Craft is material dialogue. Dialogue is conversation craft. Alchemy is the craft of crafts.
First, I intuited it implicitly in R. J. Bernstein and Gadamer. Later, I found it stated directly in Buber: our best access to divine being is through dialogue with others.
Dialogue presumes two things: alterity and a possibility of transformative understanding.
Dialogue requires two things: shared good faith to arrive at understanding and shared material to serve as the medium for this understanding.
In alchemy not just any material will do.
The material must be real enough to perform its configurative, transformative task.
In alchemy, material is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of ideal dross, and rendered pure matter (hyle), pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.
In alchemy, soul is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of accidental dross, and rendered pure spirit, pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.
In alchemy, fragmentary soul and material are dissolved and purified and passed through the narrow neck of the alembic into the chamber to combine and unite, and unified are then drawn back through the neck to recrystallize together, refaithed, rematerialized, reenworlded. New artifact, new artifex, new chamber.
This is why designers go to the rough ground of reality.
It is only here we find matter-rich materials that can support radical new understanding. What gets passed along in organizational media is precisely form, not matter. The form of the medium filters whatever data it cannot convey. The data that survives transmission is too anemic to support anything but compulsive rethinking of old thoughts.
It is the media, the material forms, the forms of understanding, the very soul-form of the organization that is in play in radical design.
Radical design is alchemy.
This sacrifice of form in radical design must be performed in the faith that resouling and reenworlding will redeem the sacrifice.
Subject and object shed form together in order to be reclothed, refurnished, rehoused, reenvironed together, all at once, in new enworldment.
This is the artifice of design.
Design is a craft requiring much technique, but much more than technique.
Mere technicians can only construct systems of unnatural artificiality. They are limited to assembling preformed components. They can build only structures the components afford. But today, the problem is the form of the components. This is why the design work of design technicians is sterile and entirely uninspiring, which is good enough in a joyless world that no longer desires or expects anything beyond fixed function.
The higher goal of design is second-natural artifice that summons whole worlds teeming with inconceivable new beings and meanings.
Alchemy might have preceded modern science, but modern science refused the very cornerstone of alchemy: its transformative Why.
This rejection of Why, first methodological, then later metaphysical, is the nihilism concealed in the heart of technik, which knows only the questions What and How, and hears that implicit question behind every truth. When someone asks “why?” the ear of technik hears a prescriptive “in order to what?” or a descriptive “how did this occur?”
Design is alchemy’s true heir, but to receive its inheritance it must reject the rejection of technicity.
Design must restore the Why to technik’s What-How so the technocratic world of techno-scientific engineering and management can answer to a higher Ought and serve our human purpose instead of enslaving humankind to its Whyless systems.
Not only are we allowed to do this, we must do what we Ought.