July 11, 2024
There’s this first, accepted idea of craft which centers around the manipulation of the physical world. There’s another ideal of craft that has an even wider scope. It takes craft and applies it to how we live life. Now, where is the overlap? Craftsmanship—traditionally associated with things like pottery, sewing, painting, and even writing—are things that are learned by doing.
The crafter becomes attuned with the ideal of whatever it is they are crafting. They apply some episteme to their techne. Of course, this comes with time and practice, and maybe a mentor. These things could be learned in school, but the best-crafted things definitely weren't made inside one. What we would associate with knowledge or theory, however, could be conceived in a school. In fact, they very likely were.
So, if craft relies on tacit knowledge and is built to a standard that couldn’t really be defined in a textbook, then maybe, life; or, how we think about leading our own, could be considered a craft. I find that very beautiful. I find it especially beautiful because just like any craft it takes time and practice, and for the most part, we define the morphable ideal. It can’t really be optimized or quantified, but there are infinite forms of the perfect, and we can build or craft our lives into any of them.
I’ll come back to this and inject some rigor, but this was actually pretty enlightening—or some other thing that’s a little less heavy, that’s a little less intense, that’s a little less trendy. On a side note, in my reflections for the year, I wrote that you have to believe in something. Idolatry is sinful, chasing wealth and fame is exploitative and dirty, but chasing erudition isn’t all that great either.
The SOP page that inspired this claimed that Socrates was for chasing the chase. You strive to be the best physicist, the best carpenter, and with that, the most important thing of all, was the pursuit of perfection or maybe excellence is the better word here.
Anyway, with that, I’ll say that I like beautiful things. I wrote that in my journal today. I like the beauty of people smiling when we talk, the beauty of a really pretty conversation, prose, words, and art. And, to add more to that, I realize that craft is important and exists everywhere that you let it be. Fine-tune your craft, make your own ideals of perfection, think hard about the techne that you want to devote yourself to, and gain intuition for how to get there, and even if the mechanics on how to do that aren’t clear, that’s not what actually matters—after all, you tried, walked the journey, pursued the craft. And as we know, the craft is not much more than conception and tried execution.