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.
Disclosure statement
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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 Citation1961, 1594).
3 See Liddell and Scott (Citation1961, 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.
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.