Welcome to Shop Class:

My Name is Mr. Heidegger

This paper seeks to answer the question: does our 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 hand
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that 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 is pre-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 can
interrogate ourselves, and thereby better understand the nature of Being.
Being is not primarily thinking; 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 anticipate their 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)
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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 creation thereof: in the tool use, in the craftsmans concern
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,
we find this bringing-forth of Being; an uncovering and revealing.
Where we can find the meaning of Being, consequently, is through examining the
concernful use of equipment. Concernful human interaction with the material world, and not
only using but doing, is a way of revealing the nature of the done-unto-oneself the craftsman
experiences the bringing-forth. Instrumentality (using), therefore, is merely one way of
revealing, and something is lost when we consider it the only way of interacting with the world.

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That is, in the more ordinary sense 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.
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C.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.
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For example, in her response to the resistance and problems presented by the raw materials perhaps not
conforming to her vision
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 agency central 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-disclosure that
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 rest
primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more 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 permanence in
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
own connections 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 pragmatic engagement with the world that the 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 from praxis), 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.
However, according to Crawford, science has taken a distinct path from this archaic
Greek conception of wisdom. As he writes, science has adopted a paradoxically otherworldly
ideal of how we come to know nature: through mental constructions [such as the frictionless
surface] that are more intellectually tractable than material reality(Crawford 22) This is a
solipsistic ideal that departs from the origins of science as an investigation of natural
phenomena by engagement with the world. Crawford points out that the caloric theory of heat
was abandoned in favor the beginnings of what is today thermodynamics thanks to the
invention and success of the steam engine. The abstraction and solipsism of science, according
to Crawford, has transferred neatly as a way of interacting and understanding the world onto
the average person.
Contrary to the common countercultural interpretation, it is Crawfords supposition
that the world we live in is problematic (in part) precisely because it does not elicit our
instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us: meaning the concernful interaction
with things that musicians and mechanics experience (Crawford 69). The problem, according to
him, is not that the technology we use elicits a universal objectification of everything by a
subject who is intoxicated with power, leading to a triumph of instrumental rationality.(68)
The problem is the aforementioned predetermination of things from afar that seems to erode
our agency, all the while luring us with the siren song of autonomy. As Crawford writes:
The market ideal of choice by an autonomous Self seems to act as a kind of
narcotic that makes the displacing of embodied agency go smoothly, or precludes the
development of such agency by providing easier satisfactions.(70)
However, it is the relation that the particular instrumentality of specific equipment has
with both the user and the task that determines whether it is good or bad instrumentality. In
other words, it is important in which way an attitude instrumental. To return to Heidegger, it is
more the cause specific instrumentality has on us and the world that is important, than is the
plain fact that we are using equipment instrumentally.
Crawford himself notes that the technocratic/meritocratic view of education treats it
as instrumental- it is good for society, and for getting ahead- and this has a corrupting effect on
genuine education.(145) Students begin to see their own goals in education as having worth
because of their connection to extrinsic goals such as higher pay and diplomas with high social
status. Classes become something that must be finished in order to get the job. This
erodes the intrinsic value of learning for students.
We lose something when we streamline our interactions with the world into
abstractions and simplifications:
Early motorcycles were not very convenient One was drawn out of oneself and into a
struggle. With another thing that, like a mule, was emphatically not simply an extension of ones will.
Rather, one had to conform ones will and judgment to certain external facts of physics that still
presented themselves as such.(Crawford 59)
Crawfords point is not that we should all return to hand-pumped lubrication and take
the seatbelts out of our cars. He is calling to attention the shifts in consumer culture which
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 malfunction of 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 agency which is lost when we abdicate
engagement 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 agency displayed 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 gains agency. 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. Using an iPod is not the same as creating music; 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 hide this
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.
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 our
agency: using an iPod, for example, or choosing a major based on forces 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 against mechanization 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 some part of what is now a work
process.(Crawford 39)
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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 been
affected 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

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trafficking 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)
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 neutral
process, 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 few
contribute 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. This
growth 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 sameness
in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear. Without this, not even the
unnatural conformism of mass society can prevent the destruction of the common 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,
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 objectification the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone branches 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, real
knowledge of ourselves and the world arises through confrontations with real things: A de-
alienation of 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