Polytropy

With our fourth reading, we enter the “three central chapters” of The Human Condition, for Arendt’s systematic “discussion of labor, work, and action.” We shall be here through the ninth reading. Some questions raised now will no doubt be answered later.

A general concern of mine is the abstractness of the discussion. What has it to do with us? Can I say that I know what labor is, because I bake bread and mop the kitchen floor, or because I once worked on a farm, or because I used to know how to fix whatever might go wrong on my bicycle? Can Arendt say such things, and does it matter? She has a moving passage towards the end of the present reading:

There is no lasting hap­piness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleas­urable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance … ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.

Did she understand herself to be living within “the prescribed cycle”? What exhausted her? In the ellipsis of the quotation are two things that can throw off the balance:

• poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretched­ness instead of regeneration, or
• great riches and an entirely effort­less life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an im­potent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death.

Was Arendt exhausting herself at the gym, or did she count the mental exhaustion of philosophy as adequate to keep her from being ground “mercilessly and barrenly to death”?

Summary by sections:

• 11 “the labor of our body and the work of our hands” Our language itself shows that we distinguish labor and work. In our theories, we have ignored the distinction:

  • Ancients, because all effort is despicable and to be consigned to slaves;
  • Moderns (Locke, Adam Smith, Marx), because effort gives us what we have.

• 12 the thing-character of the world Theories are subjective, but there is an objective distinction:

  • Labor makes what we consume (e.g. bread), just to keep on living.
  • Work makes the the things (e.g. tables) that constitute the world that we live in.

• 13 labor and life The distinction between labor and work parallels a distinction in life, shown in Greek with the words ζωή and βίος.

  • Biological life runs through endless cycles, as does labor to produce what is then immediately consumed.
  • Individual life passes from birth to death, as work has a beginning and end.

• 14 labor and fertility The modern age has seemed to fulfil the Biblical command, “Be ye fruitful and multiply.” If like Marx one pays attention onto the process of production and consumption, one may overlook the importance of producing some things that last. Locke and Smith cared about such things, as property and wealth respectively, and the distinction between unproductive and productive labor was a start to showing how these things were possible.

Despite the disclaimer in the Prologue, that “the highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable, the activity of thinking, is left out of these present considerations,” §§11 and 12 end with some paragraphs on intellectual labor and thinking in general.

Summary by paragraphs

• 11 “the labor of our body and the work of our hands”
  • ¶ 11.1 Both ancient and modern European languages distinguish labor from work.
  • ¶ 11.2 As nouns,
    • labor means laboring,
    • work can be the product of this.
  • ¶ 11.3 The ancients came to despise labor and work indiscriminately: anything that took effort.
  • ¶ 11.4 Slaves were despised for being subject to necessity, not the other way around as modern prejudice would have it. Hesiod knew the difference between
    • work, which good strife rouses us to, and
    • labor, which Pandora loosed on us.
  • ¶ 11.5 Slavery was a way, not to get stuff out of people, but to get oneself out of laboring.
  • ¶ 11.6 In classical antiquity, the distinction between labor and work was overshadowed by the distinction between private and public. Even this distinction was wiped out, first by philosophers, and then by Christians; they preferred contemplation to everything else.
  • ¶ 11.7 The modern age reversed the order of preference, but failed to recover the distinction between work and labor, although it made other distinctions, between
    • productive and unproductive,
    • skilled and unskilled,
    • manual and intellectual.
  • ¶ 11.8 Smith and Marx despised the unproductive labor of menial servants. However, these, like slaves, made possible their masters’ freedom or productivity.
  • ¶ 11.9 Unproductive labor is like labor as distinct from work: it may leave nothing behind, and yet life depends on it. Modern productivity caused Marx
    • to confuse labor with work,
    • to think it could all be eliminated.
  • ¶ 11.10 Labor is productive, in
    • keeping us going and
    • being able to do more than is needed for this.
  • ¶ 11.11 In Marx’s “quite unutopian ideal” of “socialized mankind,” all work becomes labor, because all is considered not objectively, but as “functions of the life process.”
  • ¶ 11.12 As for the distinctions of skilled and unskilled, manual and intellectual, they “play no role in either classical political economy or in Marx’s work,” because “the modern division of labor … tends to abolish skilled labor altogether.”
  • ¶ 11.13 Thinking
    • by itself is like labor in leaving no trace,
    • to become work needs remembering and materializing, through hand-work.
  • ¶ 11.14 The ancient distinction between liberal and servile arts was not between the intellectual and manual, but was political.
    1. Prudentia and utilitas were liberal.
    2. All trades were “sordid.”
    3. Below that was being paid for the operae, the pains themselves, rather than the opus, their result.
  • ¶ 11.15 Moderns distinguished the intellectual from the manual, because
    • every occupation was supposed to be useful,
    • intellectual work was increasingly needed.
• 12 the thing-character of the world
  • ¶ 12.1 Ancient contempt and modern glorification of labor are based on the subjectivity of the laborer.
  • ¶ 12.2 Thus our theories are subjective, but our language is objective in its distinction of labor from work. “What consumer goods are for the life of man, use objects are for his world.”
  • ¶ 12.3 “Distinguished from both, consumer goods and use objects, there [94] are finally the ‘products’ of action and speech … Their reality depends entirely upon human plurality …” They are “outward manifestations of human life, which knows only one ac­tivity that … needs neither to be seen nor heard nor used nor consumed in order to be real: the activity of thought.”
  • ¶ 12.4 To become worldly things, action, speech, and thought must be seen, heard, remembered, and reified.
  • ¶ 12.5 We rely on a world of things more permanent than the activity of producing them or even the producers themselves.
• 13 labor and life
  • ¶ 13.1 The least worldly, most natural things are the ones we need for life itself.
  • ¶ 13.2 Without a world, there would be only Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence.”
  • ¶ 13.3 If “life” means the interval between birth and death, that’s bios as distinct from zōē.
  • ¶ 13.4 “… unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished, ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always moves in the same circle …”
  • ¶ 13.5 “When Marx defined labor as ‘man’s metabolism with nature’ … he was ‘speaking physiologically’ and … labor and consumption are but two stages of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life.” Marx does distinguish “the worst architect from the best of bees” because “the architect raises his struc­ture in imagination before he erects it in reality”; however, “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason a silk worm produces silk.”
  • ¶ 13.6 For nature, work is destructive.
  • ¶ 13.7 “… the second task of laboring” is “its con­stant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay … The protection and preservation of the world against natural processes are among the toils which need the monotonous perform­ance of daily repeated chores.”
• 14 labor and fertility
  • ¶ 14.1 Marx cared about labor; Locke, private property; Smith, wealth. Their equation of work with labor yields the absurdity expressed by Veblen: “The lasting evidence of productive labor is its mate­rial product—commonly some article of consumption.”
  • ¶ 14.2 To avoid the problem that the products of labor don’t last,
    • Locke introduced money;
    • Marx admitted the need for reification, forgetting that labor was “metabolism.”
  • ¶ 14.3 Locke recognized that some things needed to be kept; Smith, exchangeable.
  • ¶ 14.4 “Marx’s attitude toward labor … has never ceased to be equivocal,” but this is only a sign of his greatness.
  • ¶ 14.5 What was so important about labor?
  • ¶ 14.6 From the 17th century on, the growth of wealth, property, and acquisition seemed endless, which is what labor is, but not work.
  • ¶ 14.7 Marx saw “laboring and begetting as two modes of the same fertile life proc­ess,” expressed in the command, “Be ye fruitful and multiply.”
  • ¶ 14.8 “The ‘blessing or the joy’ of labor is the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all living creatures.” For the Old Testament, though not Hesiod, death and labor were not evils.
  • ¶ 14.9 “There is no lasting hap­piness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleas­urable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance”—be it poverty or wealth—“ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.”
  • ¶ 14.10 Because Marx was interested only in the process of production and consumption, which “always strike a balance, the question of a separate existence of worldly things … does not occur to him at all.”
  • ¶ 14.11 Since Marx’s predecessors were interested in property and appropriation of wealth, it mattered to them that “labor’s products do not become more durable by their abundance.”

