Making and Doing

Someone who might object to the characterization of Kant as advocating a theory of Humanity as Homo Faber, is Kant himself. For, he insists on a distinction between Doing and Making that is reminiscent of Aristotle's. Just as the latter argues that Doing is activity for its own sake, while Making is for the sake of something else, Kant asserts that Practical Reason is followed only for its own sake, while Technical Reason, i. e. the source of hypothetical maxims, is a means to something else. Surprisingly, neither suggests that Making, not Doing, requires some external material. In any case, someone who maintains that Philosophical self-interpretation can miss what a successor can notice with the advantage of hindsight, is Kant himself. So, for example, the vestigial Aristotelian characterization of his project in teleological terms, i. e. that Practical Reason is an End, and Technical Reason a Means, with some historical distance, seems anomalous in the context of a System in which the Form-Matter distinction is so central. In other words, from the perspective of Formaterialism, the operation of Kantian Practical Reason is as much a Making as is Technical Reason, a self-Making. Furthermore, if Doing is a kind of Making, Making is a kind of Doing, and not merely insofar as the latter abstracts the Maker from external material being acted upon. For, as Marx observes, and as McCluhan has more recently popularized, human artifacts are all extensions of the human organism, so Making, on the Evolvemental analysis, is as much a mode of Exposition as is the stretching of one's arm.