Grateful Note: Gratitude for a Motorcycle-Fixing Philosopher Who Helps Us Repair Some Knowledge and Reality Problems

This evening, I'm grateful for the insights of Matthew Crawford. His influence has helped me integrate the hands-on and classroom teaching parts of my life, while also helping me see the shortcomings of knowledge work and and philosophical abstractions that often leave us untethered from reality and responsible relationships. 

“My design has never extended beyond trying to reform my own opinion to build on a foundation which is entirely my own.” --Rene Descartes in Discourse on Method

“External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they can pull us out of ourselves. But only if they are treated as external objects, with a reality of their own.” --Matthew Crawford in The World Beyond Our Head

Many folks have heard Rene Descartes’ famous saying, “I think, therefore I am” (“Cogito, ergo sum” in Latin). Mainly, Descartes establishes consciousness and doubt as the foundation of his philosophical approach to knowing. However, it's easy to overlook how Descartes represents a significant, but often unhelpful shift in how people think about knowing and reality. As a 17th century thinker, Descartes is generally considered the father of modern philosophy. 

At the risk of oversimplifying the issues, it seems that Descartes shifted the focus of philosophy from what humans can know in light of reality (epistemology submitting to metaphysics) to more narrowly focusing on what “I” can know via my consciousness (epistemology getting unhooked from metaphysics). Descartes represents a “subjective turn” or emphasis in modern philosophy with many philosophers who follow him, including Hume and Kant.

When you hear someone saying, “Your perception is your reality,” you’re encountering the sort of subjective turn or even egocentric tendency I’m thinking about here. Note that the example is not “Your perception determines your experience of reality,” which is a whole different and more sensible claim.
 

Unhelpfully Separating Knowers from Reality

Descartes’ approach is at the headwaters of an egocentric focus in modern philosophy that creates dualistic fractures in our approaches to knowledge and seeking knowledge. In contrast to philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas, Descartes and his many philosophical descendants shift the focus away from considering persons and reality holistically to a more fragmented focus on consciousness. In many ways, since Descartes, western civilization seems to have lost its ability to understand the value and nature of philosophical common sense. 

Educators tend to miss such problematic issues with philosophies due to a few factors: philosophically shallow teacher training programs, insufficient knowledge backgrounds, and a perennially recurring caricature. That caricature portrays all education as either hopelessly stuck in tradition or progressively enriched by John Dewey-esque emphases on “learning by doing.” Indeed, we can learn by doing, but we need to more fully rethink how we think about paying attention and how we know things. 

 

Repairing Our Focus Problems  

As a motorcycle repairman, philosopher, author, scholar, and tinkerer, Matthew Crawford can help us do some much-needed rethinking of our philosophies of knowledge, ethics, attention, and learning in light of reality. In The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford explores many ways in which our society promotes a restlessly distracted sense of self leaves us out of touch with reality–literally and figuratively. Crawford gently addresses the problem as “narcissism,” which seems increasingly prevalent in our modern personalities. 

When I first read The World Beyond Your Head, I thought Crawford and his publishers were merely sharing another version of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, but Crawford is actually continuing with applications of his philosophically rich intellectual and ethical insights found in Shop Class as Soulcraft. 

In The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford continues to explore how learning craftsmanship through hands-on work in the real world stimulates our intellectual and ethical growth. Delightfully, the author explores the art and craft of building pipe organs as an alternative to the chaotic sense of distraction found in our digital consumer culture.

During the pandemic, I revisited Crawford’s philosophy of hands-on work in light of so much of my own distanced-based knowledge work, especially in the form of remote teaching and learning. I don’t think I’ve ever had six months of so much online teaching and learning in light of COVID-19 conditions. That summer, I signed up for several courses and frequently caught myself in a state of screen-time burnout, even though the work was more substantial than mere browsing, drifting, and doing social media interactions. 

