how to accomplish one’s purposes (2014)

It is because wisdom arises from activity in the world that Athena combined wisdom not only with war

but also with the arts, industry, and even justice: to manufacture things suitable for a goddess took a combination of superb skill and craft, allowing insight into the weighing of actions that made for a balanced view of human activity. The English word craft implies not only ability with hands but understanding of how to accomplish one’s purposes, as in craftiness. The Greek equivalent is “metis” (Μῆτις), meaning something like the knowledge that comes from doing things with purpose, or in a somewhat archaic English, “cunning.”

— Making and Knowing (2014)

a finally perfected work (1990)

The standards of achievement within any craft are justified historically. They have emerged from the criticism of their predecessors and they are justified because and insofar as they have remedied the defects and transcended the limitations of those predecessors as guides to excellent achievement within that particular craft. Every craft is informed by some conception of a finally perfected work which serves as the shared telos of that craft. And what are actually produced as the best judgments or actions or objects so far are judged so because they stand in some determinate relationship to that telos, which furnishes them with their final cause. So it is within forms of intellectual enquiry, whether theoretical or practical, which issue at any particular stage in their history in types of judgment and activity which are rationally justified as the best so far, in the light of those formulations of the relevant standards of achievement which are rationally justified as the best so far. And this is no less true when the telos of such an enquiry is a conception of a perfected science or hierarchy of such sciences, in which theoretical or practical truths are deductively ordered by derivation from first principles. Those successive partial and imperfect versions of the science or sciences, which are elaborated at different stages in the history of the craft, provide frameworks within which claimants to truth succeed to fail by finding or failing to find a place in those deductive schemes. But the overall schemes themselves are justified by their ability to do better than any rival competitor so far, both in organizing the experience of those who have up to this point made the craft what it is and in supplying correction and improvement where some need for these has been identified.


– Alasdair MacIntyre, 1990

between usefulness and beauty (1973)

Octavio Paz by Arturo Espinosa

In craftsmanship there is a continuous movement back and forth between usefulness and beauty; this back-and-forth motion has a name: pleasure. Things are pleasing because they are useful and beautiful.

— Octavio Paz (1973)

only the earnest and free man (1860)

John Sokol, word portrait of Thoreau (1982)

We seem to have forgotten that the expression “a liberal education” originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further, and say that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. In a slaveholding country like this, there can be no such thing as a liberal education tolerated by the State; and those scholars of Austria and France who, however learned they may be, are contented under their tyrannies have received only a servile education.

– Henry David Thoreau (1860)

freedom rooted in vitality (1967)

Marianne Moore by Luis Quintanilla

       What is a college?
a place where freedom is rooted in vitality,
where faith is the substance of things hoped for,
where things seen were not made with hands –

– Marianne Moore (1967)

the deepest human life (1900)

In God’s eyes, the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as, practically, quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is everywhere, is eternal. 

– William James (1900)

craft is the skill of making (1974)

I think technique is different from craft. Craft is what you can learn from other verse. Craft is the skill

Seamus Heaney by Edward McGuire (1974)

of making. It wins competitions in the Irish Times or the New Statesman. It can be deployed without reference to the feelings or the self. It knows how to keep up a capable verbal athletic display; it can be content to be vox et praeterea nihil-all voice and nothing else-but not voice as in 'finding a voice'. Learning the craft is learning to turn the windlass at the well of poetry. Usually you begin by dropping the bucket halfway down the shaft and winding up a taking of air. You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You'll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself. Your pratices will be 'fit for digging'.

At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of technique rather than craft. Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet's way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind's and body's resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in Yeats's phrase, 'the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast' into 'an idea, something intended, complete.

– Seamus Heaney (1974)

the art of being free (1835)

It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. It is not so with despotism: despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills; it supports the right, it protects the oppressed, and it maintains public order. The nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity that it produces, until it is roused to a sense of its misery. Liberty, on the contrary, is generally established with difficulty in the midst of storms; it is perfected by civil discord; and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.

– Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)

touch the body of books (1855)

When the psalm sings instead of the singer,
When the script preaches instead of the preacher,
When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that 
         carved the supporting desk, 
When I can touch the body of books by night or by day, and 
         when they touch my body back again, 
When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and 
         child convince, 
When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman's 
         daughter, 
When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly 
         companions, 
I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as 
         I do of men and women like you. 

– Walt Whitman (1855)

style hates waste (1929)

Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental qualities; I mean the sense for style. It is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely, attainment and restraint. . . .

Here we are brought back to the position from which we started, the utility of education. Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economises his material; the artisan with a sense for style prefers good work. Style is the ultimate morality of mind.

