Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [31]
Yet he seemed to know what he was doing, as a scientist. This seemed like a contradiction. Weren’t we dealing with the same physical reality? The dissonance between his utterances and my experiences planted the seeds of a philosophical reflection that would come to fruition only twenty years later. The immediate effect was that I started to become a bit of a fatalist. I remember my friend John, who had his own travails with American muscle cars, once asking me about the design of the VW Bug. I must have had an especially frustrating day, because the words came hissing out of my mouth: “Design?! Nobody designed it.” The car seemed a brute fact in the world, impervious to my will and my efforts to comprehend it. The ancient Greek poet Solon captured this feeling when he suggested that Fate is more powerful than any technical knowledge; it “makes all human effort fundamentally insecure, however earnest and logical it may seem to be.”3 The feeling of being subject to fate chastens the conceit of mastery. This might make a person humble, but in my own case the humility had an edge to it. As I groped my way toward a modus vivendi with the Bug, I took my new fatalism to be a stinging rebuke to the pretense of easy intellectual mastery that my father was offering. So my own sense of impotence was weirdly delicious; it was based on a truer self-awareness than my father possessed, as I saw it.
To repeat a point I made earlier, modern science adopts an otherworldly ideal of how we come to know nature: through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than material reality, and in particular amenable to mathematical representation.4 Through such renderings we become masters of nature. Yet the kind of thinking that begins from idealizations such as the frictionless surface and the perfect vacuum sometimes fails us (as my dad’s advice failed me), because it isn’t sufficiently involved with the particulars. Precisely because such thinking enjoys all the credit and authority of science, however, when it fails us we may be tempted to see obscurity and unreason everywhere (“nobody designed it”), and even take pleasure in such obscurity. This reactionary tendency is a natural response to the pretense of modern reason. The reaction has an adolescent quality to it; there is a secret kinship between modernism and anti-modernism that just happens to mirror my relationship with my father.
At this point I hated my car, but also loved it. It was the source of my mobility and independence, as well as the pure pleasure of driving. So it was a passionate, dysfunctional relationship, the sort one can’t simply walk away from. I had no choice but to stay engaged with the car. This struggle has persisted throughout my life, recurring under the hoods of cars or while sitting on a milk crate in front of a bike that has me stumped. What I have learned is that mechanical work has a chancy, elusive character, very different from mathematics, even for expert mechanics.
Aristotle can help here. He expanded the idea of an art, or techne, to include those cases where our efforts are less than fully effective. In doing so, he steers a course between impotent fatalism and its opposite, a fantasy of complete mastery, shedding light on the true character of human agency.
Some arts reliably attain their object—for example, the art of building. If the building falls down, one can say in retrospect that the builder didn’t know what he was doing. But there is another class