The Crawford-esque experiences that helped me most in those months include numerous hands-on repair projects, which became welcome disruptions because they got me away from the computer screen and back into direct conversation with reality. My list includes the following items, and I’m sure I left a few things out: 

• replaced and installed a dishwasher; 
• replaced a garbage disposal motor; 
• put up shelves in garage; 
• purchased and installed a 5 cubic foot freezer; 
• fixed my refrigerator’s freezer so it wouldn’t ice up and drip water; 
• helped a technician install a radon mitigation system in my crawl space; 
• installed a replacement horn in my pickup truck; 
• installed laminate flooring and tiling in our living room; 
• learned to use new tools for the flooring install;  
• built storage boxes for the new tools; 
• replaced a broken storm door handle;  
• fixed a hydraulic arm and handle for a storm door;
• replaced washers and fitting on a kitchen faucet; replaced a dining room chandelier; 
• put in a tile backdrop behind our stove; 
• and repaired the damage on our RAV4’s right fender well from hitting a racoon. 

Despite the occasional frustrations encountered in such tasks, my work on these items helped me restore my sense of reality (and personal agency) after so much time on Google Classrooms, Google Meets, miscellaneous other learning platforms, and Zoom meetings. 

Rethinking Ancient and Modern Abstracted Work

It may be that Crawford helps us repair an ancient fracture in our theory of knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics. For me, Aristotle most represents such a fracture in thinking about hands-on work and intellectual knowing. His view seems to represent a wide-spread Greek philosophical view of hands-on work that held that such work can “disfigure one’s soul.” Although I haven’t found anywhere where Crawford addresses that ancient bias, he makes a good case for many forms of hands-on work actually enhancing one’s soul. 

In school, we often separate hands-on work from serious academic work, mistakenly thinking that the hands-on work is for laborers who merely do things while thinking that the academic work is for the up-and-coming knowledge workers who need to think more intellectually. 

Matthew Crawford’s earlier work Shop Class as Soulcraft debunks such views with striking counter-examples from his own professional knowledge-worker experiences with situations that helped him understand the appeal of satires such as The Office (and I’d add Dilbert cartoons, even if Scott Adams has been exiled from mainstream publication). Conversely, Crawford makes a good case for intellectually challenging work that can be found in the hands-on work of repairing vintage motorcycles and other forms of craftsmanship.

Matthew Crawford models a powerfully thoughtful and authentic philosophy for living well and pursuing flourishing through our labors–whether those are hands-on labors or the work of knowledge-rich explanations of everyday philosophies and habits. Crawford might be one of America’s best philosophers, especially when it comes to repairing the many fractures between abstract knowledge and concrete experiences.

For the most part, I wrote this blog several years ago during the pandemic. This past summer, I taught a technical writing course for automotive students, and many insights from Matthew Crawford helped me more effectively shape content, themes, and learning activities for my students. Also of immense help were Robert Pirsig's reflections in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and pretty much everything that Mike Rowe has shared over the last five yearsabout the value of hands-on trade work. 

For Further Consideration:

“Manual Competence,” TEDTalk by Matthew Crawford

“The Case for Working With Your Hands,” NY Times Opinion piece by Matthew Crawford 

“The Cost of Paying Attention,” NY Times Opinion piece by Matthew Crawford 

“Attention as a Cultural Problem and the Possibility of Education,” recorded talk by Matthew Crawford

 

So much good work to do and to be grateful for...  

 

Grateful Note: Rest Is a Much Needed Idea to Practice

This evening, I am grateful for the idea of rest. It sounds so simple to rest, yet it can be so difficult. I find myself sometimes bristling a little bit when my loved one suggests that I take some time to relax. 

Both common sense and spiritual wisdom from many traditions admonish us to rest, for our good and the good of those around us. We actually get more done by taking more time to rest, in intervals during the day, at night through sleep, and through some sort of weekly version of a rest day. 

How strange to think that part of our restlessness may be caused by sloth, technically called "acedia" in an older tradition. The Catholic scholar Josephy Pieper explains that in the Middle ages, "it was held that sloth and restlessness, 'leisurelessness', the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of 'work for work’s sake'" (Leisure: The Basis of Culture 43). In this sense, restlessness is largely caused by a lazy reluctance to decide on and pursue the discipline of regular rest and the restraint of unhindered ambition. 

I remember when I first came across Pieper's claim: I thought it strange and contradictory compared to what I had come to assume as a sort of inherited, unbalanced continuation of the Protestant work ethic in recent centuries. It's likely that any heritage of restlessness has little to do with the legacy of Puritan traditions or practices and much more to do with pursuing what Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey refer to as "immanent contentment": See Why We Are Restless for their exploration of this idea. 

