“I have argued that real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things” (Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, page 199).
Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft could be summed in this single line. According to Crawford’s treatise on work, the most engaging and fulfilling work is one in which the doer/the maker is intimately engaged with the process and the product of her (or his) labor. Real work is absorbing, and it requires us to slip into a state of concentration and calm. Although many of us think of the “trades” as all brawn and no brain, Crawford offers up a defense of the intellect and experience required to correctly diagnose and care for a motorcycle in disrepair (his chosen line of work, alongside his PhD in Political Philosophy and his writing practice).
Crawford also argues that valuable work is work that is situated within a particular context. The maker of things, or even, I would argue, the conscientious office worker, understands and takes seriously his or her responsibility to the community s/he is engaged within. Furthermore, Crawford argues that fixing things while situated within the context of a community of people is a practice that encourages, and even demands, integrity. Would you want to be known as the girl who overcharged for “fixing” someone’s bike all the while doing a shoddy job on the actual repairs?
Beyond this idea of community as a body of people, Crawford also makes an interesting distinction between the builder and the fixer (my terms, not his). While an architect or a construction worker is responsible for starting from scratch, a fixer is beholden to the object he is fixing. The motorcycle that comes to him for repair has probably passed through the hands of many mechanics, but the manual (if a manual is even available) assumes the bike’s newness, and it isolates problems without taking into account the potential complexities of a multi-dimensional motorcycle, an object that already has had a life of its own. In other words, in my own take on what community can mean, the object in need of repair is its own sort of community–it has its own complexities and its parts interact to form a whole, albeit a not-always-coherent whole. And, of course, this object also overlaps with the world. Context comes into play yet again as the weather, for example, or the ingredients in a lubricant could act to aggravate the problems already inherent within a particular bike.
Thinking about the fixer and his inherently relational position within the world was one of my favorite take-aways from this marvelous, albeit at times a little bit clunky, book. My favorite paragraph discusses the ways in which the doctor, like the motorcycle mechanic or other repairmen, are repeatedly humbled by the complexities of their work. Given its contextuality and complexities, the human body turns out to be not so unlike a motorcycle after all. And the inherent difficulties within the act of fixing–either the motorcycle or the human body–give rise (hopefully) to a natural humility within the person who is attempting this fix.
Crawford writes, “Some arts reliably attain their objects–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 of arts that Aristotle calls ‘stochastic.’ An example is medicine. Mastery of a stochastic art is compatible with failure to achieve its end (health). As Aristotle writes, ‘It does not belong to medicine to produce health, but only to promote it as much as is possible. . . .’ Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch. The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are expert, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making [Crawford’s emphasis], and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way. This experience of failure tempers the conceit of mastery; the doctor and the mechanic have daily intercourse with the world as something independent, and a vivid awareness of the difference between self and nonself. Fixing things may be a cure for narcissism” (pages 80-81).
While away at Chinese Medicine summer camp last year, almost everyone in my class initially had trouble accepting and integrating the dynamic and startling contradictions often found within Traditional Chinese Medicine theory. This complexity, though challenging to think about–much less to “apply” to another person’s situation–is what I love about Chinese Medicine; Chinese Medicine accounts for the complexities of the human body, and, unlike Western Medicine, which often deals with and isolates one disease at a time, it doesn’t shy away from the contradictions and chaos that manifest in all of us (for better or for worse).
Within the context of Chinese Medicine, it’s possible, for example, to be both damp and dry at the same time. While difficult to grasp, it’s possible to be deficient yin (low on fluids and thus dry) while simultaneously waterlogged (damp) because of candida or edema or too much sugar, whatever. (In other words, all of your “bad” moisture is taking up too much space for the nourishing fluids your body needs to stay flexible.)
For at least the first few days of our retreat, everyone in the class would ask questions like, “Can you be cold while also being overheated”? To which, my teacher would always reply, “If you can say it, you can be it.” Rather than being snarky or unhelpful, as it might have seemed, our teacher was just being honest. It’s possible to be any combination of seemingly conflicting signs or “symptoms.” That’s what I like about being human–that none of us can be cured or diagnosed with an operations manual and that there’s always a lot to love and to learn about within each of us, just as we are in each moment.
Wisdom of the Awakened Life 