Polytropy

Index to this series

CHAPTER IV Work [1]

18 the durability of the world

¶ 18.1

The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our bodies—

• homo faber who makes and literally “works upon”¹ as dis­tinguished from the
• animal laborans which labors and “mixes with”

—fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.

• They are mostly, but not exclu­sively, objects for use and
• they possess
  • the durability Locke needed for the establishment of property,
  • the “value” Adam Smith needed for the exchange market, and
• they bear testimony to pro­ductivity, which Marx believed to be the test of human nature.

Their proper use does not cause them to disappear and they give the human artifice the stability and solidity without which it could not be relied upon to house the unstable and mortal creature which is man.

¶ 18.2

The durability of the human artifice is not absolute; the use we make of it, even though we do not consume it, uses it up. The life process which permeates our whole being invades it, too, and if we do not use the things of the world, they also will eventually decay, return into the over-all natural process from which they were [136] drawn and against which they were erected. If left to itself or dis­carded from the human world, the chair will again become wood, and the wood will decay and return to the soil from which the tree sprang before it was cut off to become the material upon which to work and with which to build. But though this may be the unavoid­able end of all single things in the world, the sign of their being products of a mortal maker, it is not so certainly the eventual fate of the human artifice itself, where all single things can be con­stantly replaced with the change of generations which come and inhabit the man-made world and go away. Moreover, while usage is bound to use up these objects, this end is not their destiny in the same way as destruction is the inherent end of all things for con­sumption. What usage wears out is durability.

¶ 18.3

It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their “objectivity” which makes them withstand, “stand against”² and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objec­tivity lies in the fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same stream—men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. In other words, against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made world rather than the sub­lime indifference of an untouched nature, whose overwhelming elementary force, on the contrary, will compel them to swing re­lentlessly in the circle of their own biological movement, which fits so closely into the over-all cyclical movement of nature’s household. Only we who have erected the objectivity of a world of our own from what nature gives us, who have built it into the environment of nature so that we are protected from her, can look upon nature as something “objective.” Without a world between men and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity.

¶ 18.4

Although use and consumption, like work and labor, are not the [137] same, they seem to overlap in certain important areas to such an extent that the unanimous agreement with which both public and learned opinion have identified these two different matters seems well justified. Use, indeed, does contain an element of consump­tion, in so far as the wearing-out process comes about through the contact of the use object with the living consuming organism, and the closer the contact between the body and the used thing, the more plausible will an equation of the two appear. If one construes, for instance, the nature of use objects in terms of wearing apparel, he will be tempted to conclude that use is nothing but consumption at a slower pace. Against this stands what we mentioned before, that destruction, though unavoidable, is incidental to use but in­herent in consumption. What distinguishes the most flimsy pair of shoes from mere consumer goods is that they do not spoil if I do not wear them, that they have an independence of their own, how­ever modest, which enables them to survive even for a considerable time the changing moods of their owner. Used or unused, they will remain in the world for a certain while unless they are wantonly destroyed.

¶ 18.5

A similar, much more famous and much more plausible, argu­ment can be raised in favor of an identification of work and labor. The most necessary and elementary labor of man, the tilling of the soil, seems to be a perfect example of labor transforming itself into work in the process, as it were. This seems so because tilling the soil, its close relation to the biological cycle and its utter depend­ence upon the larger cycle of nature notwithstanding, leaves some product behind which outlasts its own activity and forms a durable addition to the human artifice: the same task, performed year in and year out, will eventually transform the wilderness into culti­vated land. The example figures prominently in all ancient and modern theories of laboring precisely for this reason. Yet, despite an undeniable similarity and although doubtless the time-honored dignity of agriculture arises from the fact that tilling the soil not only procures means of subsistence but in this process prepares the earth for the building of the world, even in this case the distinction remains quite clear: the cultivated land is not, properly speaking, a use object, which is there in its own durability and requires for its permanence no more than ordinary care in preservation; the tilled [138] soil, if it is to remain cultivated, needs to be labored upon time and again. A true reification, in other words, in which the produced thing in its existence is secured once and for all, has never come to pass; it needs to be reproduced again and again in order to remain within the human world at all.