Storey and Storey provide a compelling argument that we've inherited a self-defeating tendency in our uncritical adoption of striving for immanent contentment, reaching back to Michele de Montaigne in the sixteenth century. This notion of immanent contentment is an ideal conception of having the just-right blend of engaging pursuits, relationships, attitudes, and self-development strategies. The harder we seek this just-right experience, the more it seems to elude us. It's a sort of psychological utopia that can be found nowhere. 

Storey and Storey's argument is compelling because I frequently catch myself striving for this sort of perfect experience of rest. Paradoxically, this ideal of striving to have immanent contentment sets off ripple effects of restlessness, individually, societally, and historically. No doubt there are some other contributors to trends in restlessness, but the impossible search for immanent contentment deserves honest consideration as a root-cause candidate. 

Another way to consider this is that rest is a good idea but a horrible ideal, at least for our mortal lives in the days that we have. Idea vs ideal is not a trivial difference in spelling but a big difference in ambitions and expectations. Modestly practicing the idea of rest, but letting go of the immediate pursuit of ideal rest is a tricky discipline. Immanent contentment seems to drive folks into lives of quiet (and not-so-quiet) desperation. 

What's a better approach? For starters, the best wisdom is to, "Give it a rest," whether it's through the practice of regular sabbaths or some other variety of activity reduction. Once a week, the best sources recommend that we pause as many things as possible. This will lead to facing potential stretches of boredom, but learning to embrace and welcome that boredom can help us let go of the incessant, immediate happiness-hunts. 

When I'm trying to relax, it sometimes helps me to remember the advice of a wise guest ranch owner I know. I remember something he liked to tell his guests upon arrival: "The secret to a great vacation is to lower your expectations." 

Something else I'm discovering is that simple exercises of practicing gratitude on a regular basis can do much to ward off the insatiable hunger for immanent contentment. I'm also finding myself more often just enjoying sitting still, silently or doing some simple task without overthinking it.

Thinking back to a previous post in which I asked, "Why write if nobody will read it?", I find that writing, even if nobody reads it, is an effective way to practice expressing gratitude, a sort of spiritual discipline. We talk a lot about a "growth mindset,"but there's also much to be gained from developing a "gratitude mindset." So, writing can help, even if nobody reads it.  

On that note, I thought I'd draft and post this on Saturday evening and "give it a rest" tomorrow.  

So many ideas and people to be thankful for...  

Grateful Note: The Grace of Great Things with Rilke and Palmer

This morning I'm grateful for the grace of great things. I've reworked this post from a previous pandemic-era posting years ago from my now defunct blog site.

"'And thou wilt have the grace of the great things.' For it was just that which Rodin was seeking: the grace of the great things." --from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Auguste Rodin"

As educators and thoughtful human beings, we often should be subject-centered and thereby more relationally-minded in our teaching, living, and pursuit of long-term flourishing. Being subject-centered sounds counterintuitive, but it's true and helpful. Under the influence of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Parker Palmer explains in The Courage to Teach that subject-centered teaching is the best way to approach teaching and learning. Rilke and Palmer are just a few of the many thoughtful writers who compel me to assert that good subject-centered knowledge rightly guides better relationships.

In The Courage to Teach, Palmer finds wisdom in Rilke's celebration of "the grace of great things." Many years after reading Palmer and first appreciating this theme, I chased down the reference to "the grace of great things" in Rilke's written reflections in"Auguste Rodin." Rilke suggests his own sustained subject-focused view of art, poetry, and the art of living as he considers Rodin's work. Palmer and Rilke both invite us into subject-centered lifestyles that can enhance our work, relationships, and lives. 

Palmer's most important distinction is that subject-centered learning is not the same as teacher-centered learning. In subject-centered learning, the teacher and students gather around the great things of the study: great art, great science, great literature, great history, great math, etc. In such subject-centeredness, the classroom becomes a community of truth (for truth seeking and truth seeking, as Cornell West and Robert F. George assert in Truth Matters). It also can also become a community of goodness and beauty. 

