Is a craftsman an artisan?

 September 27, 2022

Is a craftsman an artisan?

New York Review of Books made an interesting point on what to my mind, was a distinction between the craftsman and the artisan. (Gorra, 9/22/22.) The craftsman, has, it was asserted, a mastery of the tools and skills of his trade. The ultimate goal was or is, the essay asserts, to do the work so as to develop his self and to improve at what he does. The artisan, so it is imagined in this distinction (-is it true? I am not convinced.-) also masters materials and the use of materials underlying his work. How could this be a proper distinction between the real as personhood, and the real as product of work of persons? I think it's a mind-body distinction that neither the possibly-fallaciously-distinct categories of artisan and craftsman, but especially the artisan, would in truth rather avoid. But if we set aside the fact that the current speculatively-tinged moment would prove, that the mind belongs to the craftsman, the very simple and much more basic and fundamental fact, that use of craft requires tools that are in their very essence also material, as the body, the voice, and the brain are all material tends to erase the distinction between craftsman and artisan if taken properly to a conclusion. And a conclusion can never be put off.-

But deeper than this is the extensively material aspect of all of our actual experience. The world, material as it is, can't be put off, in it's materiality. To see the potential in a material object to transform into another thing, is not to not see, or not deal with, it as it is. The absolute wood-ness of some thing, the quintessence of wood, is another material transformation, of wood, that cannot be fully reached its fullness and completeness. There is no purity, and in fact the quintessence of wood could actually be, and is probably, not wood in itself.

This is an example. The quintessence of stone, too, may not be stone in the material transformation that we are used to seeing it in. But it is assuredly not, stone in its raw form that allows the mind to understand that material. And so with metal, or clay, the same way. 

Does the craftsman want to, in the end, turn himself into the material he works on? I think this is the canard, or confusion to be charitable, endemic in the article. This is not, to my mind, what it is all about. Rather, it is to turn himself, in a manner of speaking, into the tools by which he works on the materials he works on. But this is the simply worded, but complex thought that is the distinction: the craftsman strives to become what he works with, and not what he works on. Not the distinction between the craftsman and the artisan at all, but between what a craftsman works with and what he works on. And this does mean he becomes his material tools, but also, he uses the tools of his mind and his body, his hands and his brain, as tools, as well. Being an artisan is an incidental but unavoidable fact of being a craftsman. But it is not at all dispositive of it. In fact, the two are imbricated in the work of it all. Materiality does not mean without mind, it means with brain.