The Craftsman, page 31
One way out of this impasse might indeed be to ignore Hephaestus’s clubfoot, as it were, and value him just for what he does; to get closer to this natural realm, in all its modesty, the archaic arcadia in which humankind first used tools and skills for the common good. This was John Ruskin’s impulse, though his version of arcadia was located in the guilds of the medieval city. But a way of life that accords with the craftsman’s natural capacities still does not account for Pandora. The craftsman’s skills, if natural, are never innocent.
Ethics
Pride in One’s Work
I’ve left for the very end of this book the subject that the reader may well think should have come first. Pride in one’s work lies at the heart of craftsmanship as the reward for skill and commitment. Though brute pride figures as a sin in both Judaism and Christianity by putting self in place of God, pride in one’s work might seem to remove this sin, since the work has an independent existence. In Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography, obnoxious boasts about his sexual prowess are irrelevant to the gold work. The work transcends the maker.
Craftsmen take pride most in skills that mature. This is why simple imitation is not a sustaining satisfaction; the skill has to evolve. The slowness of craft time serves as a source of satisfaction; practice beds in, making the skill one’s own. Slow craft time also enables the work of reflection and imagination–which the push for quick results cannot. Mature means long; one takes lasting ownership of the skill.
But pride in work also poses its own large ethical problem, exemplified, as we saw at the beginning of this study, by the creators of the atom bomb. They had taken pride in making something that, after the work was done, caused many of these makers great distress. The seductions of the work had, Pandora-fashion, led them to do harm. Those scientists who held to an absolute pride in the work itself, like Edward Teller, the organizer of the hydrogen bombs that followed on from the Los Alamos project, tended to deny Pandora. At the other end of the spectrum were the signers of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, a document that launched the Pugwash Conferences movement for the control of nuclear weapons. The manifesto states in part, “The men who know most are the most gloomy.”10
Pragmatism has no great solution to the ethical problem posed by pride in one’s work, but it does have a partial corrective. This is to emphasize the connection between means and ends. In the course of fabrication the bomb maker might have asked, What is the minimum strength of the bomb we should make?–indeed a question asked by scientists like Joseph Rotblat, accused by many of his colleagues of being disruptive or even disloyal. Pragmatism wants to emphasize the value of asking ethical questions during the work process; it contests after-the-fact ethics, ethical enquiry beginning only after facts on the ground are fixed.
It is for this reason that I have emphasized, throughout this book, stages and sequences of the work process, indicating when the craftsman can pause in the work and reflect on what he or she is doing. These pauses need not diminish pride in the work; instead, because the person is judging while doing, the result can be more ethically satisfying. I recognize that this emphasis on staged reflection must be incomplete, because it’s often not possible to reckon ethical or, indeed, material consequences. No one could have foreseen in the sixteenth century, for instance, that refining the metal composites used in knives would eventually produce less painful forms of surgery than that practiced with the barber’s razor. Still, this effort to look forward is the ethical way to take pride in one’s work. Understanding the inner sequence of development in practicing a craft, the phases of becoming a better craftsman, can counter Hannah Arendt’s conviction that Animal laborans is blind. Ours would remain an innocent philosophical school, however, if pragmatism did not recognize that the denouement of this narrative is often marked by bitterness and regret.
The clubfooted Hephaestus, proud of his work if not of himself, is the most dignified person we can become.
Notes
Prologue
1. Gaby Wood, Living Dolls (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), xix.
2. See Marina Warner, “The Making of Pandora,” in Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Vintage, 1996), 214–219.
3. This is testimony Oppenheimer gave to a government committee in 1954, reprinted in Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (London: Duckworth, 2004), 121–122.
4. Two illuminating if depressing studies are Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (London: Penguin, 2007).
5. Martin Rees, Our Final Century? Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? (London: Random House, 2003).
6. Heidegger quoted in Daniel Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 89. See also Catherine Zuckert, “Martin Heidegger: His Philosophy and His Politics,” Political Theory, February 1990, 71, and Peter Kempt, “Heidegger’s Greatness and His Blindness,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, April 1989, 121.
7. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 149.
8. See Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
9. Quoted by Amartya Sen in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London: Penguin, 2005), 5.
10. Quoted in Bernstein, Oppenheimer, 89.
11. David Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (New York: Pi, 2005), 343.
12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958], 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 176.
13. See ibid., 9, or again, 246.
14. Raymond Williams, “Culture,” in Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1983), 87–93.
15. See Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1964).
16. John Maynard Smith, The Theory of Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 311.
CHAPTER 1. The Troubled Craftsman
1. “‘Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus,” in H. G. Evelyn-White, trans., Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Loeb Classical Library, 1914), 447.
2. Indra Kagis McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 119. My thanks to McEwen for connecting weaving, boat making, and urban design in ancient Greece.
3. See ibid., 72–73, for a full list.
4. For a summary of the few literary descriptions of potters, see W. Miller, Daedalus and Thespis: The Contributions of the Ancient Dramatic Poets to Our Knowledge of the Arts and Crafts of Greece, 3 vols. in 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1929–1932), 3:690–693.
5. Aristotle Metaphysics 981a30–b2. The English translation appears in Hugh Tredennick, ed., The Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Loeb Classical Library, 1933).
6. Again, my thanks to Indra Kagis McEwen for pointing this out.
7. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 42–43.
8. Plato Symposium 205b–c.
9. For a good general description, see Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linus and the Open Source Revolution (New York: Perseus, 2002).
10. The standards used by the Open Source Initiative can be found on http://opensource.org/docs/def–print.php.
11. See Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Cambridge, Mass.: O’Reilly Linux, 1999).
12. Two views of the social problem involved are Eric Hippel and Georg von Krogh, “Open Source Software and the ‘Private Collective’ Innovational Model,” Organization Science 14 (2003), 209–233, and Sharma Srinarayan et al., “A Framework for Creating Hybrid-Open Source Software Communities,” Information Systems Journal 12 (2002), 7–25.
13. See André Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques, vol. 2 (Paris: AlbinMichel, 1945), 606–624.
14. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 220–223.
15. Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 301.
16. Ibid., 324.
17. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), 324.
18. Darren Thiel, “Builders: The Social Organisation of a Construction Site” (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2005).
19. Martin Fackler, “Japanese Fret That Quality Is in Decline,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 2006, A1, C4.
20. Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore, Innovation, the Missing Dimension (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 98.
21. Ibid., 104.
22. The three books in this study are: Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); and Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).
23. See Christopher Jencks, Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic Success in America (New York: Wiley, 1979); Gary Burtless and Christopher Jencks, “American Inequality and Its Consequences,” discussion paper (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, March 2003); and Alan Blinder, “Outsourcing: Bigger Than You Thought,” American Prospect, November 2006, 44–46.
24. For this debate, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), and Sennett, Corrosion of Character.
25. For a good general study, see Wayne Carlson, A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation (Ohio State University, 2003), available at http://accad.osu.edu/waynec/history/lessons.html.
26. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 64, 281n20.
27. Quoted in Edward Robbins, Why Architects Draw (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 126.
28. Ibid.
29. Quoted in Sherry Turkle, “Seeing through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation (Advantages and Disadvantages of Computer Simulation),” American Prospect, March–April 1997, 81.
30. Elliot Felix, “Drawing Digitally,” presentation at Urban Design Seminar, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 4 October 2005.
31. Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11–21. See also Peter Hall, Great Planning Disasters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).
32. For an excellent journalistic account of how piecework defines medical practice, see Atul Gawande, “Piecework,” New Yorker, Apr. 4, 2005, 44–53.
33. The most concise statement of this view is Julian Legrand, The Provision of Health Care: Is the Public Sector Ethically Superior to the Private Sector? (London: LSE Books, 2001).
34. A good guide to views on practice appeared in the debate on the privatization of nursing at the 2006 conference of the Royal Council of Nursing. This material can be found on their Web site at http://www.rcn.org.uk/news/congress/2006/5.php.