19 reification

¶ 19.1

Fabrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification. Solid­ity, inherent in all, even the most fragile, things, comes from the material worked upon, but this material itself is not simply given and there, like the fruits of field and trees which we may gather or leave alone without changing the household of nature. Material is already a product of human hands which have removed it from its natural location, either killing a life process, as in the case of the tree which must be destroyed in order to provide wood, or inter­rupting one of nature’s slower processes, as in the case of iron, stone, or marble torn out of the womb of the earth. This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a de­stroyer of nature. The animal laborans, which with its body and the help of tame animals nourishes life, may be the lord and master of all living creatures, but he still remains the servant of nature and the earth; only homo faber conducts himself as lord and master of the whole earth. Since his productivity was seen in the image of a Creator-God, so that where God creates ex nihilo, man creates out of given substance, human productivity was by definition bound to result in a Promethean revolt because it could erect a man-made world only after destroying part of God-created nature.³ [139]

¶ 19.2

The experience of this violence is the most elemental experience of human strength and, therefore, the very opposite of the painful, exhausting effort experienced in sheer labor. It can provide self-assurance and satisfaction, and can even become a source of self-confidence throughout life, all of which are quite different from the bliss which can attend a life spent in labor and toil or from the fleeting, though intense pleasure of laboring itself which comes about if the effort is co-ordinated and rhythmically ordered, and which essentially is the same as the pleasure felt in other rhyth­mic body movements. Most descriptions of the “joys of labor,” in so far as they are not late reflections of the biblical contented bliss of life and death and do not simply mistake the pride in having done a job with the “joy” of accomplishing it, are related to the elation felt by the violent exertion of a strength with which man measures himself against the overwhelming forces of the elements and which through the cunning invention of tools he knows how to multiply far beyond its natural measure.⁴ Solidity is not the result of pleasure or exhaustion in earning one’s bread “in the sweat of his brow,” but of this strength, and it is not simply borrowed or plucked as a free gift from nature’s own eternal presence, although it would be impossible without the material torn out of nature; it is already a product of man’s hands.

¶ 19.3

The actual work of fabrication is performed under the guidance of a model in accordance with which the object is constructed. This model can be an image beheld by the eye of the mind or a blueprint in which the image has already found a tentative ma­terialization through work. In either case, what guides the work of fabrication is outside the fabricator and precedes the actual work [140] process in much the same way as the urgencies of the life process within the laborer precede the actual labor process. (This descrip­tion is in flagrant contradiction to the findings of modern psychol­ogy, which tell us almost unanimously that the images of the mind are as safely located in our heads as the pangs of hunger are located in our stomachs. This subjectivization of modern science, which is only a reflection of an even more radical subjectivization of the modern world, has its justification in this case in the fact that, in­deed, most work in the modern world is performed in the mode of labor, so that the worker, even if he wanted to, could not “labor for his work rather than for himself,”⁵ and frequently is instru­mental in the production of objects of whose ultimate shape he has not the slightest notion.⁶ These circumstances, though of great his­torical importance, are irrelevant in a description of the funda­mental articulations of the vita activa.) What claims our attention is the veritable gulf that separates all bodily sensations, pleasure or pain, desires and satisfactions—which are so “private” that they cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world, and therefore are altogether incapable of being reified—from mental images which lend themselves so easily and naturally to reification that we neither conceive of making a bed without first having some image, some “idea” of a bed before our inner eye, nor can imagine a bed without having recourse to some visual experience of a real thing.