Question

Arendt often cites ancient Greece and Rome; in the present reading, she also cites ancient Israel. What should we make of this, particularly when she distinguishes Israel from Greece?

Look in particular at how Arendt uses Hesiod.

• Pages 81–2

  • ¶ 11.3

    • Note 6: a quotation from Vernant confirms the idea that, for Homer and Hesiod, there were just two kinds of worker: slave and “demiurge.”

    • Note 7: Hesiod’s line is quoted, “Work is not a disgrace at all, but not working is a disgrace.” Not working is glossed as being lazy, so that the whole line can be interpreted in the polis as encouragement to be slavish (by working).

  • ¶ 11.4

    • Note 8: Hesiod is recalled as attributing

      • work to “good strife,”
      • labor to Pandora.

• Page 107

  • ¶ 14.8

    • Note 53: We were punished

      • with difficult labor by the God of Genesis;
      • with work, tout court, by the Zeus of Hesiod’s Works and Days.

      Also, for Paul, we were always servants or rather slaves to sin; now we can be slaves to God.

Apparently what Hesiod misses, but the Hebrew Patriarchs do not, is (in ¶ 14.8):

The reward of toil and trouble lies in nature’s fertility, in the quiet confidence that he who in “toil and trouble” has done his part, re­mains a part of nature in the future of his children and his children’s children.

We pass to Arendt’s text of (the first part of) Chapter III, which has an unlabelled preface or disclaimer.

1. See “De la liberté des anciens comparée a celle des modernes” (1819), reprinted in Cours de politique constitutionnelle (1872), II, 549.

2. Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, sec. 26. [79]

Arendt will name Locke and allude to the section title in ¶ 11.2.

• Our language, as in Locke’s phrase, suggests that there is a distinction between labor and work.
• Our theories, even Locke’s, do not make proper use of this distinction.

Arendt’s burden is to show that the distinction is real. Still, evidently labor and work are similar enough to be confused.

3. Thus,

   • the Greek language distinguishes between ponein and ergazesthai,
   • the Latin between laborare and facere or fabricari, which have the same etymo­logical root,
   • the French between travailler and ouvrer,
   • the German between arbeiten and werken.

   In all these cases, only the equivalents for “labor” have an unequivocal connotation of pain and trouble. The German Arbeit applied origi­nally only to farm labor executed by serfs and not to the work of the craftsman, which was called Werk. The French travailler replaced the older labourer and is derived from tripalium, a kind of torture. See Grimm, Wörterbuch, pp. 1854 ff., and Lucien Fèbre, “Travail: évolution d’un mot et d’une idée,” Journal de psy­chologie normale et pathologique, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (1948).

The phenomenal evidence cannot be ignored. Is this an allusion to phenomenology? What other kinds of evidence could there be?

4. Aristotle Politics 1254b25. [80]

5. This is the case for the French ouvrer and the German werken. In both languages, as distinguished from the current English usage of the word “labor,” the words travailler and arbeiten have almost lost the original significance of pain and trouble; Grimm (op. cit.) had already noted this development in the middle of the last century: “Während in älterer Sprache die Bedeutung von molestia und schwerer Arbeit vorherrschte, die von opus, opera, zurücktrat, tritt umgekehrt in der heutigen diese vor und jene erscheint seltener.” It is also interesting that the nouns “work,” œvre, Werk, show an increasing tendency to be used for works of art in all three languages.

Arendt does not look now at the etymology of χειροτέχνης; maybe she does later. The German Handwerker would seem to be a calque, a loan-translation, as “hand-worker” would be. A better calque in English might be “hand-crafter,” since τέχνη is a special kind of work, such as we may call craft: skilled work, such as can even be a profession. By the account of Beekes in his Etymological Dictionary of Greek (2009), τέχνη means “craftsmanship, handicraft, business, art; artifice, trick” and has two possible Indo-European roots:

• *teḱ- “produce,”
• *te-tḱ- “build, timber.”

The latter is reduplicated, and from it “is derived” the word τέκτων, meaning “carpenter, craftsman, artist, initiator.” I cannot tell whether Beekes means

• that some scholars connect τέχνη and τέκτων, or
• that they really are connected.

In any case, Beekes’s τέκτων article connects with this word also the Latin texō “weave, twine.” According to “The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix,” all of these words are related, along with the Latin

• tēla “web, net, warp of a fabric, also weaver’s beam (to which the warp threads are tied),”
• subtīlis “thin, fine, precise, subtle” (from *sub-tēla, “thread passing under the warp,” the finest thread);

and the root of these words is teks-, to which is given the meaning

To weave; also to fabricate, especially with an ax; also to make wicker or wattle fabric for (mud-covered) house walls.

The Latin and Greek words have the following descendents in English: In English then we have from

texere

“text” and “tissue”;

tēla

“tiller” (of a boat) and (via the French toile) “toil” (obsolete for a net);

subtīlis

“subtle”;

τέκτων

“tectonic” and “architect”;

τέχνη

“technical.”

The verb “toil” is related to Latin tudes “hammer” and Greek ὁ τύπος “blow” (as of a hammer). The two words “till” as in “till the soil” and “till the morning comes” probably have a common Germanic root, but nothing seems to be known beyond this; and “till” for a box is of unknown origin.

Arendt will talk later about skill, in ¶ 11.7 and especially ¶ 11.12, where she will mention that “unskilled work is a con­tradiction in terms.”

6. See J.-P. Vernant, “Travail et nature dans la Gréce ancienne” (Journal de psychologic normale et pathologique, LIL, No. 1 (January-March, 1955]): “Le terme [dēmiourgoi], chez Homère et Hésiode, ne qualifie pas à l’origine l’artisan en tant que tel, comme ‘ouvrier’; il définit toutes les activités qui s’exercent en dehors du cadre de l’oikos, en faveur d’un public, dēmos: les artisans—charpentiers et forgerons—mais non moins qu’eux les devins, les héraults, les aèdes.” [81]

   Vernant was Bernant in the first edition. One can see that the first two lines of the note in the second edition have been reset.

