welcome to shop class: my name is mr. heidegger

8/11/2019 Welcome to Shop Class: My Name is Mr. Heidegger

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Welcome to Shop Class:

My Name is Mr. Heidegger

This paper seeks to answer the question: doesour instrumental interaction with

equipment primarily reveal Being as doing, or as using. According to Heidegger, one important

way we get to an understanding of Being is through our use of equipment. It is through the

equipment we find ready to hand1that the status of Being is made most evident to us:

Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are in themselves are defined

ontologico-categorically.(BT 101) Our use of equipment ispre-theoretical, we do not use or

need to use theory to engage in it. Our relationship to the world is mediated by technology,

but with ready-to-handness there is not the added layer of theoretical mediation. According to

Heidegger, it is through an examination of our pre-theoretical dealings that we caninterrogate ourselves, and thereby better understand the nature of Being.

Being is notprimarilythinking; for Heidegger, it is practice(praxis). In looking at things

as if they exist as pre-given and independently, we fail to realize that objects are only things

when we tacitly anticipatetheir ontological character; which is at least partly a result of the

kind of dualistic thinking/doing separation that Heidegger rejects. Instead, we must look at

things as ready to hand (BT 97). An equipment does not exist: equipment is a specific,

determinate thing (BT 98-99). For example, when a craftsman creates a silver chalice, it has

the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth not in itself, but in another, in the craftsman or

artist.(QT 11)2 In the crafting, not only is raw material effected into a form of the craftsmans

desire, but in turn the form is a type of manifestation of the craftsman himself. And, not only in

the finished product, but in the creationthereof: in the tool use, in the craftsmansconcern3,

we find this bringing-forthof Being; an uncovering and revealing.

Where we can find the meaning of Being, consequently, is through examining the

concernfuluse of equipment. Concernful human interaction with the material world, and not

only usingbut doing, is a way of revealing the nature of the done-unto-oneself the craftsman

experiencesthe bringing-forth. Instrumentality (using), therefore, is merely one way of

revealing, and something is lost when we consider it the onlyway of interacting with the world.

1That is, in the more ordinarysense of involvement with the world: pre-theoretical, and with a view towards

achieving something. When we look at a hammer (which is the example Heidegger uses), we usually dont see it as

a materials scientist would: as wood and steel with a certain modulus of strength. This is the present-at-hand

mode of observing and theorizing about the hammer: an abstraction from our usual experience in the world.

Usually, when we pick up a hammer, we start looking for nails: this is ready-to-handness.2C.f. LH 193: We view action as only causing an effect. The actuality of aan effect is valued according to its utility.

But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its

essence Therefore only what already is can be accomplished. But what is above all is Being.3For example, in her response to the resistance and problems presented by the raw materials perhaps not

conforming to her vision


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As Heidegger writes, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality.(QT 10) For

every acted upon, there is an actor affected by this action. An analysis of existence shows that

the way we engage with the world is according to the way we have interpreted our own Being.

Contemporary forms of world-interaction are particular ways, among many; and their effect on

us as actors is open for interpretation.

Crawford does just this: as he writes, the time is ripe to dwell on this unease rather

than dismiss it.(9) He believes there is a struggle for individual agencycentral to modern

life, but that as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been

projected from afar(Crawford 7). There is something missing from our ordinary interactions

with the world: we cannot recognize ourselves, our own responsibility and agency, in them.

We have lost the satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual

competence (Crawford 15). From work to things, we have lost the sense of self-disclosurethat

comes from actually creating something for which you are tangibly responsible.

There are more fundamental repercussions to this deterioration of agency than a loss of

satisfaction in handiwork. As Arendt writes: The reality and reliability of the human world restprimarily on the fact that we are surrounded by thingsmore permanent than the work and

even worker which created them (Arendt 95-96, emphasis added; c.f. Crawford 16). According

to Arendt, human life is engaged in a constant process of reification, and the degree of reality

our work contributes to the world of things depends on their greater or lesser permanencein

the world itself.(Arendt 96, emphasis added) The craftsman is engaged, for one, in the

reification of the plurality of relationships, acts and speech that are so important to humanity,

yet lack the tangibility and durability of material goods. Craftsmen are in the business of

creating a shared, durable world, and, according to Crawford, in the process strengthen their

ownconnections with and understanding of this world.

Arendt recognizes three fundamental areas of human activity: labor, work, and action.Arendt calls action intersubjective human plurality: a public meeting and contest of separate

wills. Work is what craftsmen and artists do, leaving behind durable articles, which Arendt calls

artifacts, and in doing so transcend their own fleeting lives. She contrasts this with labor, which

is the means by which (at least some of us) we obtain the necessities of day to day life; securing

expendable life necessities such as food and clothing. With these activities, we condition our

world, and in turn are conditioned both by the world and by the activities themselves.

