The Craftsman, page 30
If no one could deny that abilities vary at the extremes, the shape of the IQ bell curve raises a question about the middle. Why the blind spot to its potential? The person with an IQ score of 100 is not much different in ability than the person with a score of 115, but the 115 is much more likely to attract notice. There’s a devil’s answer to this question: inflating small differences in degree into large differences in kind legitimates the system of privilege. Correspondingly, equating the median with the mediocre legitimates neglect–one reason why Britain directs proportionately more resources into elite education than into technical colleges and why in America it proves so hard to find charitable contributions to vocational schools. But these venal abuses are not how our account should end.
The capacity to work well is shared fairly equally among human beings; it appears first in play, is elaborated in the capacities to localize, question, and open up problems at work. The Enlightenment hoped that learning to do good work would make human beings more capable of self-governance. No lack of intelligence among ordinary human beings threatens that political project. The craftsman’s heart may be a less solid rock. Rather than lack of mental resource, the craftsman is more likely to be threatened by emotional mismanagement of the drive to do good work; society can collude in that mismanagement or seek to rectify it. These are the reasons why I’ve argued in Part Three that motivation is a more important issue than talent in consummating craftsmanship.
Conclusion:
The Philosophical Workshop
Pragmatism
The Craft of Experience
This study has sought to rescue Animal laborans from the contempt with which Hannah Arendt treated him. The working human animal can be enriched by the skills and dignified by the spirit of craftsmanship. This view of the human condition is, in European culture, as old as the Homeric hymn to Hephaestus, it served Islam in the writings of Ibn Khaldun, and it guided Confucianism throughout several thousand years.1 In our own time, craftsmanship finds a philosophical home within pragmatism.
For more than a century, this movement has dedicated itself to making philosophical sense of concrete experience. The pragmatist movement began in the late nineteenth century as an American reaction to the ills of idealism in Europe, embodied by G. W. F. Hegel, in the eyes of the first pragmatist, C. S. Peirce. Peirce sought instead to find the keys to human cognition in everyday, small acts; the spirit of scientific experiment in the seventeenth century animated him, as did Hume’s empiricism in the eighteenth. From its origins, pragmatism addressed the quality of experience as well as sheer facts on the ground. Thus William James sought an alternative to the bitterness, irony, and tragic foreboding that seemed to him to infuse the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche; in James’s writings on religion, the philosopher attended to the small details of daily religious practices as well as to large questions of doctrine and found in these small details religion’s reward.
Pragmatism occurred in two waves. The first spanned the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. There then was a lapse of two generations until our own time, in which the movement has revived and spread back to Europe. Its proponents now include Hans Joas in Germany, a school of young pragmatists in Denmark, and the Americans Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and myself. Two world wars and the arc of the Soviet empire checked but did not extinguish the hope embodied in pragmatism; its animating impulse remains to engage with ordinary, plural, constructive human activities.2
The pragmatist in the first wave who addressed directly the condition of Animal laborans was John Dewey, an educator unfairly blamed for the sins of touchy-feely progressive education, a student of biology who disputed the aggressive, competitive views of Social Darwinism, and above all, a socialist who set himself resolutely against doctrinaire Marxism. Dewey certainly would have subscribed to Hannah Arendt’s critique of Marxism; the false hopes Marx held out to humanity can be measured, in Arendt’s words, by “the abundance or scarcity of the goods to be fed into the life process.”3 Against this quantitative measure, Dewey argued for a socialism based on improving the quality of people’s experience at work rather than advocating, as did Arendt, a politics that transcends labor itself.
Many of craftsmanship’s themes appear in Dewey’s writings in a more abstract form: the intimate relations between problem solving and problem finding, technique and expression, play and work. Dewey the socialist best assembled these connections in his book Democracy and Education: “Both work and play are equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is psychologically simply an activity which consciously includes regard for consequences as part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the activity, as an end to which activity is merely a means. Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art.”4 Dewey was a socialist in just the way John Ruskin and William Morris were: all three urged workers to assess the quality of their work in terms of shared experiment, collective trial and error. Good craftsmanship implies socialism. The workings of a modern Japanese auto plant or a Linux chat room might have expanded their sympathy for collaboration of other sorts, but still, all three disputed the pursuit of quality simply as a means to profit.
Philosophically, pragmatism has argued that to work well people need freedom from means-ends relationships. Underlying this philosophical conviction is a concept that, I think, unifies all of pragmatism. This is experience, a fuzzier word in English than in German, which divides it in two, Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The first names an event or relationship that makes an emotional inner impress, the second an event, action, or relationship that turns one outward and requires skill rather than sensitivity. Pragmatist thought has insisted that these two meanings should not be divided. If you remain in the domain of Erfahrung alone, William James believed, you may be trapped by means-and-ends thinking and acting; you may succumb to the vice of instrumentalism. You need constantly the inner monitor of Erlebnis, of “how it feels.”