7. Politics 1258b35 ff. For Aristotle’s discussion about admission of banausoi to citizenship see Politics iii. 5. His theory corresponds closely to reality: it is estimated that up to 80 per cent of free labor, work, and commerce consisted of non-citizens, either “strangers” (katoikountes and metoikoi) or emancipated slaves who advanced into these classes (see Fritz Heichelheim, Wirtschafts­geschichte des Altertums [1938], 1, 398 ff.). Jacob Burckhardt, who in his Griechische Kulturgeschichte (Vol. II, secs. 6 and 8) relates Greek current opin­ion of who does and who does not belong to the class of banausoi, also notices that we do not know of any treatise about sculpture. In view of the many essays on music and poetry, this probably is no more an accident of tradition than the fact that we know so many stories about the great feeling of superiority and even arrogance among the famous painters which are not matched by anecdotes about sculptors. This estimate of painters and sculptors survived many cen­turies. It is still found in the Renaissance, where sculpturing is counted among the servile arts whereas painting takes up a middle position between liberal and servile arts (see Otto Neurath, “Beitrige zur Geschichte der Opera Servilia,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. XLI, No. 2 [1915]).

   That Greek public opinion in the city-states judged occupations according to the effort required and the time consumed is supported by a remark of Aristotle about the life of shepherds: “There are great differences in human ways of life. The laziest are shepherds; for they get their food without labor [ponos] from tame animals and have leisure [skholazousin]” (Politics 1256a30 ff.). It is interest­ing that Aristotle, probably following current opinion, here mentions

   • laziness (aergia) together with, and somehow as a condition for,
   • skholē, abstention from certain activities which is the condition for a political life.

   Generally, the mod­ern reader must be aware that aergia and skholē are not the same. Laziness had the same connotations it has for us, and a life of skholē was not considered to be a lazy life. The equation, however, of skholē and idleness is characteristic of a development within the polis. Thus Xenophon reports that Socrates was accused of having quoted Hesiod’s line: “Work is no disgrace, but laziness [aergia] is a disgrace.” The accusation meant that Socrates had instilled in his pupils a slavish spirit (Memorabilia i. 2. 56). Historically, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between

   • the contempt of the Greek city-states for all non-political occupations which arose out of the enormous demands upon the time and energy of the citizens, and
   • the earlier, more original, and more general contempt for [82] activities which serve only to sustain life—ad vitae sustentationem as the opera servilia are still defined in the eighteenth century.

   In the world of Homer, Paris and Odysseus help in the building of their houses, Nausicaa herself washes the linen of her brothers, etc. All this belongs to the self-sufficiency of the Homeric hero, to his independence and the autonomic supremacy of his person. No work is sordid if it means greater independence; the selfsame activity might well be a sign of slavishness

   • if not personal independence but sheer survival is at stake,
   • if it is not an expression of sovereignty but of subjection to necessity.

   The differ­ent estimate of craftsmanship in Homer is of course well known. But its actual meaning is beautifully presented in a recent essay by Richard Harder, Eigenart der Griechen (1949).

Recall the analysis of activity on page 7 (¶¶ 1.1–4):

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.

1. Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body.
2. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence … Work provides an “artificial” world of things.
3. Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality … the condition … of all political life.

Arendt is now reviewing different ways of analyzing activity. When she says “Contempt for laboring … spread … until it covered everything that demanded an effort,” apparently she thinks what joins labor and work is that they require effort. This would seem to be begging the question of what effort is. Arendt refers to “the increasing demands of polis life upon the time of the citizens,” and this suggests that polis life too requires effort.

Does not polis life require bodily effort as such? It would seem to require effort, unless wars are fought only with slaves and mercenaries. Actual war may be rare, but presumably the citizens stay in training for it. Do they not also engage in athletic competitions, for pleasure and glory?

If “the polis began to classify occupations according to the amount of effort required,” amount of effort might possibly be measured by calories. But it seems we are really trying to measure necessity, and this is something moral or spiritual. Read on!

Meanwhile, the Hesiod line is 311 of Works and Days:

ἔργον δ᾽ οὐδὲν ὄνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ᾽ ὄνειδος.

Work is not a disgrace at all, but not working is a disgrace.

8. Labor and work (ponos and ergon) are distinguished in Hesiod; only work is due to Eris, the goddess of good strife (Works and Days 20–26), but labor, like all other evils, came out of Pandora’s box (90 ff.) and is a punishment of Zeus because Prometheus “the crafty deceived him.” Since then, “the gods have hidden life from men” (42 ff.) and their curse hits “the bread-eating men” (82). Hesiod, moreover, assumes as a matter of course that the actual farm labor is done by slaves and tame animals. He praises everyday life—which for a Greek is already extraordinary enough—but his ideal is a gentleman-farmer, rather than a laborer, who stays at home, keeps away from adventures of the sea as well as public business on the agora (29 ff.), and minds his own business.

9. Aristotle begins his famous discussion of slavery (Politics 1253b25) with the statement that “without the necessaries life as well as good life is impos­sible.” To be a master of slaves is the human way to master necessity and there­fore not para physin, against nature; life itself demands it. Peasants, therefore, who provided the necessities of life, are classed by Plato as well as Aristotle with the slaves (see Robert Schlaifer, “Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. XLVI [1936]). [83]

10. It is in this sense that Euripides calls all slaves “bad”: they see every­thing from the viewpoint of the stomach (Supplementum Euripideum, ed. Arnim, frag. 49, no. 2).

11. Thus Aristotle recommended that slaves who were intrusted with “free occupations” (ta eleuthera tōn ergōn) be treated with more dignity and not like slaves. When, on the other hand, in the first centuries of the Roman Empire certain public functions which always had been performed by public slaves rose in esteem and relevance, these servi publici—who actually performed the tasks of civil servants—were permitted to wear the toga and to marry free women.

What Arendt calls a “prejudice of modern historians,” namely “that labor and work were despised in antiquity because only slaves were engaged in them,” is like what she earlier called, on page 69 (¶ 9.3) in the previous reading, the “obvious contradiction in this modern concept of government, where the only thing people have in common is their private interests.”

• The prejudice of modern historians involves a prejudice about people, that they can be judged for superficial reasons. Recall from note 7 to the previous paragraph that “the selfsame activity” can be a sign of slavishness or (a striving for) independence.
• The modern concept of government involves the prejudice that nobody can be trusted. Strictly speaking, a government can be formed only by people who already trust one another to some degree.

In note 8, Arendt only hints at the duality of strife in Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 11–3 (the translation is by Glenn W. Most from the 2006 Loeb edition):

οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ γαῖαν
εἰσὶ δύω· τὴν μέν κεν ἐπαινήσειε νοήσας,
ἣ δ᾽ ἐπιμωμητή· διὰ δ᾽ ἄνδιχα θυμὸν ἔχουσιν.

So there was not just one birth of Strifes after all, but upon the earth there are two Strifes. One of these a man would praise once he got to know it, but the other is blameworthy; and they have thoroughly opposed spirits.

It makes sense that there should be two Strifes, if we think of the associated verb in English: striving can be good or bad.

I recall the line, “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” from “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher,” by Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864). I know the poem, only because of its quotation in Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944):

“But what I wanted to say to you was this,” he continued. “I’ve left proper instructions in my will, but I want you to see they’re carried out. I will not be buried on the Riviera among a lot of retired colonels and middle-class French people.”

“Of course I’ll do what you wish, Elliott, but I don’t think we need plan for anything like that for many years to come.”

“I’m getting on, you know, and to tell you the truth I shan’t be sorry to go. What are those lines of Landor’s? I’ve warmed both hands …”

Though I have a bad verbal memory, the poem is very short and I was able to repeat it.

“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”

“That’s it,” he said.

I could not but reflect that it was only by a violent stretch of the imagination that Elliott could fit the stanza to himself.

