“The desire for something more sustainable than decomposing materials is one of the sources in Western civilization for the supposed superiority of the head over the hand, the theorist better that the craftsman because ideas last. This conviction makes philosophers happy but shouldn´t. Theoria shares a root in Greek theatron, a theatre, which literally means “a place for seeing.” The philosopher can pay a certain price in the theater of ideas for durable ideas that the craftsman in the workshop does not.
In the archaic theater there was relatively little divide between spectator and performer, seeing and doing; people danced and spoke, then retired to a stone seat to watch others dance and declaim. By the time of Aristotle, actors and dancers had become a caste with special skills of costuming, speaking, and moving. Audiences stayed offstage, and so developed their own skills of interpretation as spectators. As critics, the audience sought to speculate then about what the stage-characters did not understand about themselves (though the chorus on stage sometimes also took on this clarifying role).
The classicist Myles Burnyeat believes that here, in the classical theater, lies the origin of the phrase “seeing with the mind´s eye.” Which is to say, understanding separated from doing, the “mind´s eye” that of an observer rather than of a maker.
The craftsman, engaged in a continual dialogue with materials, does not suffer this divide. His or her arousal is more complete. Part of Plato´s great ambivalence about craftsmen was that he knew this. The same philosopher who believed that an idea transcends the ink with which it is written commended craftsmen as demioergoi; they were equally engaged with material things and with one another. The work-shop has a claim to make against the theater, practice against theory. But still, how could the craftsman guard against decay? Clay, that most philosophical of materials ... could guide the metamorphosis of their craft.”
Richard Sennet´s “The Craftsman”
