One of the paradoxes that opens the debate over the near future concerns the great vendetta of the material over the intangible. People who "make things"
are generally not fully aware of what they are doing, meaning they do not always conceptualize. They work by intuition or practical skill, purposefully or traditionally, repeating age-old gestures, which are important forms of knowledge but differ from the experimentalism and understanding that generate innovative projects. Leonardo argued for the need to balance theory and practice in equal measure in a virtuous equilibrium and pointed out "the error of those who use practice without knowledge. Those who are enamored of practice without knowledge are like a helmsman on a ship without rudder or compass, who never know where they are going."
As Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman, a book that has become a landmark of advanced modernity, the Latin tag homo faber simply means "man as maker."
It is recurrent in Renaissance writings on philosophy and the arts. Henri Bergson applied it to psychology. To learn from things we have to pay attention to the quality of their materials and processes. A well-woven fabric and a well-cooked fish enable us to imagine broader categories of "goodness." Well-disposed towards the senses, the cultural materialist seeks to identify the points where pleasure is found and the way it is structured. People can collect information about themselves through the things they make. This is why technical mastery, the ability to do things properly, is so important, like the ability to select quality materials.
The term "mastery," with its reference to the master craftsmen, denotes a fundamental human impulse that is always alive, the desire to do good work for one's own sake. There is a close bond between hand and head which shows that technical skills are based on physical practice and motivation counts for more than talent.
Then, starting over from the sustainable heaviness of being, means reassessing patience as the quality of "doing better than anyone," which begins precisely with the material quality of the substance. What Giovanni Lanzone and I have called the redemption of Truth and Beauty (Verità e Bellezza, Nomos Editor, 2010), recognizing the centrality of excellence, which becomes the principal strategic lever to enter the authentic market of globalization and reveals the importance of learning to communicate.
The figure of the craftsman, revised and corrected, returns to the heart of this reflection. The craftsman is the representative figure of a specific part of the human condition starting from matter: dedication, a personal commitment to the things we do. Like tracing the threads in a complex fabric. The Greek word we translate as "craftsman" is demiourgos, a compound that combines the idea of public (demios: belonging to the people) and production (ergon: work, labor).
Plato related technical skill to the verb poiein, "to make." From poiein comes the word "poetry" and the hymn names poets among the various types of craftsmen. This type of activity is always distinguished by the aspiration to quality, and patience in pursuing it.
The neo-Renaissance companies that will shape the future, clearly possess the ability to believe unconditionally in a project, the ability to cultivate it and grow it carefully and patiently, regardless of the external pressures that are becoming more assertive. The sense of the enterprise and the courage of the entrepreneur are increasingly embodied in this capacity for investing in patience which becomes perseverance. A virtue that only a few years ago would have been considered naive and out of keeping with the spirit of the times. Today, on the contrary, the new paradigms indicate the values of material excellence, slowness, profound quality, the care of detail, as the distinctive values of the new business models. At this point we can quote Leonardo: "Patience is to wrongs as clothes are to the cold; for if you multiply your garments in proportion to the multiplication of the cold, it will never be able to harm you. Likewise great wrongs increase patience; wrongs cannot offend your mind."
Patience understood as a parameter of quality thus disrupts the Taylorist logic and breaks open the cage of scientific management, laying the foundations for excellence as a new paradigm based on the ability to "do better than anyone."
This is the theme that ties in with Italian credibility in defining taste and its distinctive character, far from the fantasies of luxury and prestige that are no part of us. Excellence can be expressed in any field and through all the processes of the business chain, from kitchen products to faucet mechanisms.
As in the fine-tuning of machines that are every bit as good as those devised by Leonardo. There is no product creativity without creativity in the conception and construction of the machinery to produce it. In every case beginning with the material.
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