“It expresses my sentiments exactly,” he said, however. “The only thing I could add to it is that I’ve always moved in the best society in Europe.”

“It would be difficult to squeeze that into a quatrain.”

It seems obvious that “strife” and “to strive” are related, and that the latter comes from the French estriver, which is for Littré (1801–81) a Terme vieilli meaning Être en querelle and coming from estrif, another Terme vieilli, also written étrif and meaning Querelle, lutte. Even Furetière (1619–88) says estrif is vieux.

There is also a word étrivière, which Littré derives from a second word estrif, which is the old form of étrier, which means “stirrup.” Etymologically, the English word is a compound, “stye-rope.” I find no scholarly suggestion that the second estrif is derived from “stirrup,” nor any explicit indication that there really are two unrelated words that have been spelled estrif.

Etymology can require more than amateur skill.

In Greek, from ἔρις, there is a derived verb, ἐρίζω “to fight, wrangle, quarrel”; but according to Beekes, the etymology of these words is unknown, and there is no evidence of a relation with Ἐρινύς, meaning one of the Furies.

Hesiod continues.

• It is a necessity that we respect bad strife (lines 14–6):

  ἣ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμόν τε κακὸν καὶ δῆριν ὀφέλλει,
  σχετλίη: οὔτις τήν γε φιλεῖ βροτός, ἀλλ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ἀνάγκης
  ἀθανάτων βουλῇσιν Ἔριν τιμῶσι βαρεῖαν.

  For the one fosters evil war and conflict—cruel one, no mortal loves that one, but it is by necessity that they honor the oppressive Strife, by the plans of the immortals.

  Most’s translation has us honoring strife, but τιμάω can also mean “to estimate,” perhaps negatively. Apparently the same evolution in meaning is seen in (the Latin origin of) “to observe,” from lauding to watching.

  As for the necessity here in Hesiod, it seems obvious that we must at least recognize that bad strife is possible.

  While reading the Republic, I found out that there was a speculative connection between ἡ τιμή (the source of τιμάω) and ἡ ποινή “penalty” (the source via Latin of “pain”); but I don’t see even a speculative connection between ποινή and ὁ πόνος “toil,” the word for what Pandora is going to give us and that Arendt takes to be analogous to “labor.”

• Good strife induces us to work, even those of us who are “helpless” or literally “hand-less”—the adjective ἀπάλαμος comes from ἡ παλάμη, which means palm and is somehow related to our word “palm” (lines 17–20):

  τὴν δ᾽ ἑτέρην προτέρην μὲν ἐγείνατο Νὺξ ἐρεβεννή,
  θῆκε δέ μιν Κρονίδης ὑψίζυγος, αἰθέρι ναίων,
  γαίης ἐν ῥίζῃσι, καὶ ἀνδράσι πολλὸν ἀμείνω·
  ἥ τε καὶ ἀπάλαμόν περ ὁμῶς ἐπὶ ἔργον ἔγειρεν.

  But the other one gloomy Night bore first; and Cronus’ high-throned son, who dwells in the aether, set it in the roots of the earth, and it is much better for men. It rouses even the helpless man to work.

  This is the strife that induces you to raise up yourself, rather than tear down another (lines 21–4):

  εἰς ἕτερον γάρ τίς τε ἰδὼν ἔργοιο χατίζει
  πλούσιον, ὃς σπεύδει μὲν ἀρώμεναι ἠδὲ φυτεύειν
  οἶκόν τ᾽ εὖ θέσθαι· ζηλοῖ δέ τε γείτονα γείτων
  εἰς ἄφενος σπεύδοντ᾽· ἀγαθὴ δ᾽ Ἔρις ἥδε βροτοῖσιν.

  For a man who is not working but who looks at some other man, a rich one who is hastening to plow and plant and set his house in order, he envies him, one neighbor envying his neighbor who is hastening towards wealth: and this Strife is good for mortals.

Hesiod goes on to explain how living used to be easy; for more on this, see note 53, page 107 (¶ 14.8) below. Then Zeus ordered Pandora to be created, in retaliation for how Prometheus had stolen fire and given it to humans, hidden in a fennel stalk. Zeus had Hermes Argeiphontes deliver Pandora to Epimetheus, who (as fits his name, “afterthought”) forgot the warning from Prometheus not to accept gifts from Zeus. As Hesiod explains in lines 90–2:

Πρὶν μὲν γὰρ ζώεσκον ἐπὶ χθονὶ φῦλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
νόσφιν ἄτερ τε κακῶν καὶ ἄτερ χαλεποῖο πόνοιο
νούσων τ᾽ ἀργαλέων, αἵ τ᾽ ἀνδράσι Κῆρας ἔδωκαν.

For previously the tribes of men used to live upon the earth entirely apart from evils, and without grievous toil and distressful diseases, which give death to men.

Then Pandora interfered (lines 94–5):

ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽: ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.

But the woman removed the great lid from the storage jar with her hands and scattered its contents abroad–she wrought baneful evils for human beings.

As far as I can tell, this is the first mention of a storage jar (ὁ πίθος) in the poem.

12. The two qualities that the slave, according to Aristotle, lacks—and it is because of these defects that he is not human—are the faculty

    • to deliberate and decide (to bouleutikon) and
    • to foresee and to choose (proairesis).

    This, of course, is but a more explicit way of saying that the slave is subject to necessity. [84]

We initially look to see

• not what we can get out of people,
• but how we can get out of working.

The meaning of

• animal laborans and animal rationale here and
• homo faber in ¶ 11.4

will be taken up further below (¶ 11.7).

13. Cicero De re publica v. 2. [85]

The philosophers’ distinction is, on page 16 (¶ 2.7), between what is by nature (φύσει) and what is by custom or law (νομῴ). The former is for philosophers to contemplate in quiet; the rest is just part of the vita activa. On page 14 (¶ 2.5), Plato discovers the superiority of contemplation; Christianity makes it “a right of all.”

14. “The creation of man through human labor” was one of the most per­sistent ideas of Marx since his youth. It can be found in many variations in the Jugendschriften (where in the “Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik” he credits Hegel with it). (See Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Part 1, Vol. 5 (Berlin, 1932], pp. 156 and 167.) That Marx actually meant to replace the traditional definition of man as an animal rationale by defining him as an animal laborans is manifest in the context. The theory is strengthened by a sentence from the Deutsche Ideologie which was later deleted: “Der erste geschichtliche Akt dieser Individuen, wo­durch sie sich von den Tieren unterscheiden, ist nicht, dass sie denken, sondern, dass sie anfangen ihre Lebensmittel zu produzieren” (ibid., p. 568). Similar for­mulations occur in the “Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte” (ibid., p. 125), and in “Die heilige Familie” (ibid., p. 189). Engels used similar formula­tions many times, for instance in the Preface of 1884 to Ursprung der Familie or in the newspaper article of 1876, “Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works [London, 1950], Vol. II).

    Google translation: “The first historical act of these individuals, what distinguishes them from the animals, is not that they think, but that they begin to produce their food.”

    It seems that Hume, and not Marx, was the first to insist that labor dis­tinguishes man from animal (Adriano Tilgher, Homo faber [1929]; English ed.: Work: What It Has Meant to Men through the Ages [1930]). As labor does not play any significant role in Hume’s philosophy, this is of historical interest only; to him, this characteristic did not make human life more productive, but only harsher and more painful than animal life. It is, however, interesting in this context to note with what care Hume repeatedly insisted that neither thinking nor reasoning distinguishes man from animal and that the behavior of beasts demonstrates that they are capable of both.