It is through pragmaticengagement with the world thatthe craftsman acquires

wisdom, in the sense of skilled, experientially acquired knowledge (Crawford 21). As Crawford

writes, skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely

the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science.(ibid) The sense of wisdom as separate

from intelligence (which connotes potential rather than actual ability) and knowledge (which

connotes abstraction frompraxis), although weakened, is still intuitively there. Wisdom

carries a sense of real world understanding. We would not call a stockbroker wise in the

ways of carpentry, for example, even if he has read a number of carpentry books. He may

know all the different joints, but he would not be able to execute them well.


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parallel those in production as seen below: we see fewer occasions for the exercise of

judgment(ibid) The resistance offered by problematic machinery, for example, makes one

aware of reality as an independent thing.(Crawford 61). A washing machine, as Crawford

writes, surely exists to serve our needs, but if it breaks, we have to contend with a thing that

lies outside the self at such a moment, technology is no longer a means by which our

mastery of the world is extended, but an affront to our usual self-absorption.(Crawford 16)Additionally, it is in the malfunctionof durable creations as well as in their creation that our

shared physical reality and common debt to the world are revealed (Crawford 17).

Thus, instrumental rationality is not merely a means by which we extend our mastery of

the world. It is also the mode of confronting the limitations of that mastery, and consequently

the nature of external reality shared reality. The malfunction of equipment is also a way for

the narcissists delusion of freedom and independence to be confronted (17). Doing, as

opposed to using, is in some ways an affront to autonomy: it is an engagement with a shared

reality of obstacles. Our autonomy increases when we free ourselves from the constraints of

problems like checking the fluids in our car. However, the bodily involvement with the

machines we use entails a kind of agency, an agencywhich is lost when we abdicateengagement with the world around us.

Crawford admits that readiness to serve our will is a good attribute in a machine, so

we must take his motorcycle example to be figurative, perhaps synecdochic, for the

consumption-production cycle as a whole (in other words, for much of how we live our lives).

One example he uses is the iPod. The songs available on an iPod grant us a kind of musical

autonomy.(65) However, contrast this to the agencydisplayed when someone exhibits the

skilled and active human engagement involved in playing a musical instrument. Somewhat

paradoxically, it is only by subjecting herself to discipline, and submitting to the physical

logic/reality of the instrument, that a player masters it and gainsagency. Her interaction with

the world through her hands lights up what Crawford, after Heidegger, calls the specifically

human manner of being (Crawford 64).

Our autonomy increases when we free ourselves from the constraints of problems like

checking the fluids in our car. However, the bodily involvement with the machines we use

entails a kind of agency, an agency which is lost when we abdicate engagement with the world

around us. Usingan iPod is not the same as creatingmusic; the latter in some way involves

realizing (not only uncovering but also actualizing) the structure of ones Being in doing.

Problematic machinery also grounds one in the world we share: in our dealings with hard,

material reality, we uncover the nature of our Being-in-the-World.

The chain of being, or rather the network of instrumentality that a motorcycle exists

as part of, becomes apparent to us when it malfunctions. As Crawford writes, the user holds

himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it.(60)

Crawford writes that the purpose of product design now seems to be to hidethis

interconnectedness from us: the engine of a Mercedes appears to its driver as a plastic

monolith rather than a delicate assemblage of moving parts that is capable of breaking down.


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The world appears as a seamless integration of autonomy-enhancing things which we do not

have to concernfully interact with; and Crawford believes this implicitly encourages solipsism.

If, according to Crawford, thinking is bound up with action, and getting an intellectual

grasp on the world depends on our doing stuff in it, I believe that he is valorizing instrumental

rationality when we use it as active agents, and deploring it when we use it to degrade ouragency: using an iPod, for example, or choosing a major based onforces projected from afar

(promise of higher wages) rather than a personal interest in learning (164). In addition, there is

perhaps nothing inherently wrong with using an iPod. Maybe you are somewhere where you

cannot play a musical instrument; but if you use it so much that your ability to play a guitar

suffers, you are probably becoming a worse person.

Crawford is also concerned with the larger consumption-production cycle, of which iPod

use is but a part, which has led to the inveterate degradation of agency and self-reliance. He

writes about how the initial movement againstmechanization played into the current C-P cycle:

The great irony is that anti-modernist sentiments of aesthetic revolt against the

machine [such as the Arts and Crafts movement] paved the way for certain unattractive

features of late-modern culture: therapeutic self-absorption and the hankering after

authenticity, precisely those psychic hooks now relied upon by advertisers. Such

spiritualized, symbolic modes of craft practice and craft consumption represented a kind

of compensation for and therefore an accommodation to, new modes of routinized,

bureaucratic work.(29)

Similarly, manual training shifted from giving workers mastery of the specialized

technical skills necessary for their work to indoctrination: moral formation to prepare them

for the assembly line (Crawford 31). Consequently, the motivation previously supplied by the

intrinsic satisfaction of manual work was to be replaced with ideology (ibid). In addition, the

draining of cognitive elements that occurred in manual work has been occurring at an ever

increasing rate in the white collar sector as well; and, as we have seen, in its corollary and

training ground: higher education (Crawford 32). The centralization of thinking results in

knowledge that is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers

in the form of minute instructions needed to perform somepart of what is now a work

process.(Crawford 39)4 As Crawford points out, this may or may not be more efficient, but it

certainly allows the employer to pay his no longer skilled workers much less money. Not only

the intrinsic reward in doing work is diminished, but also the fiscal (extrinsic) reward.

