Glenn Adamson on Material Intelligence

Peter's twin brother Glenn Adamson discusses the philosophical implications of craft.

• G. Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (New York: 2007).

• G. Adamson, The Craft Reader (London: 2010).

• G. Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: 2013).

• G. Adamson, Fewer, Better Things: the Hidden Wisdom of Objects (London: 2018).

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

Peter: Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and welcome to a special bonus episode of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. We're on summer break right now, so there are no new normal podcasts appearing in August. So I thought it would be a good chance to do something special and a little bit unexpected and have on a unique guest, if I may put it like that, namely my identical twin brother, Glenn Adamson. I thought this would be interesting because he, although he's not a philosopher, works in areas that are philosophically interesting, as I hope you'll be convinced. And also you'll all have the exciting challenge of trying to tell the difference between our two voices. So say hello, Glenn.

Glenn: Hi there. This is Glenn and it's a pleasure to be on the podcast with you, Peter.

Peter: We're actually recording this on our birthday, which of course is the same day. So happy birthday, Glenn.

Glenn: Happy birthday, Peter.

Peter: Thank you very much. And by the way, like this is not a gag. I mean, this is not me doing two people. He's really a different person. Maybe we should say something at the same time so people believe each other. So let's both say at the same time, happy birthday. One, two, three...

Together: Happy Birthday!

Peter: Okay, so now you believe us. Good. So, Glenn, tell the listeners who you are apart from being my identical twin brother.

Glenn: Well, first, let me say what a big fan I am of the podcast, Peter.

Peter: Oh, thank you very much.

Glenn: And I guess you could say I'm a museum curator, first and foremost, trained as an art historian. And I have a particular interest in the history and theory of craft. So my work tends to be around issues of 'skilled making' of one type or another. And I've looked at that in a lot of different situations, including things you might expect like furniture making or ceramics, but also things like fine art practice. So what does it mean to craft a sculpture or craft a painting, craft a piece of architecture? So a lot of what I do is try to chase the idea of craft around and culture and see where it actually lives and what people think about it.

Peter: And he's too modest to say this, but he's also astonishingly good looking. That's part of what you bring to the table. Right. So I thought, obviously, you've written a lot about craft over the years. But I thought we could maybe concentrate on what you talked about in your most recent book. So maybe just tell us the title of that and then we'll get into what the book is about.

Glenn: Sure. So the book is called Fewer Better Things, The Hidden Wisdom of Objects. And it's a book that tells some personal stories, actually from our family history, including particularly the story of our grandfather who grew up on a farm in Kansas. And he would be a great example of someone who knew a lot about the things in his life. He knew how to make ice cream from scratch. He knew how to build or mend a fence. He knew how to milk a cow. He knew how to fix a motorcycle or a tractor. And I was really struck growing up watching him, you know, carve wood by hand or listen to him talk about his job as an aircraft engineer. In fact, he had a business card that said "Arthur Adamson - wood carvings and jet engines made to order." And it's that kind of person that I talk about in the book. So really, it's an effort to get across the value that people who have a lot of knowledge and understanding of the physical world around us have. You might say it's a kind of tacit knowledge, which, as you say, may be a kind of philosophically interesting idea.

Peter: Actually, I guess a lot of people might think of this as the antithesis of being a philosopher, because philosophers are usually supposed to dwell in the abstract realm of pure thought. Like, how could someone like me have possibly come from the same family as someone as our grandfather, right? Because he was so handy and practical and kind of down to earth. But you think that there's something philosophically interesting about the practice of making things with your hands.

Glenn: I think there's even something very interesting about the fact that I think about craft all the time and you think about philosophy, because they're kind of opposite sides of the same coin. So the fact that both of us ended up having these primary interests in our career, I think that itself is kind of striking. But yes, in the book, I talk a lot about the concept of material intelligence. A minute ago, I used the word tacit, so tacit knowledge, for example. It's the kind of intelligence that somebody has, you might say, in their hands or in an embodied way. So knowing how to plane a board or knowing how to throw a pot at a wheel or knowing exactly what viscosity of acrylic paint you want to make a particular mark on a particular painting. Those kinds of things are very, very difficult to put into language, but I still think that they deserve to be seen as a kind of intelligence and a kind of knowledge.

