Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [86]
4: The Education of a Gearhead
1 I grew up in a commune; see note 3 of chapter 1.
2 In his history of the carriage trade, Kinney tells the story of one Ezra Stratton, who began his seven-year indentured apprenticeship at a southern Connecticut carriage maker in 1824. To his disgust, sixteen-year-old Ezra found that “his first morning’s work consisted of repairing the stone wall around his master’s two-acre field.” “In a time and place when many workshops were extensions of the master’s home, the line between habitation and business was blurred at best.” At lunch, young Ezra noticed “the glee of a seventeen-year-old apprentice at the table, [and] quickly divined the cause.” As he would write later in his own autobiography, “the cow and horse, the pig and woodpile no longer claimed his attention . . . for his initiatory year of ‘chores’ had expired” (Kinney, The Carriage Trade, p. 42).
3 This is the lesson of Solon’s poem according to Werner Jaeger, as quoted by David Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato’s Understanding of Techne (University Park: Penn State Press, 1996), p. 29.
4 As the German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi (1743-1819) characterized the central doctrine of the Kantian revolution, “we can grasp an object only insofar as we can let it come into being before us in thoughts, can make or create it in the understanding” (Jacobi as quoted by David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity [New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 9). Yet this is merely the completion of an earlier revolution. Beginning with Copernicus and Galileo, “the decision was taken to undo the habitual subordination of mind to the (pregiven) ‘object’ of inquiry by making the latter’s intelligibility depend on what the inquirer has inserted in the object in advance, in accordance with the relevant concept he has of it” (ibid., p. 11). The procedure of the newly mathematized physics came to be taken as the model for modern thought in its entirety. This is evident in, for example, Gassendi’s dictum that “whatever we know, we know in virtue of mathematics” (ibid., p. viii).
5 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b12.
6 Once I went with my father to see Cirque du Soleil, the famous circus. As we took our seats, he looked up at the torches burning overhead and said, “Ah, sodium yellow.” When sodium burns, it gives off a yellow color, which my dad liked to explain in terms of quantum mechanics. But in fact they weren’t torches; they were strips of yellow ribbon blown by a fan, with a light shining on them, to produce an artful imitation of burning torches. I pointed this out to my dad, and he was genuinely shaken by the revelation. Embarrassed for him, I suggested maybe it was his eyeglasses, but his intellectual honesty was such that he had no interest in trying to save face. He insisted that no, he could now plainly see that they were ribbons, not torches, yet he had seen torches before. The fact that he was disturbed by this experience, and open about it rather than defensive, impressed on me once more his genuine love of truth. Yet it seemed to me that the intellectual habits of his scientific training had gotten in the way of a true perception.
7 This distinction I want to make between attentiveness and assertiveness may be found in agriculture as well, corresponding to “organic” (or traditional) versus industrial methods. Industrial agriculture is assertive in the sense that it imposes its plan on the land, and reliably attains its object. It is demonstrative; the fruit it produces is the conclusion of a radically simplified ecological syllogism. The land is a kind of abstract grid upon which is projected the intention of the farmer; that intention is not much conditioned by the peculiarities of the land, because the land is treated