¶ 19.4

It is of great importance to the role fabrication came to play within the hierarchy of the vita activa that the image or model whose shape guides the fabrication process not only precedes it, but does not disappear with the finished product, which it survives intact, present, as it were, to lend itself to an infinite continuation of fabrication. This [potential multiplication, inherent in work, is] [141] different in principle from the repetition which is the mark of labor. This repetition is urged upon and remains subject to the biological cycle; the needs and wants of the human body come and go, and though they reappear again and again at regular intervals, they never remain for any length of time. Multiplication, in dis­tinction from mere repetition, multiplies something that already possesses a relatively stable, relatively permanent existence in the world. This quality of permanence in the model or image, of being there before fabrication starts and remaining after it has come to an end, surviving all the possible use objects it continues to help into existence, had a powerful influence on Plato’s doctrine of eternal ideas. In so far as his teaching was inspired by the word idea or eidos (“shape” or “form”), which he used for the first time in a philosophical context, it rested on experiences in poiēsis or fabrication, and although Plato used his theory to express quite different and perhaps much more “philosophical” experiences, he never failed to draw his examples from the field of making when he wanted to demonstrate the plausibility of what he was saying.⁷ [142] The one eternal idea presiding over a multitude of perishable things derives its plausibility in Plato’s teachings from the per­manence and oneness of the model according to which many and perishable objects can be made.

¶ 19.5

The process of making is itself entirely determined by the cate­gories of means and end. The fabricated thing is an end product in the twofold sense that the production process

• comes to an end in it (“the process disappears in the product,” as Marx said) and that it
• is only a means to produce this end.

Labor, to be sure, also pro­duces for the end of consumption, but since this end, the thing to be consumed, lacks the worldly permanence of a piece of work, the end of the process is not determined by the end product but rather by the exhaustion of labor power, while the products themselves, on the other hand, immediately become means again, means of subsistence and reproduction of labor power. In the process of making, on the contrary, the end is beyond doubt: it has come when an entirely new thing with enough durability to remain in the world as an independent entity has been added to the human arti­fice. As far as the thing, the end product of fabrication, is con­cerned, the process need not be repeated. The impulse toward repe­tition comes from

• the craftsman’s need to earn his means of sub­sistence, in which case his working coincides with his laboring; or it comes from
• a demand for multiplication in the market, in which case the craftsman who wishes to meet this demand has added, as Plato would have said, the art of earning money to his craft.

The point here is that in either case the process is repeated for reasons outside itself and is unlike the compulsory repetition inherent in laboring, where one must eat in order to labor and must labor in order to eat.

¶ 19.6

To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end is the mark of fabrication, which through this characteristic alone dis- [143] tinguishes itself from all other human activities.

• Labor, caught in the cyclical movement of the body’s life process, has neither a be­ginning nor an end.
• Action, though it may have a definite begin­ning, never, as we shall see, has a predictable end.

This great re­liability of work is reflected in that the fabrication process, unlike action, is not irreversible:

Homo faber is indeed a lord and master, not only be­cause he is the master or has set himself up as the master of all nature but because he is master of himself and his doings. This is true

• neither of the animal laborans, which is subject to the necessity of its own life,
• nor of the man of action, who remains in depend­ence upon his fellow men.

Alone with his image of the future prod­uct, homo faber is free to produce, and again facing alone the work of his hands, he is free to destroy.

20 instrumentality and Animal Laborans

¶ 20.1

From the standpoint of homo faber, who relies entirely on the pri­mordial tools of his hands, man is, as Benjamin Franklin said, a “tool-maker.” The same instruments, which only lighten the bur­den and mechanize the labor of the animal laborans, are designed and invented by homo faber for the erection of a world of things, and their fitness and precision are dictated by such “objective” aims as he may wish to invent rather than by subjective needs and wants. Tools and instruments are so intensely worldly objects that we can classify whole civilizations using them as criteria. No­where, however, is their worldly character more manifest than when they are used in labor processes, where they are indeed the only tangible things that survive both the labor and the consump­tion process itself. For the animal laborans, therefore, as it is subject to and constantly occupied with the devouring processes of life, the durability and stability of the world are primarily represented in the tools and instruments it uses, and in a society of laborers, tools [144] are very likely to assume a more than mere instrumental character or function.