Peter: Does it make a big difference that you're actually dealing with material? Because I was thinking that, for example, if I'm writing a podcast script, there's a lot of the same things going on, right? So I'm interacting with maybe language. I'm trying to put words together. And just as a craftsperson might not be able to spell out in great detail for you exactly why they're doing everything they're doing, I might not be able to explain to you why I think this joke works in a podcast. Okay, a lot of the time the jokes don't work. I know that. But when it does work, I might not be able to explain why it's just sort of funny or whether a sentence is put together well or something that's sort of like a craft type activity, isn't it? Even though there's no matter involved.

Glenn: Yes. And in fact, people often do use the word craft as a kind of metaphor. For example, people will talk about the craft of poetry...

Peter: or a well-crafted sentence.

Glenn: ...or well-crafted sentence. I've always been of the feeling, though, that material that's external to your body and external to language exerts a kind of friction and a kind of specificity on your creative work or the execution of an idea that is quite different to language. And my example to kind of bear that out would be that any specific board of walnut will have a slightly different set of qualities to any other board, which is quite different from the word "walnut" or the word "wood." So I feel like material intelligence often has to do with a kind of adaptability and this infinitely rich, flexible capability of dealing with the stuff that you're trying to shape, give shape to.

Peter: And this is an expertise you can only acquire by actually dealing with material of that kind over and over and over.

Glenn: This is one of the most interesting things about it is to think about the way that you acquire material intelligence and just parenthetically, I'll point out that in general we seem to have a lot less material intelligence floating around in the culture than we used to. So on the farm where our grandfather was raised in Kansas, he wasn't unusual in having all of these abilities, you know, the ice cream and the fence and the cow and the motorcycle, he would have almost been expected to be able to do all those things. Whereas today I think that kind of general material intelligence is quite rare. We actually have a lot of specific material intelligence in our culture so engineers who have a very very deep relationship to a particular material for example, or even people who make food for a living so they know an awful lot about cooking chicken, an awful lot about making a sauce. But what we seem to have less of is a general material intelligence going to be applied to all sorts of different purposes. And I feel like that's a problem, partly because it tends to, it tends to make people underestimate the degree to which they have a lot in common with other people and other walks of life. So I think of that general material intelligence - a kind of literacy in objects as being like a social connective tissue that we are in danger of losing because of the increasing dependency that we have on technology. And that brings me back to this question of how you get trained in material intelligence, because you really cannot do it just by reading about it, and arguably you can't do it even just by watching a video that shows you how to plane that board or how to make that ice cream from scratch. You have to do it and then you have to do it again and again and again with your own body. And so, when people say tacit or embodied knowledge that's really what they mean - they mean that something that's been instilled in you, muscle and bone, through your own direct experience which is what makes it so very particular not only particular to the materials, planing walnut as opposed to plnning ebony as opposed to planing elm, and what that feels like and how you need to work the tool, but also what's particular to your own body, and what works for you, how you're going to stand, the particular gestures you're going to make. So it's very very rich very complicated and as I say I think also self evidently a kind of knowledge.

Peter: But it's still something that someone else can help you to acquire rights, if you have a classic relationship between the master and the apprentice, the apprentice is trying to plane the walnut or indeed the ebony - I didn't know you could plane ebony actually. Amazing what you can plane. You're trying to plane the walnut and the master is standing over you and saying things like, 'not so hard' or 'slower' or whatever, and guiding you but you still basically have to do it yourself.