Unfortunately, many educators conceive of subject-centered teaching as teacher-centered. This is a misunderstanding. The top-down, factory-model of such teacher-centered models is far from the healthy community found in true subject-centered teaching. That is not what Palmer advocates: The teacher-centered model tends to reduce learning to information bits and skills to isolated behaviors. (This teacher-centered approach reflects an overly objectivist way of knowing.) 

Reflecting back now on what I wrote here a few years ago, I'm reminded of my more recent readings of neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist, who argues that our left-hemisphere approach to learning and science tends to default toward starting with the smallest bits of reality and working up to larger chunks of understanding. Although McGilchrist acknowledges the value of that at times, he warns that we lose a lot of meaning, value, and ethical insight by not balancing that approach with more holistic and intuitive approaches to learning and knowing. That sort of approach comes from a right-hemisphere approach and orientation.

Trying to avoid the traps of objectivism, educators often mistakenly try to ground their work in the subjective assumptions and tendencies of student-centered learning. Years ago, as I worked through some of my series of posts on "Who's Afraid of Epistemology?", I increasingly realized how difficult it is to find common ground with many educators about the importance of subject-centered knowledge in education. Student-centered (basically self-centered) visions of education have crowded out the rich potential of the better vision. We're confusing schools with shopping malls and online retail services. (This student-centered approach reflects an overly subjective way of knowing.) 

Without subject-centered guidance, student-centered teaching and learning become gasoline on the fire of consumeristic and narcissistic trends that detract from the mature growth, community-mindedness, and long-term flourishing of our students.

Our attraction to student-centeredness also seems to be part of a larger historical and cultural pattern. We seem to have a postmodern eclectic (or neo-Epicurean) approach to individualism and relationships that automatically dismisses the importance and possibility of common knowledge to gather around and grow with. The lack of such a common ground fractures our relationships. The fracturing of any common focus disrupts good efforts at education, and I'm sure it's a contributing factor to our political discourse's chaotic nature. 

To some extent, I got into learning and got into teaching because of "the grace of great things" that can be found in true subject-centered approaches to learning. Such grace is often instrumental for overcoming discouragement as a teacher and a learner. The COVID crisis and our political chaos have ramped up my awareness of how much we need better ways to develop community: More subject-centeredness can help. We need ways to get our minds off of ourselves. There are diverse sources of great writers and great things for us to be graced by. Reading, discussing, and writing about great writers has helped keep desiring to teach and learn.

Reflecting back now on my earlier version of this posting from the pandemic-era, I realize that Ian McGilchrist has helped me understand that much of my interest and (sporadic) success with teaching and learning has come from learning to embrace right-hemisphere visions for life, learning, and flourishing, while also learning to engage all sorts of left-hemisphere approaches to managing the business of teaching and learning, including dealing with time management and effective resource allocation. Perhaps, along these lines for a future posting, I could ponder some ways our minds might benefit from working more from a right- to left-hemisphere approach for teaching and learning (something like, from metaphysics to molecules, and back again?). Oliver Keen's recent book on Thomas Aquinas fits well with such a right-hemisphere approach with it's focus on thinking as an ongoing conversation with reality (See Why Aquinas Matters Now).

Also, as a disclaimer, I'm starting my fourth year working here with all sorts of thoughtful, effective educators at the community college level. Learner-centered pedagogy often comes up in discussions as with these effective teachers who have stuck with college-level work for quite a while. Although that learner-centered approach can slide into some student-centered dysfunctions, for the most part, learner-centered pedagogy tracks well with subject-centered learning in Palmer's sense. Much of learner-centered pedagogy could also be called learning-centered pedagogy, which makes good, practical sense.  

So much teaching and learning about teaching and learning to be grateful for...
 

Grateful Note: Labor Day and Various Thinkers on Work

This evening, I'm grateful for the varieties of work that keep human life going in all it's dimensions. With Walt Whitman, we can still "Hear America Singing" our various songs while we work. Some of the songs may have become edgy and cynical, but guys like Mike Rowe do much to remind us of the goodness of hands-on work and how it is more important than ever. 

Despite the absurd satire around The Office concerning so-called knowledge work, there's still a lot to be gained from working on all kinds of work. 