¶ 20.2

The frequent complaints we hear about the perversion of ends and means in modern society, about men becoming the servants of the machines they themselves invented and of being “adapted” to their requirements instead of using them as instruments for human needs and wants, have their roots in the factual situation of labor­ing. In this situation, where production consists primarily in prepa­ration for consumption, the very distinction between means and ends, so highly characteristic of the activities of homo faber, simply does not make sense, and the instruments which homo faber in­vented and with which he came to the help of the labor of the animal laborans therefore lose their instrumental character once they are used by it. Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have strength to labor or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption.

¶ 20.3

If we consider this loss of the faculty to distinguish clearly be­tween means and ends in terms of human behavior, we can say that the free disposition and use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the laboring body with its im­plement, the movement of laboring itself acting as the unifying force. Labor but not work requires for best results a rhythmically ordered performance and, in so far as many laborers gang together, needs a rhythmic co-ordination of all individual movements.⁸ In [145] this motion, the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred. What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man’s purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn into this rhythm until body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal laborans, it is no longer the body’s move­ment that determines the implement’s movement but the machine’s movement which enforces the movements of the body. The point is that nothing can be mechanized more easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the labor process, which in its turn corresponds to the equally automatic repetitive rhythm of the life process and its metabolism with nature. Precisely because the animal laborans [146] does not use tools and instruments in order to build a world but in order to ease the labors of its own life process, it has lived literally in a world of machines ever since the industrial revolution and the emancipation of labor replaced almost all hand tools with machines which in one way or another supplanted human labor power with the superior power of natural forces.

¶ 20.4

The decisive difference between tools and machines is perhaps best illustrated by the apparently endless discussion of whether man should be “adjusted” to the machine or the machines should be adjusted to the “nature” of man. We mentioned in the first chapter the chief reason why such a discussion must be sterile: if the hu­man condition consists in man’s being a conditioned being for whom everything, given or man-made, immediately becomes a condition of his further existence, then man “adjusted” himself to an environment of machines the moment he designed them. They certainly have become as inalienable a condition of our existence as tools and implements were in all previous ages. The interest of the discussion, from our point of view, therefore, lies rather in the fact that this question of adjustment could arise at all. There never was any doubt about man’s being adjusted or needing special adjust­ment to the tools he used; one might as well have adjusted him to his hands. The case of the machines is entirely different. Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines de­mand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust the natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical movement. This, certainly, does not imply that men as such adjust to or become the servants of their machines; but it does mean that, as long as the work at the machines lasts, the mechanical process has replaced the rhythm of the human body.

• Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or to replace the hand.
• Even the most primitive machine guides the body’s labor and eventually replaces it alto­gether.

¶ 20.5

As is so frequently the case with historical developments, it seems as though the actual implications of technology, that is, of the replacement of tools and implements with machinery, have come to light only in its last stage, with the advent of automation. For our purposes it may be useful to recall, however briefly, the [147] main stages of modern technology’s development since the begin­ning of the modern age. The first stage, the invention of the steam engine, which led into the industrial revolution, was still charac­terized by an imitation of natural processes and the use of natural forces for human purposes, which did not differ in principle from the old use of water and wind power. Not the principle of the steam engine was new but rather the discovery and use of the coal mines to feed it.⁹ The machine tools of this early stage reflect this imitation of naturally known processes; they, too, imitate and put to more powerful use the natural activities of the human hand. But today we are told that “the greatest pitfall to avoid is the assumption that the design aim is reproduction of the hand move­ments of the operator or laborer.”¹⁰

¶ 20.6

The next stage is chiefly characterized by the use of electricity, and, indeed, electricity still determines the present stage of techni­cal development. This stage can no longer be described in terms of a gigantic enlargement and continuation of the old arts and crafts, and it is only to this world that the categories of homo faber, to whom every instrument is a means to achieve a prescribed end, no longer apply. For here we no longer use material as nature yields it to us, killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them. In all these instances, we changed and denaturalized nature for our own worldly ends, so that the human world or artifice on one hand and nature on the other remained two distinctly separate entities. Today we have begun to “create,” as it were, that is, to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against nature’s elementary forces, keeping them as [148] far as possible outside the man-made world, we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself. The result has been a veritable revolution in the concept of fabrication; manufacturing, which always had been “a series of separate steps,” has become “a continuous process,” the process of the conveyor belt and the assembly line.¹¹

