Premodern handcraft skills foster a language which opens an experiential pathway to local nature

ABSTRACT

Handcraft skills provide premodern cultures with an experiential channel to encounter nature both in humans and in their environment. This essay sketches a dialectical overview – the roots of which can be traced via Hegel back to Heraclitus – of how handcrafts are entangled with other meaning-generating semiotic activities and participate in enriching the experiential content of verbal discourses as well. By eroding the handcraft culture, technical and social progress – realized in practice by the industrial revolution and ideologically supported by the movement of Enlightenment – has injured the experiential content of our language and thus impaired our natura experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Handcraft skills
• Heraclitus
• nature
• words
• concepts
• meaning change
• progress

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 cf. Lebensform, a popular term in Analytic philosophy, often translated as “form of life” or “mode of life”, as the anonymous reviewer suggests; but cf. also Lebenswelt, the competing term from Phenomenology.

2 Semiosis is the experiential totality of meaning generation systems of a culture; the term is derived from Greek sêmeiôsis which means, among other things, inference from a sign (Liddell and Scott 1961, 1594).

3 See Liddell and Scott (1961, 1964–65): physis is characterized as “nature as an originating power”; compare this also with Heidegger’s translation of Heraclitus’ term physis as das Aufgehen.

4 Even the etymology of the term “recreation” hints that our normal life is a disease from which we have to recover.

5 Marx 1847/1959/1847/1959

6 In other words, that they generate actual meanings by utilizing a source of preconceptual and potential experience.

7 A Hegelian term, sometimes translated as “becoming”, suggesting that what is, is perpetually changing.