The Path to a Craft

Anyone who has had an authentic pathway to a craft can attest to the lack of freedom involved in its genesis; for it to initially spring forth into consciousness is never a matter of freedom but of our thrown facticity.

Craft: Others versus “Self”

Just as one may inherit a disposition to cheerfulness or a lack thereof, so too — and with just as much arbitrariness — may one inherit the disposition to excel in a particular craft.

This, in essence, will always be what one — unencumbered by others and ideally (so, not always feasibly) supported by them — most naturally gravitates toward.

We know what this shall/ought to be for ourselves inasmuch as our feelings of being-empowered increase as we enact the understanding (intellectione) of our craft (techne).

The more one enacts such understanding, the less the other-encumbered one will be, as the more one’s creations will have an effect of encumbering others, thus bolstering them in relation to one in their role as “supportive-other.”

The way that others infiltrate one’s creative-rhythmic-momentum is by co-opting the supportive role — another’s presence must be immediately known as a threat when it disrupts this moment, even in cases where such disruption occurs from a supposed supportive role.

There is, in fact, no difference between this momentum — which is neither linear nor capitalistic concerning the hastiness of manufacturing — and the craftsperson’s (the technite’s) very livelihood (which is to say, it is what anchors their sense of ultimate [non-conventional] value, and thus reality.)

Authentic Works Versus Morals

That is why Vincent Van Gogh, for example, said that his impressionistic portraits of the cypresses he observed in the last years of his life were “exactly as [he] saw them to be; that is how they [were] for [him].”

Thus, the pathway to any craft is one wherein one sees things originally, representing such “visions” in a manner ultimately diluted into conventional forms, which may affect others to further enact craft of any sort.

The origin or arche of a craft is self-perpetuated and blocked to/by oneself as one values others above oneself (as is indistinct from the customs of morality — especially religious morality). For what is being blocked under such circumstances is not other than oneself as self-actualized,

One loses oneself here for an other-defined overlay called “a self” or “myself.”

But one also loses themself in craft, and therefore, we cannot say there is an absolute value to one pathway or another; all we can go on is the presenting of our feelings and what our valuations take them to signify — and the problem here is that most valuations people adhere to as “uppermost” are excessively other-oriented, in that they de-prioritize craft and themselves to both’s underdevelopment.

This leaves both craftspeople and others underdeveloped — one can only give excess value to themselves or a child, so trying to do so with all others (as is common, making good creative works rare) is how such values devalue themselves.

The danger of the creative person is an utter reversal of the script in this context — i.e., only caring for oneself and one’s projective acts of understanding or harmfully de-prioritizing others. This is self-derived narcissism, just as much as excessive care for others is other-derived narcissism.

Any demand for excess care is narcissistic.

The grandness of style across crafts does not necessitate one to be a solitary who seeks refuge only in the phenomenological not-other — one must entrench oneself both in the Earthly and the artistic realms if they are to walk the middle way on the path of craft.

And this is the last thing one should seek — as seeking it is, by definition, its self-undermining.