References for Theme: Craftsmanship
- Helms, Eleanor; Dobson, John
- "Heidegger’s critique of technology and the contemporary return to artisan business activity" (2016)
(p.205) It is true that Heidegger—along with the founder-philosophers of most business-ethics theory— wrote very little directly about business. However, on the question of the ontology of the artisan, Heidegger is uniquely valuable. He provides an interpretation that differs fundamentally from those based on either an ethics of virtue, or a beauty-based aesthetic. We argue furthermore that Heidegger’s account of what it means to be a human person in a meaningful world can significantly broaden and enrich our conception of what it means to manage or play a significant role in a business organization.
- "Heidegger’s critique of technology and the contemporary return to artisan business activity" (2016)
- Hong, Jisu
- Martin, Tom
- Sennett, Richard
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.11) History has drawn fault lines dividing practice and theory, technique and expression, craftsman and artist, maker and user; modern society suffers from this historical inheritance. But the past life of craft and craftsmen also suggests ways of using tools, organizing bodily movements, thinking about materials that remain alternative, viable proposals about how to conduct life with skill.
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.13) The myth of Pandora has become now a secular symbol of self-destruction. To deal with this physical crisis we are obliged to change both the things we make and how we use them. We will need to learn different ways of making buildings and transport and to contrive rituals that accustom us to saving. We will need to become good craftsmen of the environment. The word sustainable is now used to convey this kind of craftsman-ship, and it carries a particular baggage. Sustainable suggests living more at one with nature, as Martin Heidegger imagined in his old age, establishing an equilibrium...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.173) In learning to make a Barolo goblet O’Connor passed through stages that resemble those we’ve explored among musicians and cooks. She had to ‘‘untape’’ habits she’d learnt in blowing simpler pieces in order to explore why she was failing, discovering, for instance, that the easy way that had become her habit meant that she scooped too little molten glass at the tip. She had to develop a better awareness of her body in relation to the viscous liquid, as though there were continuity between flesh and glass. This sounds poetic, though poetry was per-haps dispelled by the shouted comments of...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.175) We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labor, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it’s nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organized as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled craftsman has extended...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.179) Diderot found printers and typesetters inarticulate in explaining what they did; I found myself unable to put clearly into word show hand and eye coordinate. Language struggles with depicting physical action, and nowhere is this struggle more evident than in language that tells us what to do. Whoever has tried to assemble a do-it-yourself bookcase following written instructions knows the problem. As one’s temper rises, one realizes how great a gap can exist between instructive language and the body. In the workshop or laboratory, the spoken word seems more effective than written instructions. Whenever a procedure becomes difficult, you can...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.20) All craftsmanship is founded on skill developed to a high degree. By one commonly used measure, about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician. Various studies show that as skill progresses, it becomes more problem-attuned, like the lab technician worrying about procedure, whereas people with primitive levels of skill struggle more exclusively on getting things to work. At its higher reaches, technique is no longer a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply what they are doing once they do it well.
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.21) One of the earliest celebrations of the craftsman appears in a Homeric hymn to the master god of craftsmen, Hephaestus: -‘‘Sing clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for skill. With bright-eyed Athena he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world—men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts. But now that they have learned crafts through Hephaestus famous for his art they live a peaceful life in their own houses the whole year round.’’- The poem is contrary in spirit to the legend of Pandora, which took form at roughly the same time. Pandora presides over destruction, Hephaestus...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.23) A graver portent of the artisan’s darkening fortunes appears in the writings of Aristotle on the nature of craft. In the Metaphysics, he declares, ‘‘We consider that the architects in every profession are more estimable and know more and are wise than the artisans, because they know the reasons of the things which are done.’’ Aristotle abandons the old word for the craftsman, demioergos, and uses instead cheirotechnon, which means simply hand-worker.
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.24) All craftsmanship is quality-driven work; Plato formulated this aim as the arete, the standard of excellence, implicit in any act: the aspiration for quality will drive a craftsman to improve, to get better rather than get by. But in his own time Plato observed that although ‘‘craftsmen are all poets . . . they are not called poets, they have other names.’’ Plato worried that these different names and indeed different skills kept people in his day from understanding what they shared. In the five centuries between the hymn to Hephaestus and his own life-time, something seemed to have slipped....