35. The complete text of the speech can most easily be found online: http://bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/content/ARM2006JJohnson.
CHAPTER 2. The Workshop
1. Quoted, in English, in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 143.
2. Augustine, Sermons. The Standard Edition authorized by the Vatican uses a common system of reference in all languages. This key passage occurs in 67,2.
3. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 152–153.
4. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 316ff.
5. Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 127.
6. Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 201.
7. Edward Lucie-Smith, The Story of Craft (New York: Van Nostrand, 1984), 115.
8. See J. F. Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, 1540–1620 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1976).
9. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, abridged version, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. and abridged N. J. Dawood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 285–289.
10. Bronislaw Geremek, Le salariat dans l’artisinat parisien aux XIIIe–XVe siè-cles: Étude sur la main d’oeuvre au moyen âge (Paris: Mouton, 1968), 42.
11. Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town,” Past and Present 154 (February 1997), 9.
12. See Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths.
13. See Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Adviser to Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Holt, 2001), 251.
14. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin, 1991), 321.
15. S. R. Epstein, “Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998), 691.
16. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).
17. For an interesting discussion of this, see Rosser, “Crafts, Guilds, and Negotiation of Work,” 16–17.
18. Ibid., 17.
19. See Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn; The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), 91–95, 134–135; or again, Lucie-Smith, Story of Craft, 149.
20. See Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 139–142.
21. Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1998), xix. The translator, like all scholars of Cellini, owes much to the textual labors of Paolo Rossi. Rossi struggled with establishing the text of this sonnet, and even in clear copy the Italian is not straightforward in sense. I have taken the liberty of inserting “only” before “one” in the lines I have quoted because this is what the boast seems meant to imply; remove my insertion, and it remains an astounding statement.
22. T. E. Heslop, “Hierarchies and Medieval Art,” in Peter Dormer, ed., The Culture of Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 59.
23. See John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 279–281.
24. The following account is indebted to the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, which has reconstructed the sequence of building in “The Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Salisbury” from 1220 to 1900. I thank Robert Scott for making this map available.
25. Augustine quoted in Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2.
26. Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1998), xiv–xv.
27. See Elizabeth Wilson, Mstislav Rostropovich: The Legend of Class 19 (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), chaps. 11, 12.
28. See Toby Faber, Stradivarius (London: Macmillan, 2004), 50–66. Though Faber is both accurate and evocative, the reader in search of a more technical account should consult what is still the greatest of all Stradivarius studies: William H. Hill, Arthur F. Hill, and Alfred Ebsworth, Antonio Stradivari [1902] (New York: Dover, 1963). Another biographical source is Charles Beare and Bruce Carlson, Antonio Stradivari: The Cremona Exhibition of 1987 (London: J. and A. Beare, 1993).
29. See Faber, Stradivarius, 59.
30. Duane Rosengard and Carlo Chiesa, “Guarneri del Gesù: A Brief History,” in Metropolitan Museum catalogue for the exhibition, The Violin Masterpieces of Guarneri del Gesù (London: Peter Biddulph, 1994), 15.
31. Almost every issue of the luthiers’ professional journal, The Strad, is occupied with these problems. A particularly good guide to the varnishing issues in particular remains L. M. Condax, Final Summary Report of the Violin Varnish Research Project (Pittsburgh: n.p., 1970).
32. John Donne, Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John Hayward (London: Nonesuch, 1929), 365.
33. Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (New York: Free Press, 1965).
34. Etienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude [1552–53], trans. Harry Kurz (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1975), 42.
CHAPTER 3. Machines
1. See Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1988).
2. Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000).
3. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 266.
4. Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism [1913], trans. W. R. Dittmar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), esp. 58–112.
5. See Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (Princeton, N.J.: Architectural Press, 1980).
6. These replicants have speaking roles in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason and Dixon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). Gaby Wood provides more precise and purely historical information: see Wood, Living Dolls (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 21–24.
7. Wood, Living Dolls, 38.
8. Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784), 481. I am indebted to James Schmidt for this English translation, in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58.