The result, paradoxically, is that the surest way of finding cognitively demanding and

rewarding (both cognitively and fiscally) work is to find a manual trade that has not beenaffected by this simplification process. However, the effects of work-simplification are not

confined to the individual. As Crawford writes, the men who felt less revulsion towards

working on an assembly line because they had less pride in their own powers, and were

therefore more tractable might justly be called less republican.(42) Additionally, the

4trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually

shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite(Crawford 44)


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diminishing of concernfulness and responsibility from whatever task might be at hand is

sometimes a matter of public policy (Crawford 45).

As Crawford points out, from standardized tests to sentencing guidelines, it is

paradoxically our liberal political instincts that push us in this direction of centralizing

authority; we distrust authority in the hands of individuals with its reverence for neutralprocess, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility.(ibid) Crawford believes that the

desire of liberalism to secure liberties from abuses of power has gradually and systemically

degraded individual agency (as profit maximization has in its own ways). Similarly, Arendt

generally notes that as the public realm withered, government became bureaucratized and

increasingly served a merely administrative role. The end stage of classic liberalism, epitomized

by libertarian ideals, is a paring of politics altogether into this reduced function, as a kind of

rights police, merely there to safeguard against violations of private property laws, rather

than as a forum for contesting viewpoints (action/plurality).

We have no guarantee against the futility of individual life: our only common ground is

based on necessity, not durability and freedom. We are a society of laborers: exceedingly fewcontribute to the durability of the world we share. This state of affairs has undermined the

durability on which civilization itself is reliant. Engrossed in playing our roles in the production-

consumption cycle, we take no responsibility in the world. This thoughtlessness is an

abdication of humanity itself, as we allow ourselves to be submerged in a variety of systems,

such as gender, race, wealth, capitalism, and above all technology and science. As party to

systems, we can forget our responsibilities and capacities, thinking of ourselves simply as an

animal species governed by natural laws. Bureaucracy, which is the current form government

takes, discourages individual action of any kind, above all anything that could be considered

outstanding.

Socializing the laboring activity has resulted in exponential growth and change. Thisgrowth has overwhelmed action and speech, which have been banished to intimate spheres.

The consequence of this is that our worldly reality itself is being undermined. Arendt writes

that the public realm is incredibly important, because being seen and being heard by others

derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different

position.(57) Family life, and even social life, merely prolong or multiply a few individual

viewpoints. Deep political partisanship, for example, is the result of two groups of people who

see no common object, there is no mutual reality between them, they are imprisoned in

subjectivity. According to Arendt, multiple perspectives of a common object construct a

worldly reality: only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without

changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see samenessin utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear. Without this, not even the

unnatural conformism of mass society can prevent the destruction of thecommon world.(58)

We are told that the diminishing of concernfulness and responsibility from our

engagement with the world gives us freedom. In addition, there is a powerful economic

argument for the dumbing down of our lives. As Crawford writes,


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Economics recognizes only certain virtues, and not the most impressive ones at that to

fix ones own car is not merely to use up time, it is I to have a different experience of time, of

ones car, and of oneself.(Crawford 55)

Heidegger notes that the language we use now expedites communication along routes

where objectificationthe uniform accessibility of everything to everyonebranches out and

disregards all limits, reflecting and expressing the ubiquity of this economic mindset (LH 197).

The language we use to communicate with each other dictates the range of possibilities given

us; we enjoy ourselves and take our pleasures as they do; and language surrenders itself to

our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.(LH 197; 199; c.f.

BT 126-27)

Breaking down jobs into tasks has undoubtedly resulted in exponential growth.

Crawford points out what we lose when mass production leads to mass society. One remedy to

the dumbing down, according to Crawford, is to follow the traces of our own actions to their

source, so that we may attain some understanding of the good life by examining the

practical activities we undertake in company with others.(197) In other words, realknowledge of ourselves and the world arises through confrontations with real things:A de-

alienationof our activities. (198) People have to answer for themselves if the freedom and

autonomy they gain is worth the change in the quality of their lives: this requires a spirit of

inquiry which hopefully has not yet been excised from the modern human.

Works Cited:

Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin,

2010. Print.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition.[Chicago]: University of Chicago, 1958. Print.

BEING TIME (technically read in class)

Letter on humanism

Question concerning technology (read in class)

Pg 47, 164, 185-189, 195-197, 200-ff

welcome to shop class: my name is mr. heidegger

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