Dictionary

homo faber en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin homō faber (“man the maker”, literally “ingenious man”).

Meanings

1. (uncountable) The human being viewed as a tool maker and user, or having evolutionarily reached the stage of tool use.
   • Man is not only homo sapiens or homo ludens, he is also homo faber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts. Thus objects also make and use their makers and users. 1981, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, page 1:
   • The production of tools (as opposed to the mere opportunistic use of available sticks and stones) indicates that Homo Faber is already thinking in terms of sets and classes. 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 89:
   • Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god—not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths. 1958, Hannah Arendt, chapter 2, in The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 22:
   • The sandpit, mud, lollipop sticks, goo, plasticine, oozing clay and, later, petri dishes and test tubes: playing with such stuff, Hall argues, has clearly influenced the materialisations of contemporary art, so much of it three-dimensional, inherently transient and labile, and playful. Homo ludens has supplanted homo faber. 2000 April 13, Marina Warner, “A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque”, in London Review of Books, volume 22, number 08, →ISSN:

Forms

Coordinates

homo ludens