Craft and skill

Use in the book

Knowing the craft means knowing rules, whereas knowing art means grasping their reason, or feeling and obeying it. The distinction produces the severe verdict that La Harpe knew craft but nothing of art. In the instrument analogy, craft is explicitly glossed as reasoned habit: playing depends on instrument and craft, while aptitude belongs innately to the self. Natural skill, in a later fragment, is something art never supplies. Yet art can also be defined as skill reduced to precepts and theory. These formulations distinguish a capacity, its practiced exercise and its articulated guidance, without requiring the translator to harmonize every use into a single hierarchy.

Places to read

1. II, p. 525, entry 14, ¶1Art, craft and artifice are explicitly separated.
2. II, p. 525–526, entry 14, ¶2Craft knows rules; art grasps or feels their reason.
3. II, p. 526, entry begun p. 525, no. 14, ¶3La Harpe is judged to possess craft without art.
4. II, p. 569, entry 5, ¶1Craft is glossed as reasoned habit in an instrument analogy.
5. II, p. 723, entry 3, ¶1Natural skill is not conferred by art.
6. II, p. 837, entry 1, ¶2Art can formulate skill in precepts and theory.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses craft for métier in these witnesses and skill for habileté. [Natural] discloses the damaged natu[…]elle. Reasoned habit is Joubert’s own gloss, not a translator’s definition imposed on every occurrence; reduced in the final definition need not imply degradation.