The modern reversal of tradition was introduced on page 17 (¶ 2.9).

15. Wealth of Nations (Everyman’s ed.), II, 302. [86]

The real parasitism would seem to go the other way. Have we here the “prejudice of modern historians,” mentioned on page 83 (¶ 11.4), against the people who do menial labor? See “prejudicial” in the first sentence of the next paragraph.

16. The distinction between productive and unproductive labor is due to the physiocrats, who distinguished between producing, property-owning, and sterile classes. Since they held that the original source of all productivity lies in the natural forces of the carth, their standard for productivity was related to the creation of new objects and not to the needs and wants of men. Thus, the Marquis de Mirabeau, father of the famous orator, calls sterile “la classe d’ouvriers dont les travaux, quoique nécessaires aux besoins des hommes et utiles a la société, ne sont pas néanmoins productifs” and illustrates his distinc­tion between sterile and productive work by comparing it to the difference be­tween cutting a stone and producing it (see Jean Dautry, “La notion de travail chez Saint-Simon et Fourier,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. LII, No. 1 [January–March, 1955]).

17. This hope accompanied Marx from beginning to end. We find it already in the Deutsche Ideologie: “Es handelt sich nicht darum die Arbeit zu befreien, sondern sie aufzuheben” (Gesamtausgabe, Part I, Vol. 3, p. 185) and many dec­ades later in the third volume of Das Kapital, ch. 48: “Das Reich der Freiheit beginnt in der Tat erst da, wo das Arbeiten … aufhört” (Marx-Engels Gesamtaus­gabe, Part II [Zürich, 1933], p. 873). [87]

So when Marx wanted to define man as animal laborans as in note 14 on page 86 (¶ 11.7), he was really thinking not of the “parasitical” laborer, but of the noble worker?

In what we produce, as the proportion that we consume just to stay alive decreases towards zero, we may (with a faulty mathematical imagination) conclude that what we thus consume may itself vanish.

18. In his Introduction to the second book of the Wealth of Nations (Every­man’s ed., I, 241 ff.), Adam Smith emphasizes that productivity is due to the division of labor rather than to labor itself.

19. See Engels’ Introduction to Marx’s “Wage, Labour and Capital” (in Marx and Engels, Selected Works [London, 1950], I, 384), where Marx had introduced the new term with a certain emphasis.

20. Marx stressed always, and especially in his youth, that the chief function of labor was the “production of life” and therefore saw labor together with procreation (see Deutsche Ideologie, p. 19; also “Wage, Labour and Capital,” p. 77). [88]

• Work gives us stuff, artefacts.
• Labor keeps us going, in the crudest, biological sense.
• Labor power is behind it all, and need not actually stop at our mere maintenance as it does in (other) animals.

21. The terms vergesellschafteter Mensch or gesellschaftliche Menschheit were frequently used by Marx to indicate the goal of socialism (see, for instance, the third volume of Das Kapital, p. 873, and the tenth of the “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The standpoint of the old materialism is ‘civil’ society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or socialized humanity” [Selected Works, II, 367]). It consisted in the elimination of the gap between the individual and social exist­ence of man, so that man “in his most individual being would be at the same time a social being [a Gemeinwesen]” (Jugendschriften, p. 113). Marx frequently calls this social nature of man his Gattungswesen, his being a member of the species, and the famous Marxian “self-alienation” is first of all man’s alienation from being a Gattungswesen (ibid., p. 89: “Eine unmittelbare Konsequenz davon, dass der Mensch dem Produkt seiner Arbeit, seiner Lebenstätigkeit, seinem Gattungs­wesen entfremdet ist, ist die Entfremdung des Menschen von dem Menschen”). The ideal society is a state of affairs where all human activities derive as natu­rally from human “nature” as the secretion of wax by bees for making the honeycomb; to live and to labor for life will have become one and the same, and life will no longer “begin for [the laborer] where [the activity of laboring] ceases” (“Wage, Labour and Capital,” p. 77).

    The eleventh and last of the “Theses On Feuerbach” is the famous one: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

22. Marx’s original charge against capitalist society was not merely its trans­formation of all objects into commodities, but that “the laborer behaves toward the product of his labor as to an alien object” (“dass der Arbeiter zum Produkt seiner Arbeit als einem fremden Gegenstand sich verhält” [Jugendschriften, p. 83])—in other words, that the things of the world, once they have been pro­duced by men, are to an extent independent of, “alien” to, human life. [89]

Recall from page 70 (¶ 9.6) the “modern discussions of freedom, where freedom is never understood as an objective state of human existence,” because of the supposed “elimination of necessity,” which has kept people from understanding what freedom is in the first place.

More information about work: not only does it make things as on page 88 (¶ 11.10), but uses skill, τέχνη—power that does not come naturally.

Do laboring and working also never quite coincide?

23. For convenience’ sake, I shall follow Cicero’s discussion of liberal and servile occupations in De officiis i. 50–54. The criteria of prudentia and utilitas or utilitas hominum are stated in pars. 151 and 155. (The translation of prudentia as “a higher degree of intelligence” by Walter Miller in the Loeb Classical Li­brary edition seems to me to be misleading.)

    Does prudentia translate φρόνησις?

24. The classification of agriculture among the liberal arts is, of course, specifically Roman. Ie is not due to any special “usefulness” of farming as we would understand it, but much rather related to the Roman idea of patria, accord­ing to which the ager Romanus and not only the city of Rome is the place occu­pied by the public realm.

25. It is this usefulness for sheer living which Cicero calls mediocris utilitas (par. 151) and eliminates from liberal arts. The translation again seems to me to miss the point; these are not “professions … from which no small benefit to society is derived,” but occupations which, in clear opposition to those men­tioned before, transcend the vulgar usefulness of consumer goods. [91]

26. The Romans deemed the difference between opus and operae to be so de­cisive that they had two different forms of contract, the locatio operis and the locatio operarum, of which the latter played an insignificant role because most laboring was done by slaves (see Edgar Loening, in Handwörterbuch der Staats­wissenschaften [1890], 1, 742 ff.).

Does the third category include waiters and prostitutes? Are they “Adam Smith’s ‘menial servants’” as in the next paragraph?

Don’t pat yourself on the back for being an intellectual worker or for reading the Great Books unless you are actually serving the public—albeit not in a servile way! And if you are serving the public and thus doing good work, you should forget about it, as on page 74 (¶ 10.3). See the next paragraph.

27. The opera liberalia were identified with intellectual or rather spiritual work in the Middle Ages (see Otto Neurath, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Opera Servilia,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. XLI [1915], No. 2).

28. H. Wallon describes this process under the rule of Diocletian: “… les fonc­tions jadis serviles se trouvèrent anoblies, élevées au premier rang de l’État. Cette haute considération qui de l’empereur se répandait sur les premiers serviteurs du palais, sur les plus hauts dignitaires de l’empire, descendait à tous les degrés des fonctions publiques … ; le service public devint un office public.” “Les charges les plus serviles, … les noms que nous avons cités aux fonctions de l’esclavage, sont revêtus de l’éclat qui rejaillit de la personne du prince” (His­toire de l’esclavage dans l’antiquité [1847], III, 126 and 131). Before this elevation of the services, the scribes had been classified with the watchmen of public buildings or even with the men who led the prize fighters down to the arena [92] (ibid., p. 171). It seems noteworthy that the elevation of the “intellectuals” coincided with the establishment of a bureaucracy.

