Richard Sennett Craftsman Quotes

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.

To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure.

But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.

A healthy obsession, we could say, interrogates its own driving convictions.

you can’t understand how wine is made simply by drinking lots of it.

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake.

the single most pressing earthly obligation of every medieval artisan was the establishment of a good personal reputation."11

Good craftsmanship implies socialism. The workings of a modern Japanese auto plant or a Linux chat room might have expanded their sympathy for collaboration of other sorts, but still, all three disputed the pursuit of quality simply as a means to profit.

In cultural production, Levi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne a manger) and good to think with (bonne a penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.

Developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. These ills are complicated because few institutions set out to produce unhappy workers. People seek refuge in inwardness when material engagement proves empty; mental anticipation is privileged above concrete encounter; standards of quality in work separate design from execution.

Burton'a göre “sanatçı", yalnızlık çeken insan bedeninin kendi üzerinde yaptığı kazıların yol açtığı depresyon riskinin sadece bir örneğidir.

Kendi imalatçısı olarak insan fikrine benzer bir düşünce Shakespeare'de de görülür; onun kahramanı Coriolanus da “Ben kendimin imalatçısıyım” der ve bu sözüyle kendisini, “Ellerini kendinden çek! Dokunduğunda harabeye çeviriyorsun!" diye uyaran Augustine’e meydan okumuş olur.

Skilled operatives live with and through machines but rarely create them in modern industry. Technological advance comes in this way to seem inseparable from domination by others.

Zanaatkar için yapılan ilk övgüler, zanaatkârların usta tanrısı Hephaistos’a yönelik olarak Homeros destanlarında yer alır (..) Destanda zanaatkar için kullanılan kelime demioergos'tur. Ki bu da kamu [demios) ve üretken (ergon) kelimelerinden oluşan bileşik bir kelimedir. Kadim zanaatkar,kabaca ortasmıfa denk bir toplumsal konum işgal eder. Demioergoi, çömlekçi gibi el sanatçısı işçilerin yanı sıra, doktorlar ve alt düzey hâkimleri, profesyonel şarkıcıları ve eski zamanların haber yayıcıları işlevine sahip ulaklan da içerir. İşte bu türden sıradan yurttaşlar, görece az sayıda ve çalışmayan aristokratlar ile köle kitleleri arasında bir yerde yaşıyordu.

Although in a lab the neophyte can be readily inducted in procedures, it's harder for a scientist to pass on the capacity to look suspiciously for new problems in the course of solving old ones or to explain the intuition formed from experience that a problem is likely to wind up a dead-end.

Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker: "There are machines so hard to describe and skills so elusive that ... it has often been necessary to get hold of such machines, set them in operation, and lend one's hand to the work.

Tests that measure a person’s capacity to manage many problems at the expense of depth suit an economic regime that prizes quick study, superficial knowledge, all too often embodied by consultants who dart in and out of organizations. The craftsman’s ability to dig deep stands at the pole opposite from potential ability deployed in this fashion.