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.241) When W. Edwards Deming first put forward in the 1960s his views on ‘‘total quality control’’ for organizations, the pursuit of quality seemed a frill to many profit-driven corporation executives. Deming put forward such nostrums as ‘‘The most important things cannot be measured’’ and ‘‘You can expect what you inspect’’; the Deming-Shewhart cycle for quality control is a four-step process that investigates and discusses before setting to work. Hard headed managers preferred the practical experiments on worker motivation by Elton Mayo and his colleagues at the Western Electric Company in the 1920s. What most stimulated workers to achieve higher productivity, Mayo...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.286) 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.∞ 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...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.294) Pride in one’s work lies at the heart of craftsmanship as the reward for skill and commitment. Thoughbrute 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...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.3) Fear of Pandora creates a rational climate of dread—but dread can be itself paralyzing, indeed malign. Technology itself can seem the enemy rather than simply a risk. Pandora’s environmental casket was too easily closed, for instance, in a speech given by Arendt’s own teacher, Martin Heidegger, near the end of his life, at Bremen in 1949. On this infamous occasion Heidegger ‘‘discounted the uniqueness oft he Holocaust in terms of the ‘history of man’s misdeeds’ by comparing ‘the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camp ’to mechanized agriculture.’’ In the historian Peter Kempt’s words, ‘‘Heidegger thought...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.53) The workshop is the craftsman’s home. Traditionally this was literally so. In the Middle Ages craftsmen slept, ate, and raised their children in the places where they worked. The workshop, as well as a home for families, was small in scale, each containing at most a few dozen people; the medieval workshop looked nothing like the modern factory containing hundreds or thousands of people. It’s easy to see the romantic appeal of the workshop-home to socialists who first confronted the industrial land-scape of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx, Charles Fourier, and Claude Saint-Simon all viewed the workshop as a space ...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.7) The human animal who is Animal laborans is capable of thinking; the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people; people working together certainly talk to one another about what they are doing. For Arendt, the mind engages once labor is done. Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.83) Age-old questions of deprivation and lack did not go away—the masses of Europeans still lived in a scarcity society—but machine production of tableware, clothing, bricks, and glass added tot his other dimension of worry: how to use these goods well, what abundance might be for, how not to be spoiled by possessions. On balance, the eighteenth century embraced the virtue of abundance, mechanically produced, and so should we. For consumers the ma-chine then promised, and by the twenty-first century has infinitely improved, the quality of our lives; more and better medicines, houses, food—an endless list. The material quality of life...
- The Craftsman (2008)
(p.9) ‘‘Craftsmanship’’ may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, how-ever, often stand in the way of the craftsman’s discipline and commitment: schools...
- The Craftsman (2008)
- Thoreau, Henry David
- Walden (2008)
(p.290) There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in...
- Varkøy, Øivind; Angelo, Elin; Rolle, Christian
- "Artist or Crafts(wo)man?" (2020)
(p.15) At the same time, however, we are aware that crafts(wo)men may consider good work to have value in itself. In this case, experiences have meaning that can be found in the process of handcrafting, exclusively for the crafts(wo)man him-/herself. No score of music, no novel, no painting can be said to have intrinsic value as products. The products of crafts(wo)men are means with ends outside themselves. Similarly, in Sennett’s definition of the crafts(wo)man (in Arendt’s terms, Homo faber) as a person who is dedicated to good work for its own sake, he speaks of the process of good work as...
- "Artist or Crafts(wo)man?" (2020)
(p.19) Further, the Aristotelian concept of techné, (‘art’ in English), which is often associated with technique, can be used to discuss the technical skills needed to play an instrument, as a musician needs to have technical knowledge. However, Heidegger argues that the term techné has nothing to do with what we think about today as technical skills and that it is to be interpreted as a way in which to have knowledge or to have seen. To see, according to Heidegger, is a perception of being just as it is and uncovering the deeper truth of being. Moreover, a central aspect...
- "Artist or Crafts(wo)man?" (2020)
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