But craftwork, as presented in this book, emphasizes the realm of Erfahrung. Craftwork focuses on objects in themselves and on impersonal practices; craftwork depends on curiosity, it tempers obsession; craftwork turns the craftsman outward. Within the philosophical workshop of pragmatism, I want to argue for this stress more largely: the value of experience understood as a craft.
The craft of experience traces, as an idea, back to Madame d’Épinay’s writings in the eighteenth century on parenting. She argued against the self-sufficiency of instinctive love, and again, to nurture a child well, she maintained that the parent must restrain the impulse to command autocratically. Focusing on the child will turn the parent outward. In place of blind love or command, there need to be objective, rational, guiding standards of when to go to sleep, what to eat, and where to play, or the child will be rudderless; implementing such standards requires skill that any parent develops only through practice. Outward-turned, skilled, hewing to objective standards, her view of parenting as a craft has indeed become the modern common sense of parenting. Its stress falls more on Erfahrung than on Erlebnis.
Taken just as a concept, what does the “craft of experience” imply? We would focus on form and procedure–that is, on techniques of experience. These could guide us even in encounters that happen only once by furnishing an envelope of tacit knowledge for our actions. We would want to shape the impress people and events have made on us so that these impressions are intelligible to others who do not know the same people we know or lived through the same events. As appeared in the discussion of expertise, we would try to make the particular knowledge we possess transparent in order that others can understand and respond to it. The idea of experience as a craft contests the sort of subjectivity that dwells in the sheer process of feeling. Of course this is a matter of weights; impressions are the raw materials of experience, but only that–raw materials.
The argument I’ve presented in this book is that the craft of making physical things provides insight into the techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others. Both the difficulties and the possibilities of making things well apply to making human relationships. Material challenges like working with resistance or managing ambiguity are instructive in understanding the resistances people harbor to one another or the uncertain boundaries between people. I’ve stressed the positive, open role routine and practicing play in the work of crafting physical things; so too do people need to practice their relations with one another, learn the skills of anticipation and revision in order to improve these relations.
I recognize that the reader may balk at thinking of experience in terms of technique. But who we are arises directly from what our bodies can do. Social consequences are built into the structure and the functioning of the human body, as in the workings of the human hand. I argue no more and no less than that the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations. And if debatable, this viewpoint is not uniquely mine. One hallmark of the pragmatist movement has been to suppose a continuum between the organic and the social. Whereas some sociobiologists have argued that genetics dictates behavior, pragmatists like Hans Joas maintain that the body’s own richness furnishes the materials for a wide variety of creative action. Craftsmanship shows the continuum between the organic and the social put in action.
An eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible. This is because the word carries too much Romantic baggage–the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius. I have sought to eliminate some of the mystery by showing how intuitive leaps happen, in the reflections people make on the actions of their own hands or in the use of tools. I have sought to draw craft and art together, because all techniques contain expressive implications. This is true of making a pot; it is also and equally true of raising a child.
I recognize also that the least developed side of my argument concerns politics–Arendt’s domain, the domain of “statecraft.” Modern pragmatism could be said to take on faith Jefferson’s belief that learning to work well is the foundation of citizenship. Perhaps this Enlightenment faith remains compelling because it bridges the social and political realms, whereas Arendt, drawing on a long tradition of political thought stretching back to Machiavelli, believed that statecraft was a self-standing domain of expertise. The connection between work and citizenship may imply socialism, but not necessarily democracy; as appeared in the medieval guild, whose workshops served Ruskin, Morris, and Dewey as models, hierarchy at work could morph seamlessly as hierarchy in the state. But there are craft reasons to credit pragmatism’s faith in democracy; these lie in the capacities on which human beings draw to develop skills: the universality of play, the basic capabilities to specify, question, and open up. These are widely diffused among human beings rather than restricted to an elite.
Self-rule supposes the capacity of citizens to work collectively on objective problems, to suspect quick solutions; missing in Dewey’s democratic faith is, however, an understanding of the disabling filter of mass media. High-concept news snippets or blogs filled with personal trivia do not develop communication of a more skilled sort. Still, pragmatism insists that the remedy to these ills must lie in the experience, on the ground, of citizen participation, participation that stresses the virtues of practice with its repetitions and slow revisions.5 Arendt’s reproach to democracy is that it demands too much of ordinary human beings; it might be better said of modern democracy that it demands too little. Its institutions and tools of communication do not draw on and develop the competences that most people can evince in work. Belief in those skills is the homage pragmatism pays to the craft of experience.