¶ 20.7

Automation is the most recent stage in this development, which indeed “illuminates the whole history of machinism.”¹² It certainly will remain the culminating point of the modern development, even if the atomic age and a technology based upon nuclear discoveries puts a rather rapid end to it. The first instruments of nuclear tech­nology, the various types of atom bombs, which, if released in suf- [149] ficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth, present sufficient evidence for the enormous scale on which such a change might take place. Here it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural proc­esses, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of nuclear physicists.¹³ If present technology consists of channeling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future techniques will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice.

¶ 20.8

The channeling of natural forces into the human world has shat­tered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is char­acteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not “made” but grow by themselves into whatever they become. (This is also the authentic meaning of our word “nature,” whether we derive it from its latin root nasci, to be born, or trace it back to its Greek origin, physis, which comes from phyein, to grow out of, to appear by itself.) Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is en­tirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing’s existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed con­tains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence [150] stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism. We call automatic all courses of movement which are self-moving and therefore outside the range of wilful and purposeful interference. In the mode of produc­tion ushered in by automation, the distinction between operation and product, as well as the product’s precedence over the operation (which is only the means to produce the end), no longer make sense and have become obsolete.¹⁴ The categories of homo faber and his world apply here no more than they ever could apply to nature and the natural universe. This is, incidentally, why modern advocates of automation usually take a very determined stand against the mechanistic view of nature and against the practical utilitarianism of the eighteenth century, which were so eminently characteristic of the one-sided, single-minded work orientation of homo faber.

¶ 20.9

The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and imple­ments is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer “human value” is restricted to the use the animal laborans makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.

¶ 20.10

One thing is certain: the continuous automatic process of manu­facturing has not only done away with the “unwarranted assump­tion” that “human hands guided by human brains represent the [151] optimum efficiency,”¹⁵ but with the much more important assump­tion that the things of the world around us should depend upon human design and be built in accordance with human standards of either utility or beauty. In place of both utility and beauty, which are standards of the world, we have come to design products that still fulfil certain “basic functions” but whose shape will be pri­marily determined by the operation of the machine. The “basic functions” are of course the functions of the human animal’s life process, since no other function is basically necessary, but the product itself—not only its variations but even the “total change to a new product”—will depend entirely upon the capacity of the machine.¹⁶

¶ 20.11

To design objects for the operational capacity of the machine instead of designing machines for the production of certain ob­jects would indeed be the exact reversal of the means-end cate­gory, if this category still made any sense. But even the most gen­eral end, the release of manpower, that was usually assigned to machines, is now thought to be a secondary and obsolete aim, in­adequate to and limiting potential “startling increases in effi­ciency.”¹⁷ As matters stand today, it has become as senseless to describe this world of machines in terms of means and ends as it has always been senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce a tree or the tree to produce the seed. By the same token it is quite probable that the continuous process pursuant to the channeling of nature’s never-ending processes into the human world, though it may very well destroy the world qua world as human artifice, will as reliably and limitlessly provide the species man-kind with the necessities of life as nature herself did before men erected their artificial home on earth and set up a barrier be­tween nature and themselves.

¶ 20.12

For a society of laborers, the world of machines has become a substitute for the real world, even though this pseudo world can­not fulfil the most important task of the human artifice, which is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves. In the continuous process of operation, this world of machines is even losing that independent worldly character which the tools and implements and the early machinery of the [152] modern age so eminently possessed. The natural processes on which it feeds increasingly relate it to the biological process itself, so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were “shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of a turtle.” Seen from the vantage point of this development, technology in fact no longer appears “as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the in­nate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever­increasing measure into the environment of man.”¹⁸

21 instrumentality and Homo Faber

¶ 21.1

The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fun­damental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them.

• The end jus­tifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood.
• Because of the end product, tools are designed and implements in­vented, and
• the same end product organizes the work process it­self, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of co-opera­tion, the number of assistants, etc.

During the work process, every­thing is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else.

