When I wrote this essay for the journal of psychology, The Folio, I was thinking of all the times people looked at me funny and asked where the design ideas came from. But more importantly, I wanted to challenge the pervading Western attitude that working with your hands is just a fun thing separate from your intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life—now an impractical oddity in an industrial, now electronic, age. In fact, contrary to this, I came to feel that craft offered a unique paradigm for being in the world with more creativity, but less modern desperation—and a unique, flexible logic for dissolving (rather than fixing) many problems, conflicts, and disconnects we experience within modern life. The so called Focusing work of Eugene Gendlin (celebrated in The Folio) gave me a philosophical & psychological language for getting into this hidden layer of craft and art.

The essay can be read without explanation, but occasionally I refer to a Gendlin idea you may not be familiar with. So if you are interested, I direct you to his little book, titled simply Focusing. Let me just say two things about Gendlin’s work. It is easy to dismiss at first glance—it has little to do with the usual sense of our word ‘focusing.’ It comes to us primarily in the form of a therapeutic, self-help book written almost 50 years ago. But this little, influential book is now widely considered, among psychologists anyway, a classic for both practical and analytical reasons. You can think of Focusing as a kind of inner fluid attention grounded in your body—grounded in your intricate felt sense, as he calls it.

Secondly, while Gendlin’s basic idea is brilliantly reframed for us moderns, it is not really new. It is a rediscovery of a very old way of knowing yourself often lost in the unconscious dualisms shared by religion, science, and technology alike. What I have learned (some 15 years after I wrote this) is that Gendlin was doing psychology within the broad, radically holistic framework of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and his process thought friends (William James, John Dewey, and others). Process thought came along before philosophers were ready for it. The philosophical world of the early 20th Century had been overtaken with the now discredited,somewhat predatory logical positivism. But I am pleased to note that Whitehead’s process thought has finally emerged into some sunlight and continues to gain steam today within multiple fields (Gendlin’s embodied psychology, for instance, but also economics, the arts, religion, science, politics, and ecology).

Gendlin opened up a particular aspect of Whitehead’s system given little attention to for its therapeutic or transformative implications. It was process philosophy’s insight that all knowledge and action (human and animal) is grounded in vague, mostly unconscious, bodily feelings—a vast, initially unconscious, inarticulate, intricate inheritance from our deep evolutionary past, the intermediate past of our own epoch, and the immediate past of our own families, and individual experiences. A mouthful I realize. But, sorry I’m not done, how this inheritance natually, continuously transforms itself within experience. Whitehead called this expansive sense of experience prehension or simply feeling depending on the context—Gendlin called it the felt sense). Philosopher Suzanne Langer, one of Whitehead’s students, argues that music and art is the earliest evidence of this inheritance of feeling becoming conscious—the first sign of nature (or civilization as an aspect of nature) engaging with itself—then and now. Art is the first sign of new abstraction, innovation, and the first inclination toward hope, or warning, for the future. Creativity, not inanimate mechanical causality, is the fundamental category of everything.