Glenn: Or 'hold the tool like this.' Or 'here's how I do it. So try it this way.' And then maybe you'll do it that way, maybe you won't. And that's precisely the kind of situation that we probably don't have as much in our culture as we used to so we don't have guilds, we don't have those traditional master-apprentice relationships. We don't have farms where people observe and participate in those kinds of making that I was describing. And so, in general we're more and more distanced from the world around us, so I always like to use the example of a chair. So maybe a lot of listeners right now are sitting down. And it might be interesting for them to think about how much they actually know about the object they're sitting in - what materials that was made from, how were those materials worked, where was it made, who made it - because material intelligence also has this kind of social imprint. And so, again, if you don't understand how something was made, or who made it, or what their lives were like, what kind of ethical responsibility can you have to your material environment? And obviously that has environmental implications and implications about other people's labor. So there's a kind of political dimension to this as well. It's not just knowing how to plane that board it's also understanding what that means in a larger context.

Peter: Okay, because I was really wondering, what would you say if somebody objected to you 'well okay I don't know how to plane a board, and I can't make a chair - but who cares? I don't need to know things like that because they make them very well at factories, I can go to IKEA.' This podcast by the way not brought to you by IKEA - but 'I can go to IKEA (other furniture shops are available), and I can just buy these things. I don't need to know all this' and the reason why we don't have material intelligence anymore is that we don't need it, because we've kind of outgrown that phase of human history, and you would say what to that?

Glenn: Yeah, and in fact I'm no ace crafts person myself, so I'm certainly not sitting here saying that everybody needs to know how to make everything in their environment in fact, I think, again if listeners will just look around the room, wherever they are, or if they're in a car, around that car interior. I would suggest that very very few people could make everything within eye shot of any one person at any given time. So it's not a matter of total knowledge in the sense of being able to make those things, but it's rather a matter of curiosity and awareness that, first of all things are difficult to make, and there are specific conditions in which they are made, and also the openness to the idea of material intelligence as a kind of intelligence that we should value, which again has a kind of political dimension to it. So the idea that philosophy professors and manual laborers should be seen as different to one another and the level and importance of knowledge that they have - rather than thinking that the professor has knowledge and the manual labor doesn't.

Peter: Actually this thing about could you make everything in your life. There's a story that makes it what's way into a Platonic dialogue there was this sophist named Hippias. I think that's right, that it's Hippias, and it's mentioned that he showed up at the Olympic Games and everything on his body he had made himself. So he'd made his own clothing, he'd made his own sandals, he'd made his own belt, and that was this was an ancient Greece right and that was already thought to be a very remarkable thing to have done - to have mastered all of these crafts sufficiently that he could even just kit himself out in a full wardrobe. So even then that wasn't possible nevermind now.

Glenn: Right, when the repertoire of materiality was much simpler, even at that point it was past the horizon of human capability. I've been very interested to learn, in fact from you, Peter about Plato's thoughts on these questions, which is not something I had known about - but he apparently puts it quite a high value on the concept of techne, which is one of these words that's hard to translate from the Greek, I guess, but you could say it's a rough equivalent to our word "craft."

Peter: Yeah, that's how people usually translate it. Yeah, art or craft.

Glenn: Right. So, for example, our word "architect" comes from master builder. Or "technical." So, you know, there is a place for craft, at least in ancient philosophy where it's accorded a very high value, and our sense that craft might be a kind of lower calling, or lower vocation, than something that a lawyer or doctor or philosopher might do. That seems to me to be of relatively recent vintage, I would actually myself date it to the late 18th early 19th century and the onset of industrialism, because I think it's only once you have the machine in the picture, then making something by hand starts to seem somewhat ineffective or inadequate. So it's only by juxtaposition or contrast with industrial production, mass production, that craft starts to acquire all of these qualities that we tend to attribute to it. So for example, traditionalism or smallness of scale, inefficiencies, slowness, but also of course positive characteristics like high quality or luxury production, humane qualities like the kind of warmth of handworked wood...

Peter: The uniqueness of the item, because if it's handmade, there's only one.