29. “The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value,” says Adam Smith and ranks among them “the whole army and navy,” the “servants of the public,” and the liberal professions, such as “churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds.” Their work, “like the declamation of the actors, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician … perishes in the very instant of its pro­duction” (op. cit., I, 295–96). Obviously, Smith would not have had any diffi­culty classifying our “white-collar jobs.”

30. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether any painting was ever as much admired as Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia, whose magical power was cred- [93] ited to make one forget all trouble and sorrow; whoever had not seen it had lived in vain, etc. [94]

There is a key antithesis of the subjective and the objective. Here I try to gather all uses so far of “objectiv-” and “subjectiv-.”

• First reading, page 9 (¶ 1.6):

  The objectivity of the world—its object- or thing-character—and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence.

• Second reading, page 31 (¶ 5.6):

  This freedom is the essential condi­tion of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical neces­sity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man­made violence. This twofold and doubled “unhappiness” of slavery is quite independent of the actual subjective well-being of the slave.

  Page 39 (¶ 6.3):

  The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be localized with the same cer­tainty as the public space. To Rousseau, both the intimate and the social were, rather, subjective modes of human existence, and in his case, it was as though Jean-Jacques rebelled against a man called Rousseau. The modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life, was born in this rebellion of the heart.

  Page 49, note 40 (¶ 6.20):

  Homer’s much quoted thought that Zeus takes away half of a man’s excel­lence (aretē) when the day of slavery catches him … is put into the mouth of Eumaios, a slave himself, and meant as an objective state­ment, not a criticism or a moral judgment.

• Third reading, page 50 (¶ 7.2):

  while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.

  Page 51 (¶ 7.3): Under body pain,

  There seems to be no bridge from the most radical subjec­tivity, in which I am no longer “recognizable,” to the outer world of life … Pain, in other words … is so subjective and removed from the world of things and men that it cannot assume an appearance at all. [Note 43:] On the subjectivity of pain and its relevance for all variations of hedonism and sensualism, see §§ 15 and 43.

  Page 56 (¶ 7.12):

  And since the need for food has its demonstrable basis of reality in the life process itself, it is also obvious that the entirely subjective pangs of hunger are more real than “vainglory,” as Hobbes used to call the need for public admiration … The futility of public admiration … is such that monetary reward, one of the most futile things there is, can become more “objective” and more real.

  Page 57 (¶ 7.13):

  As distinguished from this “objectivity,” whose only basis is money as a common denominator for the fulfilment of all needs, the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects … The subjectivity of privacy can be prolonged and multiplied in a family, it can even become so strong that its weight is felt in the public realm; but this family “world” can never replace the reality rising out of the sum total of aspects presented by one object to a multitude of spectators.

  Page 58 (¶ 7.14): Under radical isolation or mass hysteria, men

  are all imprisoned in the subjec­tivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times.

  (¶ 8.1):

  To live an entirely private life means above all … to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an “objective” relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things …

  (¶ 8.2):

  Under modern circumstances, this deprivation of “objective” relationships to others and of a reality guaranteed through them has become the mass phenomenon of loneliness …

  Page 69 (¶ 9.4):

  … the modern discovery of intimacy seems a flight from the whole outer world into the inner subjec­tivity of the individual, which formerly had been sheltered and protected by the private realm.

  Page 71 (¶ 9.6):

  Modern discussions of freedom, where freedom is never understood as an objective state of human existence but either presents an unsolvable problem of subjectivity, of an entirely undetermined or determined will, or develops out of necessity, all point to the fact that the objective, tangible differ­ence between being free and being forced by necessity is no longer perceived.

  (¶ 9.7):

  A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.

• Fourth reading (this one), page 89 (¶ 11.11):

  Within a com­pletely “socialized mankind” … all work would have become labor because all things would be under­stood, not in their worldly, objective quality, but as results of living labor power and functions of the life process.

  Page 93 (¶ 12.1), right now: Ancient contempt and modern glorification of labor

  both take their bearing from the subjective attitude or activity of the laborer.

  Page 94 (¶ 12.2):

  The curious discrepancy between language and theory … turns out to be a discrepancy between

  • the world-oriented, “objective” language we speak and
  • the man-oriented, subjective theories we use in our attempts at understand­ing.

  Page 102 (¶ 14.2)

  … even Marx … had to admit that productivity of labor … begins only with reification (Vergegenständlichung), with “the erection of an objective world of things.”

I have long been suspicious of the usage of “subjective” and “objective.” I recall being troubled by a high-school assignment to write two essays, one “subjective,” the other “objective.”

People call opinions “subjective” by way of dismissing them, while whatever is “objective” must be agreed to by anybody who wants to be considered scientific or rational. I think this is the sense of Orwell’s parodical translation from Ecclesiastes:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Perhaps males of most species are “objectively” more beautiful than females, but if we say this is false for humans, that is “subjective.”

Here are the definitions from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, sixth edition (1976):

subjective

belonging to, of, due to, the consciousness or thinking or perceiving subject or ego as opp. real or external things; due to one’s own feelings or capacities rather than being actually existent; imaginary.

objective

Belonging not to the consciousness or the perceiving or thinking subject, but to what is presented to this, external to the mind, real.

The first parts may be fine:

• the subjective belongs to our consciousness,
• the objective is what we are conscious of.

However,

• feelings actually exist;
• what we are conscious of may be imaginary.

Collingwood argues more or less this way in the disclaimer or explainer in the Preface of Speculum Mentis (1924):

But I may here call attention to one or two words which, though I think my use of them is natural and correct, may be a stumbling-block to others beside the malicious.

• When I call a thing subjective I mean that it is or pertains to a subject or conscious mind.
• When I call it objective, I mean that it is or pertains to an object of which such a mind is conscious.

I do not call

• a real rose objective and an imaginary one subjective, or
• the rose objective and its colour subjective,
• or the molecules in it objective and the beauty of it subjective.

A real rose I call real, and an imaginary rose I call imaginary; and I call them both objective because they are the objects of a perceiving and an imagining mind respectively. Similarly, the molecules are objective to a scientist and the beauty to an artist.

Collingwood’s culminating use of the terminology is in his final chapter, “Speculum Speculi” (p. 311):

But in abolishing the notion of an external world other than the mind we do not assert any of the silly nonsense usually described by unintelligent critics as idealism. We do not assert that the trees and hills and people of our world are ‘unreal’, or ‘mere ideas in my mind’, still less that matter is nothing but a swarm of mind-particles. The very essence of trees and hills and people is that they should be not myself but my objects in perception: they are not subjective but objective, not states of myself but facts that I know. None the less, my knowing them is organic to them: it is because they are what they are that I can know them, because I know them that they can be what to me they really are. They and I alike are members of one whole, a whole which the destruction of one part would in a sense destroy throughout, as the death of our dearest friend darkens for us the very light of the sun.

This seems concordant with Arendt’s usage. See the next paragraph.

• the world-oriented, “objective” language we speak and
• the man-oriented, subjective theories we use in our attempts at understand­ing.

