23
PART I

silent about technology. It now turns out that the demands made here on you, the students, have been excessive for the beginning of our journey. We have called thinking the handicraft par excellence.

Thinking guides and sustains every gesture of the hand.

We were talking about the cabinetmaker's craft. It could be objected that even the village cabinetmaker works with machines nowadays. It could be pointed out that today gigantic industrial factories have risen alongside the crafts.men's workshops, and have in fact been there for quite some time. Inside the factories, working men pull the same lever day and night for eight to ten hours at a stretch, and working women push the same button. The point is correct. But in this case, and in this form, it has not yet been thought out. The objection falls flat, because it has heard only half of what the discussion has to say about handicraft. We chose the cabinetmaker's craft as our example, assuming it would not occur to anybody that this choice indicated any expectation that the state of our planet could in the foreseeable future, or indeed ever, be changed back into a rustic idyll. The cabinetmaker's craft was proposed as an example for our thinking because the common usage of the word "craft" is restricted to human activities of that sort. However—it was specifically noted that what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood. But where in the manipulations of the industrial worker is there any relatedness to such things as the shapes slumbering within wood? This is the question you were meant to run up against, though not to stop there. For as long as we raise questions only in this way, we are still questioning from the standpoint of the familiar and previously customary handicraft.

What about the lever? What about the button which the worker manipulates? Levers and buttons have long existed even on the workbenches of an old-fashioned craftsman's


Martin Heidegger (GA 8) What Is Called Thinking?