Glenn: Yeah, exactly. Which of course relates again to questions of value luxury production, but I'm also very opposed to the idea that having a high level of respect for material intelligence needs to mean that you spend more money on things. So, for example, I use the title Fewer Better Things in my book title, and that might sound like, I mean you should just buy things at Hermes once a year, but that's not what I mean. And I also like to use the example of, you know, let's say you're walking along the beach with a child and the child picks one stone up off the beach and hands it to you, and then you take it home in your pocket and you put it in a special place and you always remember that day with that child because of that one stone. That to me would be a great example of what I'm talking about, even though it wasn't even made by that child. The child infused it in that moment with value. Gifts are often like that, relics are often like that. And in a way handmade artifacts are like that too because they have that single connection, that single moment of meaning that's put into them by a person. So, my message I guess would be to say that it would be great if we all had lives that were filled with objects that were more like that, rather than just that, rather than the kind of impersonal Ikea generated detritus that we actually seem to have all around us.

Peter: Right. And now I'm starting to be worried we're going to be sued by Ikea.

Glenn: Taking their name in vain.

Peter: Yeah, hopefully they're not listening. Let me go back to something we've been talking about a couple of times, and it actually relates to what you said about Plato, which is that craft is a kind of knowledge, or that material intelligence is a kind of knowledge, because this is not the kind of knowledge philosophers usually think about. There's a whole branch of philosophy called epistemology, we've covered a lot of epistemological topics in the podcast. And usually epistemology is about knowledge that, I would say, takes propositional form. In other words, roughly speaking, there's a sentence, you believe the sentence is true and then it counts as knowledge if your reasons for believing that the sentence are true are good enough reasons that it amounts to knowledge. So that's a very kind of rough outline. But the point is that knowledge would be propositional, basically because you could spell it out in words. And we've already said that in the case of something like knowing how to shape a piece of wood into a straight board, there's something that transcends or escapes language, right, because you can't really just tell someone how to do it, in words even. And it's also maybe not just a matter of having beliefs, like, it's you it's, I mean, you might also believe it's better to use this kind of tool. But a lot of is knowing how to do something, rather than knowing that something is the case or knowing that something is true. So do you think that it is even appropriate to use the word knowledge. In this case, I mean, I guess you do because you keep saying it. But why do you think that that counts as a kind of knowledge if it's not propositional?

Glenn: So we're talking about 'knowing how' versus 'knowing that.' Right, so I know that this board is straight - that's knowledge, but in some sense, knowing how to plane it would not be. So I guess I would say two things to that: one is that I think it's such a common sense use of the word "knowledge" to include that kind of capability or skill that if we don't include it in our conception of knowledge, then we've probably gone wrong somewhere. So I would say maybe the, the burden of proof there would be on the person who wants to hold to a very strict propositional definition of knowledge. But maybe a more convincing argument would be to say that the 'knowing how' and the 'knowing that' aren't actually separable from one another. So, in fact, if you are planning a board. There's going to be a moment when you look at it in a raking light to see if there's any high spots or low spots. And that is, to some extent, an embodied skill, where you know what wood like that should look like, because you've done it a lot. And you also know what is going to happen if you run that plane across it again. It's probably not something you're thinking through logically or consciously and in the sense that you would a proposition, but there's also a sort of standard external fact finding process that's going on there. So I know that this board is not planed correctly yet in the same way that I know that you are bald, and by the way, so am I. So, there's a way in which in craft processes 'knowing how' and 'knowing that' are always bound up in one another in a manner that would be very difficult to disentangle, and I would imagine that that's probably true in other contexts of knowledge as well.

Peter: Yeah, like playing piano, let's say or surgery. Right. These are in fact are kind of craft-material processes as well as though, although we don't think of them as crafts.

