A prática da religião católica tem permitido aos seus mais fervorosos devotos e aficionados, ao longo dos tempos, elaborar sobre aquilo que seria o Inferno, esse ‘todo-devorador lago de chamas’.
"These mythological personae [Hephaestus and Pandora] suggest the ambivalence about material culture that marked out our civilization from its origins. Western civilization has not chosen between these personae so much as fused them into ambivalence about man-made physical experience. Both Hephaestus and Pandora are artificers. Each of these artificers contains a contrary: a virtuous god who makes worthwhile everyday things yet whose person is ugly and inglorious; a goddess whose things are as beautiful, as desirable, as her body, and as malign. The fusion of these two personae was why Plato could celebrate the virtue of archaic, domesticating technologies yet assert the superior beauty of the immaterial soul; why early Christians could see virtue in acts of carpentering, sewing, or gardening yet scorn the love of material things themselves; why the Enlightenment at once embraced and feared the perfection of machines; why Wittgenstein could call his desire to realize a beautiful, perfect building a sickness. The man-made material object is not a neutral fact; it is a source of unease because it is man-made. "
"Schools and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take one concrete step to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job retraining. Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for such efforts. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers oftendon't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor, the Animal laborans of Arendt's imagination. But we've seen throughout this book that just the opposite is the case. For good craftsmen, routines are not static; they evolve, the craftsmen improve. "
"Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elaborated in long term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 247]
"On the steps of the tenements, the improvisers observe and experiment with stoops in relation to their own bodies. Like a jazz musician, a tenement dweller who improvises follows rules. The physical materials at hand in the street are givens, like the written melody of fundamental harmonies spelled out for each number in a jazz musician's "cheat book" (cheating because many of these songs are lifted illegally out of copyright). Good jazz improvisation follows rules of economy; variations pick out an element to explore, otherwise they lose focus; the harmonic reversals are disciplined by what came before. [...] Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas "renewal" projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 236/237]
Impaciência do Coração: Comportamento Humano Desviante e Justiça - Neste programa, Gabriela Moita conversa com o psicólogo Luís Fernandes.
Os objectos transicionais e a aprendizagem musical.
Da importância da separação (insegurança) no processo da criatividade e do impulso para explorar territórios desconhecidos (D. W. Winnicott), tendo sempre, no horizonte, a certeza de que é sempre possível atingir uma perfeição. Ao percorrer esse, árduo, caminho desenvolve-se a expressão.
"Musically we need simply observe that believing in correctness in technique breeds expression. In music, this passage occurs when standards modulate from physical events like playing with a good tone to more aesthetic measures of, for instance, a well-shaped phrase. Of course, spontaneous discoveries and happy accident inform what a musical piece should sound like. Still the composer and the performer must have a criterion to make sense of happy accidents, to select some as happier than others. In developing technique, we resolve transitional objects into definitions, and we make decisions based on such definitions. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 159]
In the meantime silver and gold, the raw materials of money, get no more respect from anyone than their intrinsic value deserves — which is obviously far less than that of iron. Without iron human life is simply impossible, just as it is without fire or water — but we could easily do without silver and gold, if it weren't for the idiotic concept of scarcity-value. And yet kind Mother Nature has deliberately placed all her greatest blessings, like earth, air, and water, right under our noses, and tucked away out of sight the things that are no use to us.
"The craftsman is a more inclusive category than the artisan; he or she represents on each of us the desire to do something well, concretely, for its own sake. [...] but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. [...] From the origins of classical civilization, craftsmen have suffered mistreatment. What has kept them going humanly is belief in their work and their involvement with its materials."
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pag 144]
"Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones. Bad results will cause people to reason harder, and so improve. "
Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg 96]