Now “use object” becomes an important term. I suppose it is whatever has, or even is, a “use value” in Marx’s terminology. The following is from Vol. 1, Part 1, Ch. 1, § 1 of Capital (and note the quotation of Locke in the footnote):

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another …

Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history …

The utility of a thing makes it a use value.* But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities …

* “The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniencies of human life.” (John Locke, “Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, 1691,” in Works Edit. Lond., 1777, Vol. II., p. 28.) In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.

Thought is real, as Descartes discovered.

How do action, speech, and thought exist or make sense at all without this materialization or reification?

31. Locke, op. cit., sec. 46. [96]

It seems to be an accident that “work” and “world” have the same first three letters. For the AHD, the Indo-European root of

• “wor-” in “world” is *wī-ro- (which via Latin gives us words like “virtue”);
• “work” is *werg- (which also the root of τὸ ἔργον and τὸ ὄργανον—Beekes is skeptical that τὰ ὄργια is another derivative).

However, Arendt connects the two words implicitly. Recall from page 7 (¶ 1.3), “Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things … The human condition of work is worldliness.”

Arendt alluded to eternal recurrence on page 18 (¶ 3.2): “Against this back­ground of nature’s ever-recurring life and the gods’ deathless and ageless lives stood mortal men, the only mortals in an immortal but not eternal universe, confronted with the immortal lives of their gods but not under the rule of an eternal God.”

Whose philosophy of life is Arendt denigrating?

32. Politics 1254a7. [97]

Is ὁ βίος going to be to ἡ ζωή as work is to labor?

33. In the earlier literature on labor up to the last third of the nineteenth cen­tury, it was not uncommon to insist on the connection between labor and the cyclical movement of the life process. Thus, Schulze-Delitzsch, in a lecture Die Arbeit (Leipzig, 1863), begins with a description of the cycle of desire-effort-satisfaction—“Beim letzten Bissen fängt schon die Verdauung an.” However, in the huge post-Marxian literature on the labor problem, the only author who emphasizes and theorizes about this most elementary aspect of the laboring activity is Pierre Naville, whose La vie de travail et ses problémes (1954) is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most original recent contribution. Dis­cussing the particular traits of the workday as distinguished from other measure­ment of labor time, he says as follows: “Le trait principal est son caractère cyclique ou rythmique. Ce caractère est lié a la fois à l’esprit naturel et cosmolo­gique de la journée … et au caractère des fonctions physiologiques de l’ếtre humain, qu’il a en commun avec les espèces animales supérieures… . Il est évi­dent que le travail devait être de prime abord lié à des rythmes et fonctions naturels.” From this follows the cyclical character in the expenditure and re­production of labor power that determines the time unit of the workday. Naville’s most important insight is that the time character of human life, inas­much as it is not merely part of the life of the species, stands in stark contrast to the cyclical time character of the workday. “Les limites naturelles supérieures de la vie … ne sont pas dictées, comme celle de la journée, par la nécessité et la possibilité de se reproduire, mais au contraire, par l’impossibilité de se renouveler, [98] sinon a l’échelle de l’espèce. Le cycle s’accomplit en une fois, et ne se renouvelle pas” (pp. 19–24).

Everything in nature is somehow circling, but there is no up or down unless we distinguish it. This tree may be growing, but that one has become a rotting log, and nature does not distinguish them—I guess!

34. Capital (Modern Library ed.), p. 201. This formula is frequent in Marx’s work and always repeated almost verbatim: Labor is the eternal natural necessity to effect the metabolism between man and nature. (See, for instance, Das Kapital, Vol. I, Part 1, ch. 1, sec. 2, and Part 3, ch. 5. The standard English translation, Modern Library ed., pp. 50, 205, falls short of Marx’s precision.) We find almost the same formulation in Vol. Ill of Das Kapital, p. 872. Obviously, when Marx speaks as he frequently does of the “life process of society,” he is not thinking in metaphors.

35. Marx called labor “productive consumption” (Capital [Modern Library ed.], p. 204) and never lost sight of its being a physiological condition.

36. Marx’s whole theory hinges on the early insight that the laborer first of all reproduces his own life by producing his means of subsistence. In his early writings he thought “that men begin to distinguish themselves from animals when they begin to produce their means of subsistence” (Deutsche Ideologie, p. 10). This indeed is the very content of the definition of man as animal laborans. It is all the more noteworthy that in other passages Marx is not satisfied with this definition because it does not distinguish man sharply enough from animals. “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his struc­ture in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement” (Capital [Modern Library ed.], p. 198). Obviously, Marx no longer speaks of labor, but of work—with which he is not concerned; and the best proof of this is that the apparently all-important element of “imagination” plays no role whatsoever in his labor theory. In the third volume of Das Kapital he repeats that surplus labor beyond immediate needs serves the “progressive extension of the reproduction process” (pp. 872, 278). Despite occasional hesi- [99] tations, Marx remained convinced that “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason a silk worm produces silk” (Theories of Surplus Value [London, 1951], p. 186).

37. Locke, op. cit., secs. 46, 26, and 27, respectively.

Though the word “imagination” seems to be used about a dozen other times in the text, the index refers only to note 36 here and the final chapter, where “the ancients had relied upon imagination and memory … to convince themselves of their happiness.”

How do we know the bee does not imagine the comb ahead of time? The bee would seem always to follow the same plan, so to speak. The architect may do that, but can also create something new. He or she may do this creating in imagination, before any actual building is done; but not every artist works that way.

38. Ibid., sec. 34. [100]

So mopping the floor is a different kind of labor from baking bread. Did Arendt spend much time engaged in either of these?

39. The expression is Karl Dunkmann’s (Soziologie der Arbeit [1933], p. 71), who rightly remarks that the title of Marx’s great work is a misnomer and should better have been called System der Arbeit. [101]

40. The curious formulation occurs in Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1917), p. 44.

Did Locke, Smith, Marx, and Veblen equate work with labor, or fail to distinguish them?

41. The term vergegenständlichen occurs not very frequently in Marx, but al­ways in a crucial context. Cf. Jugendschriften, p. 88: “Das praktische Erzeugen einer gegenständlichen Welt, die Bearbeitung der unorganischen Natur ist die Bewährung des Menschen als eines bewussten Gattungswesens. … [Das Tier] produziert unter der Herrschaft des unmittelbaren Bedürfnisses, wahrend der Mensch selbst frei vom physischen Bedürfnis produziert und erst wahrhaft produziert in der Freiheit von demselben.” Here, as in the passage from Capital quoted in note 36, Marx obviously introduces an altogether different concept of labor, that is, speaks about work and fabrication. The same reification is mentioned in Das Kapital (Vol. I, Part 3, ch. 5), though somewhat equivocally: “[Die Arbeit] ist vergegenständlicht und der Gegenstand ist verarbeitet.” The play on words with the term Gegenstand obscures what actually happens in the process: through reification, a new thing has been produced, but the “object” that this process transformed into a thing is, from the viewpoint of the process, [102] only material and not a thing. (The Engish translation, Modern Library ed., p. 201, misses the meaning of the German text and therefore escapes the equivo­cality.)

42. This is a recurrent formulation in Marx’s works. See, for instance, Das Kapital, Vol. 1 (Modern Library ed., p. 50) and Vol. II, pp. 873–74.

43. “Des Prozess erlischt im Produkt” (Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Part 3, ch. 5).