Glenn: Yeah, exactly. I think music, athleticism, again cooking. These are all things that seem quite close to craftsmanship - surgery is another thing people often mention. I tend to think that the crafts are activities in which there's something left behind. So the reason you don't think of making furniture and playing basketball as being quite the same is because after the basketball game is over, it's over - same with a violin performance. So it's something quite specific in the idea of making a chair and then having it sit there as the evidence of your work. And there's a lot that flows from that so just to take one to me interesting example: you might notice that most of the things around you are symmetrical and wonder why that is, and one answer that has been given is that 'well people are symmetrical so that means we like symmetrical things,' but a much more convincing argument is that a symmetrical object is already a check on craft skill because if the left side and the right side match, and it wasn't made in a rotational process - on a lathe for example, or on a potter's wheel - but was actually just made by hand, then you know that the person who made it knew that what they were doing. Because only somebody that knows what they're doing can make the left side and the right side match, and that probably is the reason that so many objects in our lives are symmetrical. So that's a good example of the way that an object that has been made - once it actually goes out into the world, has a kind of recursive relationship to the act of making. And you don't really have the same thing as that in basketball or Beethoven concertos.

Peter: The participants in this conversation are also symmetrical.

Glenn: Yes, exactly on our couch.

Peter: Maybe too many twin jokes. Okay. So I think there might be this kind of philosophical prejudice against this idea, this thinking of material intelligence or craft as a knowledge in this way. But I'm struck by - to go back to Plato one more time - I'm struck by the fact that he actually treats techne, "craft," as a kind of paradigm for knowledge. And a lot of the time in the Socratic dialogues, you get the impression that what Socrates is suggesting is that we need to find a craft or techne for virtue or ethics like living in the world that is more or less like the technique that, say, a carpenter has. So what he wants to do is acquire expertise in life that would work a lot like the way that a carpenter's expertise works. And I think there's a theme also in Aristotle that picks up on that as well, because he talks about ethics being a kind of negotiation with this bewilderingly complex world where you have to react to each situation in the right way. And the situations are infinitely variable, and also you as an agent will have certain features that distinguish you from other agents. And actually this is something I was thinking might apply to the craft case, because if I'm planning a piece of wood, it's not just what the wood is like - it's also what my body is like, how strong am I, how tall am I. And Aristotle thinks that - he actually says that this means that ethics is not a very exact science. So you can't - the philosopher can't come along and say: 'here's exactly how you're going to have to behave in all cases.' Rather than that, all the philosopher, the ethicist, can do is give you a kind of general description of what virtue is going to be like. And how virtue works, how you can be educated into virtue - but the specific action you take in a specific situation is always going to be somehow, something that the virtuous person has to discern in each case which sounds a lot like what you've been saying about craft.

Glenn: Right, actually, it's an ability to navigate material, often, that we're talking about when we talk about craft. And it is interesting to hear you talk about this because I think philosophy often has a bad rap among people who think a lot about craft, because they assume that philosophy sort of has it in for physical embodied knowledge, and a great example of that would be the Cartesian mind body split - which we're all looking forward to hearing about on your podcast soon. So often, people in my field will take that as a kind of prejudicial structure, where the mind is held to be 'higher' than the body - it's exalted above the body in some way. Which I think is not probably a satisfactory reading of what Descartes was thinking about. I realize there's a complicated story there but I think that, in general, it would be much better to fold material intelligence, or similar related related topics, within the domain of philosophical curiosity rather than to think of embodied knowledge as somehow opposed to philosophical knowledge. I think you can draw that conclusion, because of this idea that embodied knowledge is tacit, but in fact I think that you can perfectly adequately philosophize about tacit understanding.

Peter: There's another theme in Aristotle actually that, in fact, I think if I were going to point a finger at a bad guy here I would probably pick Aristotle, and not Descartes - despite the parallel I just drew to ethics. Because when he talks about knowledge in his work on epistemology, he says that knowledge in the strict sense has to be general and universal. So exactly the opposite of what you've been saying. And in the Aristotelian tradition therefore, there's this very strong tendency in ancient and medieval philosophy to say that knowledge is always about abstracting or getting away from the particular. And so then to come along and say 'well here's this kind of knowledge which is all about having a kind of sense for the particular,' which for an Aristotelian would actually always have to do with matter, because it's matter that makes things particular in Aristotelianism, at least that's the usual story. So their idea that knowledge is abstract, universal, general, necessary, not contingent and tied to these particular one off cases - that is a really strong push to think that knowledge isn't like craft. Knowledge is something propositional, something general, it's abstract. Right. So that's a very Aristotelian way of thinking about knowledge, which I think you're challenging, but of course other philosophers have challenged it. So even in Islamic philosophy, which is the field that I work on in my day job, so to speak, or part of my day job. There are philosophers who came along and suggested that there might be kinds of knowledge which involve the direct confrontation between the knower and an individual thing - so like just eyesight. So if I'm looking at you and seeing how handsome you are. I'm using my vision to know that you're handsome and I don't need to abstract there and come up with some kind of universal thought about beauty or handsomeness and apply it to you - I just see you. Right. And another example, which is really relevant here I think actually is the relationship that you have to your own body - you just feel yourself in space, right, which is in a lot of ways like what you're talking about the kind of feel that you have for a material like wood.