But above style, and above knowledge, there is something, a vague shape like fate above the Greek gods. That something is Power. Style is the fashioning of power, the restraining of power. But, after all, the power of attainment of the desired end is fundamental. The first thing is to get there. Do not bother about your style, but solve your problem, justify the ways of God to man, administer your province, or do whatever else is set before you.

— Alfred North Whitehead (1929)

imitating the best work of your betters (2012)

Perhaps the old academies were right after all: don't learn by copying nature, copy art. It's not that nature gets it wrong, it's that good artists show you how to get nature right. They know what changes you have to make to a thing to make it look like itself, but in another medium. What a chisel has to do to make marble flowers look like flowers, what a paintbrush has to do to bring a face to life in two dimensions. No matter what direction you take later, imitating the best work of your betters makes a good beginning. Maybe my eighteenth-century motto got it backward. Don't imitate Homer, imitate the Iliad.

– David Esterly (2012)

see the table vanish (1958)

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as the table is located between those who sit around it, the world like every inbetween relates and separates men at the same time. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritual séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.

– Hannah Arendt (1958)

conversation flowing through time (2013)

The best way to understand craft, I believe, is to think of it as a conversation flowing through time. Or, more precisely, as a recent eddy in a broad conversation about object-making that began at least 25 million years ago, when our hominid ancestors were making tools . . . Knowledge gained through experience has accreted from generation to generation (along with their beliefs, values, and aesthetic ideals), passed on by example and explanation. This flow of information through millennia is the conversation of object making. We participate in it every time we make an object and, to a lesser extent, every time we interact with one.

– Peter Korn (2013)

on intellectual craftsmanship (1959)

. . . whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his own craft; to realize his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has at its core the qualities of the good workman.

What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work . . .

Imagination is often successfully invited by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connections . . . I do not know the full social conditions of the best intellectual worksmanship, but certainly surrounding oneself by a circle of people who will listen and talk – and at times they have to be imaginary characters – is one of them . . .

There is an unexpected quality about [imagination], perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable . . . There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which a technician usually lacks. Perhaps he is too well trained, too precisely trained. Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy. But you must cling to such vague images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such forms that original ideas, if any, almost always first appear . . .

Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness. You must not stop thinking too soon – or you will fail to know all that you should; you cannot leave it to go on forever, or you yourself will burst. It is this dilemma, I suppose, that makes reflection, on those rare occasions when it is more or less successful, the most passionate endeavor of which the human being is capable.

Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the . . . imagination. Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself.

– C. Wright Mills (1959)

you cannot make both (1853)

And this is what we have to do with all our labourers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touches he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men are not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last – a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned: saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool.

– John Ruskin (1853)

demand intellectual engagement (2007)

"Deliverance from a Gilded Cage" (1994)

. . . the case for craft education at the college level should be addressed to a generalized liberal arts university. Why? Because liberal arts institutions place a rigorous intellectual demand (in theory, if not quite in practice) on subjects taught in that environment. To justify a subject within the liberal arts one must answer specific questions about the subject's place in the larger society, and its ability to demand intellectual engagement. If craft can answer the questions imposed by the liberal arts framework, it can answer similar questions raised by small colleges, art schools – and in fact, almost any educational setting. . . . 

– Bruce Metcalf (2007)

right thinking (19 BCE)

scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons
["the source and fountainhead of good writing is right thinking"]

– Horace (19 BCE)

the craft of reading (2002)

One becomes a crafty reader by learning the craft of reading. I believe that it is in our interest as individuals to become crafty readers, and in the interest of the nation to educate citizens in the craft of reading. The craft, not the art. Art is high, craft is low. Art is unique; it can't be taught. Craft is common; it can be learned.

There are virtuoso readers, who produce readings that are breathtakingly original, but the more original these readers become, the less they remain readers. Their readings become new works, writings, if you will, for which the originals were only pretexts, and those who create them become authors. I am not interested in producing such readings myself, nor do I believe that anyone can teach others to produce them. What can be studied, learned, and taught is the craft of reading. . . . What is the craft of reading? As with any craft, reading depends on the use of certain tools, handled with skill. But the tools of reading are not simply there, like a hammer or a chisel; they must be acquired, through practice.

– Robert Scholes (2002)

a creature divided (1979)

Patrick Haines

Caught – the bubble
in the spirit level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed – the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

– Elizabeth Bishop (1979)

a holding environment (2012)

So what is the bargain you're establishing to be? A holding environment? That's what Winnicott calls it, and a classroom is also kind of holding environment. I mean you are not going to settle everything here, but we're going to admit that we're in this mess together. Some things we can do, some things we can't do, but some things we're going to hold onto.

– Stanley Cavell (2012)