¶ 21.2

The same standards of means and end apply to the product itself. Though it is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced and is the end of the fabrication process, it never be­comes, so to speak, an end in itself, at least not as long as it re­mains an object for use. The chair which is the end of carpentering can show its usefulness only by again becoming a means, either as a thing whose durability permits its use as a means for comfortable living or as a means of exchange. The trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the rela­tionship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some [153] other context. In other words, in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends.¹⁹

¶ 21.3

This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theo­retically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction be­tween utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between “in order to” and “for the sake of.” Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen—like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is “for the sake of” usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of “in order to.” The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: “And what is the use of use?” The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever ar­riving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The “in order to” has become the content of the “for the sake of”; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.

¶ 21.4

Within the category of means and end, and among the experi­ences of instrumentality which rules over the whole world of use objects and utility, there is no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is “an end in itself.” In the world of homo faber, where everything must be of some use, that is, must lend itself as an instrument to achieve something else, meaning itself can appear only as an end, as an “end in itself” which actually is either a tautology applying to all ends or a contradiction in terms. For an end, once it is attained, ceases to be an end and loses its capacity to guide and justify the [154] choice of means, to organize and produce them. It has now become an object among objects, that is, it has been added to the huge arsenal of the given from which homo faber selects freely his means to pursue his ends. Meaning, on the contrary, must be permanent and lose nothing of its character, whether it is achieved or, rather, found by man or fails man and is missed by him. Homo faber, in so far as he is nothing but a fabricator and thinks in no terms but those of means and ends which arise directly out of his work activ­ity, is just as incapable of understanding meaning as the animal laborans is incapable of understanding instrumentality. And just as the implements and tools homo faber uses to erect the world be­come for the animal laborans the world itself, thus the meaningful­ness of this world, which actually is beyond the reach of homo faber, becomes for him the paradoxical “end in itself.”

¶ 21.5

The only way out of the dilemma of meaninglessness in all strictly utilitarian philosophy is to turn away from the objective world of use things and fall back upon the subjectivity of use itself. Only in a strictly anthropocentric world, where the user, that is, man himself, becomes the ultimate end which puts a stop to the unending chain of ends and means, can utility as such acquire the dignity of meaningfulness. Yet the tragedy is that in the moment homo faber seems to have found fulfilment in terms of his own ac­tivity, he begins to degrade the world of things, the end and end product of his own mind and hands; if man the user is the highest end, “the measure of all things,” then not only nature, treated by homo faber as the almost “worthless material” upon which to work, but the “valuable” things themselves have become mere means, losing thereby their own intrinsic “value.”

¶ 21.6

The anthropocentric utilitarianism of homo faber has found its greatest expression in the Kantian formula that no man must ever become a means to an end, that every human being is an end in himself. Although we find earlier (for instance, in Locke’s in­sistence that no man can be permitted to possess another man’s body or use his bodily strength) an awareness of the fateful con­sequences which an unhampered and unguided thinking in terms of means and ends must invariably entail in the political realm, it is only in Kant that the philosophy of the earlier stages of the modern age frees itself entirely of the common sense platitudes which we [155] always find where homo faber rules the standards of society. The reason is, of course, that Kant did not mean to formulate or con­ceptualize the tenets of the utilitarianism of his time, but on the contrary wanted first of all to relegate the means-end category to its proper place and prevent its use in the field of political action. His formula, however, can no more deny its origin in utilitarian thinking than his other famous and also inherently paradoxical in­terpretation of man’s attitude toward the only objects that are not “for use,” namely works of art, in which he said we take “pleasure without any interest.”²⁰ For the same operation which establishes man as the “supreme end” permits him “If he can [to] subject the whole of nature to it,”²¹ that is, to degrade nature and the world into mere means, robbing both of their independent dignity, Not even Kant could solve the perplexity or enlighten the blindness of homo faber with respect to the problem of meaning without turning to the paradoxical “end in itself,” and this perplexity lies in the fact that while only fabrication with its instrumentality is capable of building a world, this same world becomes as worthless as the employed material, a mere means for further ends, if the standards which governed its coming into being are permitted to rule it after its establishment.