Glenn: So the ability to plane the board would not be not totally unlike feeling pain, for example, you would just know it and would be present to you.

Peter: Right, or even I was thinking I guess it would be more like knowing where your arm is, or the knowing how to throw a ball - or maybe the ball's not a good example because there's another object, but say, knowing how to perform a dance move, or even knowing where you are in the dance move. That kind of intimate awareness you have for your body convinces some philosophers, so for example, this 12th century Persian philosopher named Suhrawardi, he thought that that was the paradigm of knowledge - this immediate confrontation you have with yourself. That would be for him a paradigm of knowledge, and he admitted that you could have an abstract universal knowledge as well - for for him that was a kind of secondary knowledge. That's a very, very anti Aristotelian point of view.

Glenn: And if we might leap ahead by 2000 or 1000 years to the present. You can also see how very attractive this idea of knowledge is - something that is very very specific and localized, particular, might be. You might even associate it with, you know, the local food movement or the idea that you should try to live on the resources within a 12 or 20 mile radius from where you live, because of its environmental benefits, and without getting into the big topic of, you know, rightwing doing politics in the last few years and this kind of nativism that we that we have seen too deeply. I do think there's certainly merit to thinking about socially embedded and physically embedded knowledge as being more worthy of respect. And I think that gets back to these issues of labor, as well, because again, if you think of people who are in manufacturing, or other so called "menial" trades - big scare quotes around the word menial. If you were to think of those as being simply a different form of knowledge, rather than a lower form of knowledge to so called 'white collar' trades, I think that would already make a huge positive contribution to the way in which our public discourse seems to unfold. So, you know this idea that knowledge is local to each person's experience, and it is experiential in that way, and that craft might also be a paradigm for that, particularly in the sense that craft is something you acquire over many years of experience. So it's really people's lives that you're talking about as well as their livelihoods. I think that kind of move seems to me very urgent at the moment, so that's in fact one of the main reasons I wrote the book.

Peter: And I suppose that you're not mostly talking to philosophers in the book. Do you think that what you want people to take away from all this, would it be maybe that everyone should maybe learn how to do something that's a craft, would that help, or?

Glenn: I think it would be helpful, if only to, you know, instill people a little bit of humility around the issue of material intelligence. Because when you do try your hand at something you realize not only how difficult that thing is, but how difficult lots of other things might be as well. But it's also, again it's a kind of curiosity that I'm trying to encourage, you know - reading a book is not the same as going into the workshop, in fact. So it's more that I want people to see material intelligence as being this big wide enveloping continuum, which has within it, yes, potters and furniture makers and weavers - but also scientists, also philosophers, also engineers. Also children, you know, I actually think children have a very intuitive relationship to their own material intelligence. In some ways I think we might train it out of them in a lot of cases. So it's really an inherent human faculty that I'm trying to describe, the same human faculty that Plato was trying to describe. And all I'm saying is we should have more instinctive respect for it.

Peter: And I guess that pretty much everyone has this in some spheres already. So really what they maybe need to do is not so much go learn a craft, although that might be a good idea too, but realize that, for example, they're good at cutting onions, and that thing that they're good at - cutting onions - actually could be, could appear in a lot of other parts of their life too and in other people's lives.

Glenn: Exactly. Yeah.