44. Adam Smith, op. cit., I, 295.

45. Locke, op. cit., sec. 40.

46. Adam Smith, op. cit., 1, 294. [103]

47. Op. cit., secs. 46 and 47.

48. Jules Vuillemin’s L’être et le travail (1949) is a good example of what happens if one tries to resolve the central contradictions and equivocalities of Marx’s thoughts. This is possible only if one abandons the phenomenal evidence altogether and begins to treat Marx’s concepts as though they constituted in themselves a complicated jigsaw puzzle of abstractions. Thus, labor “springs apparently from necessity” but “actually realizes the work of liberty and affirms our power”; in labor “necessity expresses [for man] a hidden freedom” (pp. 15, 16). Against these attempts at a sophisticated vulgarization, one may remember Marx’s own sovereign attitude toward his work as Kautsky reports it in the following anecdote: Kautsky asked Marx in 1881 if he did not contemplate an edition of his complete works, whereupon Marx replied: “These works must first be written” (Kautsky, Aus der Frühzeit des Marxmismus [1935], p. 5 3).

49. Das Kapital, 111, 873. In the Deutsche Ideologie Marx states that “die kom­munistische Revolution … die Arbeit beseitigt” (p. 59), after having stated some pages earlier (p. 10) that only through labor does man distinguish himself from animals. [104]

50. The formulation is Edmund Wilson’s in To the Finland Station (Anchor ed., 1953), but this criticism is familiar in Marxian literature.

What other “fundamental and flagrant contradictions” has Arendt got in mind? I recall somebody’s accusation of Maugham that he could not decide whether he admired or despised humanity; but the critic thought this conflict kept Maugham from being first-rate. There is also the opening of Descartes’s Discourse on Method—here are the original and a translation:

The conflict in the Veblen quote on page 102 (¶ 14.1) seemed clear enough; but in Marx, is it anything other than the conflict of

• the real and the ideal (though I guess those are loaded terms for Marx),
• “what you are, [and] what you’re meant to be” (John Perry Barlow and Bob Weir),
• the human and the humane (there was only one word before the 18th century)?

51. See ch. vi, § 42, below. [105]

So we have the following (faulty) syllogism?

• Economic growth will never end.
• Labor never ends.
• Therefore everything comes from labor.

52. Deutsche Ideologie, p. 17. [106]

A command in an old book is like the voice of nature?

53. Nowhere in the Old Testament is death “the wage of sin.” Nor did the curse by which man was expelled from paradise punish him with labor and birth; it only made labor harsh and birth full of sorrow. According to Genesis, man (adam) had been created to take care and watch over the soil (adamah), as even his name, the masculine form of “soil,” indicates (see Gen. 2:5, 15). “And Adam was not to till adamah … and He, God, created Adam of the dust of adamah. … He, God, took Adam and put him into the garden of Eden to till and to watch it” (I follow the translation of Martin Buber and Franz Rosen­zweig, Die Schrift [Berlin, n.d.]). The word for “tilling” which later became the word for laboring in Hebrew, leawod, has the connotation of “to serve.” The curse (3: 17–19) does not mention this word, but the meaning is clear: the serv­ice for which man was created now became servitude. The current popular mis­understanding of the curse is due to an unconscious interpretation of the Old Testament in the light of Greek thinking. The misunderstanding is usually avoid­ed by Catholic writers. See, for instance, Jacques Leclercq, Leçons de droit naturel, Vol. IV, Part 2, “Travail, Propriété,” (1946), p. 31: “La peine du travail est le résultat du péché original. … L’homme non déchu eût travaillé dans la joie, mais il eût travaillé”; or J. Chr. Nattermann, Die moderne Arbeit, soziologisch und theologisch betrachtet (1953), p. 9. It is interesting in this context to compare the curse of the Old Testament with the seemingly similar explanation of the harsh­ness of labor in Hesiod. Hesiod reports that the gods, in order to punish man, hid life from him (see n. 8) so that he had to search for it, while before, he apparently did not have to do anything but pluck the fruits of the earth from fields and trees. Here the curse consists not only in the harshness of labor but in labor itself. [107]

From Genesis, apparently we are to infer:

• The woman’s sorrows are multiplied, and thus she already has some sorrow.
• That ground is cursed that Adam was already going to be tilling.
• The pair have not eaten of the Tree of Life, so they are not losing immortality; they were always going to die.

Perhaps this not all entirely clear. Here are verses of Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 in the King James Version:

15 And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
18 And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

It seems possible that Adam and Eve were eating of the Tree of Life, since it was not forbidden in chapter 2; so they could have been immortal, had they remained in Eden. If it had been an important point though, Moses might have made it clearer.

Aquinas thinks it is clear, in the Summa, First Part, Question 97, Article 1; but he relies on Paul:

It is written (Rom. 5:12): “By sin death came into the world.” Therefore man was immortal before sin.

In Article 4, Aquinas implies that this immortality had not come from the tree, though would have been continued by it:

It is written (Gn. 3:22): “Lest perhaps he put forth his hand, and take of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” Further, Augustine says (QQ. Vet. et Nov. Test. qu. 19 [*Work of an anonymous author, among the supposititious works of St. Augustine]): “A taste of the tree of life warded off corruption of the body; and even after sin man would have remained immortal, had he been allowed to eat of the tree of life.”

Arendt alludes to the last verse of Romans 6; earlier verses are relevant for the discussion of being a “servant” or rather slave, ὁ δοῦλος. Here again is the KJV:

14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.
15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.
16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?
17 But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you.
18 Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.
19 I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.
20 For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness.
21 What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death.
22 But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.
23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Does Arendt object to the idea that we have always been slaves, whether to sin or to God? Apparently so, if being a slave is necessarily an evil.

In Hesiod, Arendt now alludes to Works and Days, lines 42–6:

κρύψαντες γὰρ ἔχουσι θεοὶ βίον ἀνθρώποισιν·
ῥηιδίως γάρ κεν καὶ ἐπ᾽ ἤματι ἐργάσσαιο,
ὥστε σε κεἰς ἐνιαυτὸν ἔχειν καὶ ἀεργὸν ἐόντα·
αἶψά κε πηδάλιον μὲν ὑπὲρ καπνοῦ καταθεῖο,
ἔργα βοῶν δ᾽ ἀπόλοιτο καὶ ἡμιόνων ταλαεργῶν.

For the gods keep the means of life concealed from human beings. Otherwise you would easily be able to work in just one day so as to have enough for a whole year even without working, and quickly you would store the rudder above the smoke, and the work of the cattle and of the hard-working mules would be ended.

How much is Arendt speaking for herself?

Compare Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, Prologue (pages 23, 25). Beyond not distinguishing work from labor, Collingwood may differ by talking of doing one’s best work:

But the very tendency to level downwards, the very narrowness of medieval institutionalism, secured one great benefit, namely the happiness of those humble ordinary men and women who ask not for adventure or excitement, but for a place in the world where they shall feel themselves usefully and congenially employed.

Now there is no truer and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, in the kind one likes best, and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one’s own life. The man who is rich enough to work unnoticed and unrewarded is by comparison a savage; the man who can only do his own work by stealth when he has won his daily bread elsewhere is a slave. Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do. But this freedom and happiness were in principle at least the lot of every one in the middle ages.

So it is a failure,

• not that Marx did not recognize the distinction between work and labor,
• but that Locke and Smith did not understand it properly?