Culture
Pandora and Hephaestus
It is sometimes said that pragmatism makes a shrine out of experience, but craft experience cannot be blindly worshipped. From their origins in Western history, technical labors have aroused ambivalence, represented by the two deities Hephaestus and Pandora. The contrast in classical mythology between their personae helps make sense of the cultural value accorded to the craftsman.
Most of the eighteenth chapter of Homer’s Iliad is devoted to praises of Hephaestus, the builder of all the houses on Mount Olympus. Here we read that he is also a coppersmith, a jeweler, the inventor of chariots.6 But Hephaestus is also lame–he has a clubfoot–and in ancient Greek culture physical deformity was a deep source of shame: kalôs kagathos (beautiful in mind and body) contrasted to aischrôs, the single word denoting both ugly and shameful.7 This god is flawed.
There is something socially consequent about Hephaestus’s clubfoot. The clubfoot symbolizes the craftsman’s social value. Hephaestus makes jewelry from copper, an ordinary material; his chariots are fashioned from the bones of dead birds. Homer embraces Hephaestus in the midst of a story about heroes and heroic violence; the domestic virtues of home and hearth are beneath these heroes’ contempt. The misshapen figure of Hephaestus is meant to suggest that material domestic civilization will never satisfy the desire for glory; that is his defect.
By contrast, Hesiod described Pandora as “the beautiful evil…. Wonder gripped the immortal gods and the mortal human beings when they saw the steep deception, entrancing for human beings.” Pandora could, like Eve, be taken as the quintessential sexual temptress, but the fullness of the myth suggests another reading. The name Pandora itself means “all gifts”; the vessel containing her gifts is lodged within the home she shares with Epimetheus; when it is opened, only the most immaterial gift, that of hope, does not fly out to become a destructive force. The physical tools, the elixirs and medications within, do the damage; material goods compose the “beautiful evil.”8
Pandora’s “beautiful evil” seems to stand in stark contrast to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil,” which Arendt worked out in studying Adolf Eichmann and other engineers of the Nazi concentration camps. The banality of evil applies to the craftsman just trying to get the job done as well as possible. Further research on Eichmann and other Holocaust engineers has, however, leaned more to the presence of Pandora; these were destroyers animated both by hatred of Jews and by the seductions of Götterdämmerung, the beauty of destruction.9 Pandora’s myth installed itself in Greek culture as a story in which only at the urging of others did she open the casket. The danger lay in their physical craving, their curiosity and desire for the things within. She satisfied their desire, but in opening the lid, she transformed the sweet perfumes into poisonous vapors, the gold swords cut their hands, and the soft cloths suffocated those who held them.
These mythological personae suggest the ambivalence about material culture that marked out our civilization from its origins. Western civilization has not chosen between these personae so much as fused them into ambivalence about man-made physical experience. Both Hephaestus and Pandora are artificers. Each of these artificers contains a contrary: a virtuous god who makes worthwhile everyday things yet whose person is ugly and inglorious; a goddess whose things are as beautiful, as desirable, as her body, and as malign. The fusion of these two personae was why Plato could celebrate the virtue of archaic, domesticating technologies yet assert the superior beauty of the immaterial soul; why early Christians could see virtue in acts of carpentering, sewing, or gardening yet scorn the love of material things themselves; why the Enlightenment at once embraced and feared the perfection of machines; why Wittgenstein could call his desire to realize a beautiful, perfect building a sickness. The man-made material object is not a neutral fact; it is a source of unease because it is man-made.
Such ambivalence about the man-made has shaped the fortunes of the craftsman. History has conducted something like a set of experiments in formulating the craftsman’s images as drudge, slave, worthy Christian, avatar of Enlightenment, doomed relic of the preindustrial past. This story has a spine. The craftsman has been able to call to his or her aid a capacity and a dignity ingrained in the human body: signifying acts as simple as human grip and prehension, as complex as the lessons of resistance and ambiguity that give to human tools and physical constructs an intelligible form. The unity of the craftsman’s mind and body can be found in the expressive language that guides physical action. Physical acts of repetition and practice enable this Animal laborans to develop skill from within and to reconfigure the material world through a slow process of metamorphosis. The origin of all these powers is as simple, as elemental, as physical as playing games with toys.
The spine of the story recounted in these pages is thus, in a way, a familiar one: nature versus culture, the naturalness of what craftsmen do–no matter how skilled they become–set against Western culture’s long-standing ambivalence about man-made things. Though no philosopher, Isaac Ware wanted to make sense of brick in this way. The contrast between honest brick and artificial stucco, though both are fabricated materials, became contrasting emblems of nature and culture, the first according with a skill developed under modest domestic circumstances, the second a material developed at the behest of social climbers, and yet seductive and beautiful to Ware himself.