This morning, I scanned my bookshelves for books that have something significant, directly or indirectly, to say about work, and different kinds of work. I was surprised to find how books I have, old and new, related to work in some way, and I thought I'd play with a few AI tools to help take inventory of some of the books and ideas I've worked through over the years. I'm fascinated by ways that AI tools may or may not be helpful for work. At times, we lean too much on the emerging tools, and the hype does get exhausting, but sometimes AI tools are actually helpful. Just don't expect too much of them or assume too much about their accuracy!

In this case, I used a free AI voice transcriber to capture the authors and titles of  the books I had slightly pulled out of my shelf. Later, I ran that list through ChatGPT to edit, clean it up, and group it into categories. The results aren't terrible, as a friend of mine would say. I did a lot of shuffling and adjusting categories, and it still seems incomplete. Each of these books could get a post from me about gratitude for their insights and opinions. 

Work, Vocation, and the Meaning of Labor

Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life by Bahnsen
Redeeming Capitalism by Barnes
What Are People For? by Berry
The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus 
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Crawford

Common Arts Education: Renewing the Classical Tradition of Training the Hands, Head, and Heart by Chris Hall
Every Good Endeavor by Keller
Essentialism by McKeown
The Sacredness of Secular Work by Raynor
Small is Beautiful by Schumacher

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Terkel

Making Things Right: The Simple Philosophy of Working Life by Thorstensen
"On Principle" by Thoreau

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Weber 

In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden by Williams and Breen  

 

The Work of Teaching, Learning, and Human Formation

How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren
The Well-Educated Mind by Bauer 
What the Best College Teachers Do by Bain
Engaging Ideas by Bean
The English Coach’s Instructional Playbook by Berry and Degen
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey 
Designing Your New Work Life by Burnett and Evans
Why Read? by Edmundson 

Truth Matters by George and West 

The Art of Teaching by Highet 

The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt  
The Vocation of a Teacher by Morris 

The Courage to Teach by Palmer

The DOSE Effect by Power
Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys by Smith and Wilhelm
These Six Things by Stuart 
Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian by The Great Books Foundation
Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform by Tyack and Cuban
Education for Human Flourishing by Spears and Loomis
Effective Grading by Walvoord and Anderson

Renovation of the Heart by Willard 

The Work of Rhetoric, Writing, and the Craft of Communication

Zen and the Art of Writing by Bradbury
The Rhetoric of Rhetoric by Booth
The Craft of Research by Booth, Colomb, and Williams
Writing and the Sense of Self by Brooke
Teaching Arguments by Fletcher
Writing Rhetorically by Fletcher
Can Poetry Matter? by Gioia
Rewriting by Harris
Bird by Bird by Lamott
Revising Prose by Lanham
A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers by Lindemann
How to Think Like Shakespeare by Newstok
The Language of Life by Moyers
The Writer’s Workshop by Roper

The Work of Thinking, Philosophy, and Human Understanding

Politics by Aristotle
How to Know a Person by Brooks
The Good Life Method by Sullivan and Blaschko
How to Think by Jacobs
Learning to Disagree by Inazu
Socratic Logic by Kreeft 

Looking at Philosophy by Palmer 
Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas by Pegis 

The Constitution of Knowledge by Rauch 

Working with Technology, the Future, and Society

Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury 
2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity by Lennox
Being Digital by Negroponte
1984 by Orwell  

Technopoly by Postman 
Future Shock by Toffler

More than Words by Warner  

Ancient, Classic, and Literary Reflections on Work and Life

The Enuma Elish by unknown  
Genesis by Moses
Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth
The Divine Comedy by Dante
"A&P" by Updike
Death of a Salesman by Miller
The Milagro Beanfield War by Nichols
The Winter of Our Discontent by Steinbeck

Working on Relationships, Conflict, and Cooperation 

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by Gottman
How to Have Impossible Conversations by Boghossian and Lindsay
The Peacemaker by Sande
Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton, and Heen
Reclaiming Conversation by Turkle

Working on Productivity, Creativity, Society, and Culture

Making It All Work by Allen   

The Advancement of Learning by Bacon 

The Mythmakers by Hendrix

Steal Like an Artist by Kleon
Capital by Marx
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
The Master and His Emissary by McGilchrist
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Rose 

The Wealth of Nations by Smith  

The Mind of the Maker by Sayers 

So much work and so many workers to be grateful for...