Craftsmanship

You don't have to know anything about the character Ron Swanson from the TV series Parks and Recreation to appreciate the message of this video (Its only purpose is as a prompt to my thoughts.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0YAhykMMxc
  

Mathew Crawford published a book not long ago entitled "Shop Class as Soul Craft."   Though I have not read the book, I did read his essay with the same title that later inspired the book.  A few of his comments helped me bridge the gap between my vocation and intellectual wanderings.  Academics and craftsman do not often mix well, they stay in their respective theory vs practice sides of the spectrum.  For instance, most college professors in the humanities know nothing about basic mechanics; nor do mechanics know anything of Dante's Inferno.  I do not believe this to be a very ancient problem.  With the specialization of tasks brought about by the industrial revolution, the new norm has been to do one thing only, but be the best at it.  Though we have benefited materially from the assembly line mentality, I do not believe it has been all credit with no debit.  But while I equally loath mechanics lack of interest in the liberal arts, I will argue here for academia's need to take part is some form of craftsmanship whether it be planting a garden or a DIY project on the house.   

Quoting Crawford:

"As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday. Even if not, one feels responsible to one’s better self. Or rather, to the thing itself — craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake. If the primary satisfaction is intrinsic and private in this way, there is nonetheless a sort of self-disclosing that takes place. As Alexandre Kojève writes:

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away."

His reflection on craftsmanship makes perfect sense since it involves our working with a nature that cannot be bended to our liking without consequences. We inevitably must conform to it; Ideally, we learn to work with it. There is no 'explaining away' in craftsmanship, like Crawford says,"the lights are on" or they are not.

One more:

"Hannah Arendt says. 'The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.'
Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently argued. 'The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. The craftsman is then more possessive, more tied to what is present, the dead incarnation of past labor."

Though so much more could be extrapolated from theses passages, I simply want the theological minds in the crowd that have never dared physical craftsmanship of any kind reflect that our savior,  the one who redeemed our humanity was himself a craftsman...a carpenter.