Resonant Thoughts: Soetsu Yanagi’s “The Uknown Craftsman” (1972)

“Machine-made things are children of the brain; they are not very human. The more they spread, the less the human being is needed. What seems to be a great advance is also a great step backward; the desire for the natural as opposed to the artificial surely has some basic, unchanging significance.

No machine can compare with a man’s hands. Machinery gives speed, power, complete uniformity, and precision, but it cannot give creativity, adaptability, freedom, heterogeneity. These the machine is incapable of, hence the superiority of the hand, which no amount of rationalism can negate. Man prefers the creative and the free to the fixed and standardized” (108).

“One may be able to turn intuition into knowledge, but one cannot produce intuition out of knowledge” (110).

“Freedom comes from infinite repetition of a technique” (175).

Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s