practice needs craft (1951)

Everything here is the path of a responding that examines as it listens. Any path always risks going astray, leading astray. To follow such paths takes practice in going. Practice needs craft. Stay on the path, in genuine need, and learn the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring.

– Martin Heidegger (1951)

a craft of thinking (2000)

Most of this knowledge cannot even be set down in words; it must be learned by practicing, over and over again. Monastic education is best understood, I think, on this apprenticeship model, more like masonry or carpentry than anything in the modern academy. It is an apprenticeship to a craft which is also a way of life. It is "practice" both in the sense of being "preparation" for a perfect craft mastery which can never be fully achieved, and in the sense of "working in a particular way." . . .  Meditation is a craft of thinking. People use it to make things, such as interpretations and ideas, as well as buildings and prayers. . . . the basic craft involved in making thoughts, including thoughts about the significance of texts, has been treated as though it were in itself unproblematical, even straightforward. It is neither. In the idiom of monasticism, people do not "have" ideas, they "make" them. The work (and I include both process and product in my use of this word) is no better than the skillful hand, or in this case the mind, of its user. . . . Toolmaking is an essential part of the orthopraxis of the craft.


– Mary Carruthers (2000)

mental capacity, art, science (1903)

A very interesting knowledge-word is English craft ("skill, ability, trade") which in Middle English signified "might, power, ability, art, craft, deceit" – and the corresponding M. H. G. adjective crafi, "skillful, sly," our crafty, "cunning, sly." The cognate Modern High German word Kraft signifies, like Dutch Kracht and Danish kraft, "power, strength, force of an army, multitude, abundance" and the Anglo-Saxon craeft, besides these, meant also "mental capacity, art, science." The final etymology of craft is doubtful, but Skeat suggests kinship with cramp, and derivation from the Teutonic krap, "to draw forcibly together." If this etymology be true, it is curious that the verb "to cram" is cognate. Craft is evidently a word which has undergone, as Kluge points out, specialisation within the mental sphere, the English crafty being the latest development.

– Alexander F. Chamberlin (1903)

in my craft or sullen art (1946)

In my craft or sullen art  
Exercised in the still night  
When only the moon rages  
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light  
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms  
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages  
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart  
From the raging moon I write  
On these spindrift pages  
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms  
But for the lovers, their arms  
Round the griefs of the ages,  
Who pay no praise or wages  
Nor heed my craft or art.

– Dylan Thomas (1946)

the instrument of labour (1867)

Marx had good reason to stress the great fluidity of the connection between segments in artisanal labour. This connection appears to the factory worker on an assembly line in a detached, reified form. Independently of the worker's volition, the object being worked upon, comes within his range of action. And it moves away from him just as arbitrarily. "Every kind of capitalist production," writes Marx, "has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instrument of labour, but the instrument of labour that employs the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this reversal for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. In working with machines workers learn to coordinate their own movement to the uniform, unceasing motion of an automaton."

– Walter Benjamin, citing Karl Marx (1867)

the atmosphere of craftsmanship (1936)

Ain Sakhri lovers figurine (British Museum)

The intellectual picture of the atmosphere of craftsmanship from which the storyteller comes has perhaps never been sketched in such a significant way as by Paul Valéry: “This patient process of Nature was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of thin transparent layers are placed one on top of the other – all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated. . . . It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort.”

– Paul Valéry, cited by Walter Benjamin (1936)

craft of the mind (1989)

In an important and general sense, any art or technique may be said to be liberating. . . . any art liberates certain characteristics of the material it works on . . . the artisan by continued practice of his art acquires skill or, as it might be said, he liberates his own powers to make and apply his knowledge . . . Finally, it may be said that art is self-liberating . . . The liberal arts are not the special prerogative of the humanities nor of medieval professors, and pursuit of them does not turn a scientist into a literary man, nor a philosopher into a pedant. They may be understood – and properly understand, I should like to maintain – as arts, ways of making things, ways of producing a product. Among university people, instructors as well as students, I do not find a secure grasp upon the liberal arts in this sense. Usually courses in them are regarding as ways of acknowledging a subject matter that is not quite worth prolonged study or of touching ceremonially upon an area honored by a probably outworn tradition. They are not ways of actively producing something, but are rather a passive viewing which convention recommends from old habit. Nevertheless, the ancient conviction has it that they are arts in the proper sense, ways of making, only in their instance ways of making an internal, intellectual, and moral, product. I believe this tradition to be correct, and that we acquiesce in its loss to our peril. The liberal arts compose the craft of the mind and are practiced successfully whenever anyone succeeds in an intellectual or linguistic endeavor, whether in science, technology, the humanities, or in a fine art. . . . the arts of using language . . . are the arts of achieving such material, operative, and productive liberation as the human mind is capable. They define the craft of the mind in whatever context that mind happens to labor, whether scientific, technological, literary, or philosophic. Lumping the liberal arts vaguely together with the humanities and opposing them to the sciences is productive only of confusion and ultimately of disaster, for thus the primary ground of the unity of the mind's operation is concealed. 

– E. G. Ballard (1989)

elevate your craft (2011)

Once you decide on your occupation . . . you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That's the secret of success. . . . I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I'll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.

– Jiro Ono

Always look ahead and above yourself. Always try to improve on yourself. Always strive to elevate your craft. That's what he taught me.

– Yoshikazu Onu

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

network of learning (1977)

In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students – and adults – become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching. . . . the educational system so radically decentralized becomes congruent with the urban structure itself. People of all walks of life come forth, and offer a class in the things they know and love . . . Living and learning are the same. . . 

Therefore:

Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups traveling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city's "curriculum"; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their "school" . . . Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network. 
 
Above all, encourage the formation of seminars and workshops in people's homes . . .


– Christopher Alexander (1977)

education is an end in itself (1889)

[Education] has lost sight of the most important thing: the end as well as the means to the end. That schooling, education is an end in itself . . . that to this end educators are needed – and not grammar-school teachers or university scholars – people have forgotten this . . . What is needed is educators who have educated themselves: superior, noble minds, proven at every moment, proved by their words and silences, mature cultures grown sweet – not the learned louts whom grammar school and university set up to the youth of today as 'higher nurse-maids.' Apart from the rarest of exceptions, educators – the foremost precondition for education – are lacking . . . schools actually achieve a brutal kind of training aimed at losing as little time as possible in making a multitude of young men usable, exploitable for public service. . . . our 'high' schools are without exception geared to the most ambiguous mediocrity, with teachers, teaching plans, teaching objectives.

– Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)

difficulty and labor (1601)

But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love, of the lie itself.

– Francis Bacon (1601)