Premodern handcraft skills foster a language which opens an experiential pathway to local nature

Handcraft skills provide premodern cultures with an experiential channel to encounter nature both in humans and in their environment. This essay sketches a dialectical overview - the roots of which can be traced via Hegel back to Heraclitus - of how handcrafts are entangled with other meaning-generating semiotic activities and participate in enriching the experiential content of verbal discourses as well. By eroding the handcraft culture, technical and social progress - realized in practice by the industrial revolution and ideologically supported by the movement of Enlightenment - has injured the experiential content of our language and thus impaired our natura experience.