¶ 21.7

Man, in so far as he is homo faber, instrumentalizes, and his in­strumentalization implies a degradation of all things into means, their loss of intrinsic and independent value, so that eventually not only the objects of fabrication but also “the earth in general and all forces of nature,” which clearly came into being without the help of man and have an existence independent of the human world, lose their “value because [they] do not present the reification which comes from work.” It was for no other reason than this attitude of homo faber to the world that the Greeks in their classical period declared the whole field of the arts and crafts, where men work with instruments and do something not for its own sake but [156] in order to produce something else, to be banausic, a term perhaps best translated by “philistine,” implying vulgarity of thinking and acting in terms of expediency. The vehemence of this contempt will never cease to startle us if we realize that the great masters of Greek sculpture and architecture were by no means excepted from the verdict.

¶ 21.8

The issue at stake is, of course, not instrumentality, the use of means to achieve an end, as such, but rather the generalization of the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are estab­lished as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men. This generalization is inherent in the activity of homo faber because the experience of means and end, as it is present in fabrication, does not disappear with the finished product but is extended to its ultimate destination, which is to serve as a use object. The instru­mentalization of the whole world and the earth, this limitless de­valuation of everything given, this process of growing meaning­lessness where every end is transformed into a means and which can be stopped only by making man himself the lord and master of all things, does not directly arise out of the fabrication process; for from the viewpoint of fabrication the finished product is as much an end in itself, an independent durable entity with an existence of its own, as man is an end in himself in Kant’s political philosophy. Only in so far as fabrication chiefly fabricates use objects does the finished product again become a means, and only in so far as the life process takes hold of things and uses them for its purposes does the productive and limited instrumentality of fabrication change into the limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists.

¶ 21.9

It is quite obvious that the Greeks dreaded this devaluation of world and nature with its inherent anthropocentrism—the “ab­surd” opinion that man is the highest being and that everything else is subject to the exigencies of human life (Aristotle)—no less than they despised the sheer vulgarity of all consistent utilitarian­ism. To what extent they were aware of the consequences of seeing in homo faber the highest human possibility is perhaps best illus­trated by Plato’s famous argument against Protagoras and his ap­parently self-evident statement that “man is the measure of all use things (chrēmata), of the existence of those that are, and of the non- [157] existence of those that are not.”²³ (Protagoras evidently did not say: “Man is the measure of all things,” as tradition and the stand­ard translations have made him say.) The point of the matter is that Plato saw immediately that if one makes man the measure of all things for use, it is man the user and instrumentalizer, and not man the speaker and doer or man the thinker, to whom the world is being related. And since it is in the nature of man the user and instrumentalizer to look upon everything as means to an end—upon every tree as potential wood—this must eventually mean that man becomes the measure not only of things whose existence depends upon him but of literally everything there is.

¶ 21.10

In this Platonic interpretation, Protagoras in fact sounds like the earliest forerunner of Kant, for if man is the measure of all things, then man is the only thing outside the means-end relationship, the only end in himself who can use everything else as a means. Plato knew quite well that the possibilities of producing use objects and of treating all things of nature as potential use objects are as limit­less as the wants and talents of human beings. If one permits the standards of homo faber to rule the finished world as they must necessarily rule the coming into being of this world, then homo faber will eventually help himself to everything and consider every­thing that is as a mere means for himself. He will judge every thing as though it belonged to the class of chrēmata, of use objects, so that, to follow Plato’s own example, the wind will no longer be un­derstood in its own right as a natural force but will be considered exclusively in accordance with human needs for warmth or refresh­ment—which, of course, means that the wind as something objec­tively given has been eliminated from human experience. It is be­cause of these consequences that Plato, who at the end of his life recalls once more in the Laws the saying of Protagoras, replies with an almost paradoxical formula: not man—who because of his [158] wants and talents wishes to use everything and therefore ends by depriving all things of their intrinsic worth—but “the god is the measure [even] of mere use objects.”²⁴