(7) Meaningful work and self-reliance are both ideals tied to a struggle for individual agency
Both as workers and consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces
We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense
(17) [When repairman comes] We're not as free and independent as we thought
Street-level work that disrupts the infrastructure (the sewer system below or the electrical grid above) brings our shared dependence into view
(31) Assembly line severed the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution
Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of white collar versus blue collar, corresponding to mental versus manual
(42) In 1900 there were 7,632 wagon and carriage manufacturers in the United States. Adopting Ford's methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three
(51) Creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice
Built up through submission (musician practicing scales, Einstein learning tensor algebra)
Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence
Such competence is the condition for genuine creativity + economic independence of the tradesman
(53) Carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics require circumspection and adaptability. One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine
The trades are a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life
Freedom from hope and fear is the Stoic ideal
(56) Ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen
Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility
To be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it
Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed at mudras
There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality
(60) [Rider of old motorcycle] His will is educated - both chastened and focused - so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only what he wants
(63) There seems to be a tension between a certain kind of agency and a certain kind of autonomy, and this is worth thinking about
(65) Learning a foreign language, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect
Task = difficult; goal = distant and perhaps never entirely attainable
My work = progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me
Attention is rewarded by knowledge of reality
Hardness of language learning is at odds with ontology of consumerism
Thing vs device
Musical instrument vs. stereo
Meaning thru inherent qualities vs. shifting psychic needs
(66) Focal practices (ex: family singing around a guitar) gather our world and radiate significance in ways that contrast with the diversion and distraction afforded by commodities
(68) What if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is really fundamental to the way human beings inhabit the world?
Problem of technology = we live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us
We have too few occasions to do anything
Remote control makes the spirited man angry; it offends the pride he takes in self-reliance
But the modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption, and it starts early in life
(70) The market ideal of Choice by an autonomous Self seems to act as a kind of narcotic that makes the displacing of embodied agency go smoothly, or precludes the development of such agency by providing easier satisfactions
The growing dependence of individuals in fact is accompanied by ever more shrill invocations of freedom in theory, that is, in the ideology of consumerism
Paradoxically, we are narcissistic but not proud enough
(146) Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses
Might want to improve student by first crushing him - to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages
Such studies are likely to embolden him against timid conventionality, and humble him against the self-satisfaction of the age, which he wears on his face. These are the pedagogical uses of the "D".
Low grade --> presses upon you that admission to law school hangs in the balance. The Sort is on.
(157) [On a construction site] Either you can bend conduit or you can't, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances
Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn't quite so fragile
(163) To regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of embodiment and purposiveness, those features of actual thinkers who are always in particular situations.
(164) Principle question of cognitive science = how the mind "represents" the world (since mind and world are conceived to be entirely distinct)
For Heidegger, there is no problem of re-presenting the world, because the world presents itself originally as something we are already in and of.
Preoccupation of knowing things "as they are in themselves" he found to be wrongheaded, tied to a dichotomy between subject and object that isn't true to our experience
Expert knowledge that is inherently situated = firefighter or mechanic
(191) Depersonalization caused the 2008 housing crisis (2007-2009 recession)
Wall Streeter cannot be sustained by his work, so he goes and climbs Everest/tours the Amazon
"It is in this gated ghetto of his second life that he inhabits once again an intelligible moral order where feeling and action are linked, if only for a couple weeks"
(194) To take pleasure in an activity is to engage in that activity while being absorbed in it
Absorption = single-minded and lively attention to whatever it is that seems to make the activity good or worth pursuing
If struck by only instrumental value of the activity…one's attention is only directed at the expected results
At something other than what one is doing
This sort of attention…absents us from our activity and renders it burdensome
(197) If we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life
(199) The trades resist tendency toward remote control, because they're inherently situated in a particular context
(206) Agency is a activity directed toward some end that is affirmed as good by the actor
This affirmation is not something arbitrary and private
Rather, it flows from an apprehension of real features of the world
(207) A tradesman's individuality is not only compatible with, it is realized through his efforts to reach a goal that is common
Basic functional ends that are captured by objective standards of the practice
The lights turn on, the level sets, the car drives fast
His individuality is thus expressed in an activity that connects him to others
Customers/practitioners of his art, who are competent to recognize the peculiar excellence of his work
(208) ^Such a sociable individuality contrasts with the self-enclosure that is implicit in the idea of "autonomy", or giving law to oneself
Autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us
Posits essential aloneness; the autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free
Regard oneself in this way = betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude
In fact, we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is not of our making
In the West, we've failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power
Consolation we seek in shopping serves only to narcotize us against a recognition of these facts
Concentration of capital ---> Opportunities for self-employment and self-reliance are preempted by distant forces
(210) The revolutionary, for his part, entertains an exaggerated fantasy of world-changing
Heady vision of the progressive hereafter…may stand in for, and distract him from, the smaller but harder work of living well in this life
The alternative to revolution, which I want to call Stoic, is resolutely this-worldly
It insists on the permanent, local viability of what is best in human beings
In practice, this means seeking out the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one's own life