Calling tool talk into question


After we become well-equiped, so to say, with tool talk, it would then come to seem natural that tools would be various and heterogenous–some would come from this tradition, others from that one, and the word bricolage would appear–yet all would fit into one’s toolkit. That toolkit is what one carries around with one in order to work on the world. Yet all of this is strange not because hammers and nails cannot be put into a toolkit and not because a first-aid kit can’t accommodate gauze, needles, and scissors but because, in a more abstract sort of way, those who are said to be more well-adapted to living at the present historical moment are said to have a more robust toolkit. Moreover, more and more teaching could be said to consist of showing others what tools there are and how to use them more effectively for achieving certain immediate aims.

And that last is just the point. Talk of tools is also, but not always, connected with talk of what is to be done most effectively or efficiently. Nobody speaks of tools unless one is concerned with what can be done with things. Indeed, just as no one speaks of having tools in order to perceive the properties of a Pink Dawn tree, so no one would say that cultivating one’s life just means achieving greater facility with a certain set of tools. (What tools would fit into a Toolkit for Human Flourishing anyway?)

Given the thesis that the world is broken and thus in need of fixing, what would need to be invented would be a better set of tools in order to fulfill this task. Also more technicians–more engineers of reality, more architects of reality. I suppose we might call them designers or re-designers. A philosopher has to wonder how it happened that so many concepts could get transformed into tools so that they could become operationalized. I do not have an answer.