Unix philosophy: a tool does one thing only, and does it well. This modular design enables the versatility and portability that is the Unix operating system (and its open source mimics).
But there is also something deeper and more entrenched going on. Sometime around the Industrial Revolution, our culture has emphasized the tooling impulse of our species to an absurd degree and increasingly thought of nature merely as something to be exploited by our tools, for our material benefit. This can be called the modern mindset.
Computing is perhaps the ultimate application of the modern mindset. In that context, minimalism: good. And as a self-contained endeavor, that’s all well and proper. But computing is just a tool, and what I’m trying to get at is that there are things in life apart from tools. What we seem to have forgotten is that those other things actually are the raison d’être of the tools themselves.
What those other things – the not-tools – are is hard to define. It’s the ineffable, esoteric stuff of all religions. It’s love, beauty, friendship, worship, meaning. It’s art. In the modern context, it’s what philosophy – as a tool! – tries to pin down, extract and use. But that kind of philosophy is just another application of the same mindset; in its most absurd form, it becomes a self-perpetuating system of people (read: machines) whose sole purpose is to make ever more efficient tools that enable them to keep making tools forever.
The point is this: when an object is viewed as a tool, its sole purpose becomes its function. Minimalism is a way to optimize for function. In the modern mindset, everything is but a tool. The architecture example is just one of many, but it is a very clear one: the place we call our home, which we formerly embellished with ornamentation and a kind of organic, non-minimalist design that expressed the raw beauty and meaning of life, has been replaced by the functional boxes of modernity, whose purpose is to contain us and nothing else. Our buildings are no longer homes or monuments to our existence; they are tools. What follows is inevitably a minimalist design: sharp corners, glass and concrete boxes. Tradition is shunned. Ornamentation and beauty becomes an afterthought or even a nuisance. The rich meaning and symbolism of the past is utterly lost. The self-alienation of man from his environment is complete.
Thus, minimalism is an anti-tradition. It preserves nothing, as it is fundamentally destructive to past knowledge and practices. As such, it ultimately strips life of its meaning and tries to recreate it in its own image: as a tool.
It’s a philosophy for making a hammer, not for using it.