Work and ethics are joined in different ways. The phrase ‘the work ethic’ refers to habits of self-discipline, responsibility, reliability and efficiency that improve the quality of one’s work but are also held to be more generally desirable character features and so relate to the topic of virtues. Similarly, negative work habits of laziness, distraction, non-completion of tasks, etc. are not just bad work features but manifest broader vices. Related to this is the idea that work itself is a worthwhile kind of activity, giving structure to one’s life, providing a means of self-expression and offering a sense of purpose and fulfilment. For these reasons there is particular concern about forms and conditions of work that are frustrating, mindless, purposeless, physically diminishing or involve coercion, as in forced labour. Related to the latter are issues raised by several authors in the 19th century in response to industrialisation and factory labour concerning the loss of meaning and purpose in work. Figures such as John Ruskin and Karl Marx argued that features of the contemporary world meant that work had become detached from human nature and people were forced from craft-like activities in which they were invested and from which they took satisfaction to forms of labour in which they were merely ‘cogs in a machine’. These problems also attracted the interest of the Catholic Church beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) where he writes “It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies” and including the defence of unions and the requirement of a just wage.
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— Accueil Revues Revue internationale de philosophie Numéro 2016/4 (n° 278) Aristotle on work 2016/4 Aristotle on work Suivre cet auteur Tom Angier Dans Revue internationale de philosophie 2016/4 (n° 278), pages 435 à 449 format_quote Citer ou exporter Ajouter à une liste Suivre cette revue ArticleRésuméBibliographieAuteurSur un sujet prochefile_downloadTélécharger Article ArticleRésuméBibliographieAuteurSur un sujet prochefile_downloadTélécharger Article 1 ‘Work’ is a richly textured English term of Germanic origin. It can have a technical sense, viz. the exertion of force in overcoming resistance, which is employed in the physical sciences. As a verb, ‘work’ signifies activity engaged in or set in train in order to achieve a particular result or set of results: it can be intransitive (‘they are working hard’) or transitive (‘she works the machine’), personal (‘he works for little money’) or impersonal (‘the mechanism works’, ‘the plan worked’). As a mass noun, ‘work’ again indicates mental and/or physical activity directed at an end or ends, covering (most generally) a task to be completed (‘the work took longer than expected’), but also (more specifically) one’s job (‘I’m looking for work’), or the place one is employed (‘she’s home from work’). As a count noun, it picks out the result of or product made by activity: here we speak, for instance, of ‘works of art’ or a ‘masterwork’. In light of this lexicographical data, can we reduce the semantics of ‘work’ to some kind of philosophical order? To some degree, yes. The noun ‘work’ is process/product ambiguous, in that it can designate either a form of activity or the result (s) of that activity. In this respect, it differs from the Latin-derived term ‘labour’, which refers exclusively to a form of activity. ‘Work’ differs from ‘labour’ also insofar as the latter tends to pick out physical, especially manual work, and therefore work of some strenuousness. In this way, ‘labour’ reflects its etymological origin in the Latin for ‘toil’, which could be said to be a species of work. [1] 2 When we turn to ancient Greek, the semantic field is perhaps more variegated, but betrays some structural similarity. Ergazdomai (verb) and ergon (noun), from which English derives ‘ergonomic’ (etc.), are cognates that share the same Indo-European root as ‘work’. Whereas English’s mixed Germanic and Latin inheritance permits the contrast between ‘work’ and ‘labour’, Greek uses ergazdomai to cover all forms of result-directed activity, including manual or hard labour. Ergon has an even wider semantic range, covering not only the highly general sense of ‘thing’, but also ‘trouble’ (cf. Latin ‘labor’), ‘product’, ‘deed’, ‘task’, ‘business’ and ‘function’. (Aristotle’s ‘function argument’ in Nicomachean Ethics [NE] I.7 refers to the different erga or functions that characterise different species.) Like the English noun ‘work’, ergon displays a process/product ambiguity, since it can refer either to activity per se, or to that which is generated by activity. And this is crucial to the opening chapter of NE, where Aristotle makes a key distinction between ends [telē]: ‘some are activities [energeiai]’, he holds, ‘others are products [erga] apart from the activities that produce them’ (1094a4-5). This notion of ends that are para or apart from activity is, as we shall see, seminal for Aristotle’s axiology of work. This is because, as he goes on to add, ‘where there are ends apart from the actions [praxeis], it is the nature of the products [erga] to be better than the activities [energeiōn]’ (1094a5-6). 3 We have seen, then, that English and Greek terminology in this domain overlaps, to an extent, even if the substantive ergon incorporates a range of concepts not falling under any one English term. What I want to concentrate on in this article is ‘work’ in the sense of one’s occupation, whether this is understood in purely instrumental terms (a ‘job’ to earn money), or in some more elevated sense (‘vocation’, métier). What is striking is that, compared to modern thinkers, Aristotle is far more ready to assert and argue for a hierarchy among types of occupation. As I’ll detail below, NE X.7-8 leave the reader in no doubt that at the summit of human erga lies what Aristotle calls the activity of theōria, variously translated as ‘contemplation’, ‘study’, ‘speculation’ or simply ‘theory’. This is the activity characteristic of philosophoi, viz. those who love wisdom, and in Aristotle’s view it approximates the activity of god. Below theōria there is ordinary praxis, namely action [2] that instantiates the moral or character virtues, virtues such as courage, temperance, justice and generosity. The highest form of praxis is that of the politikos or ruler, whose sphere of action is the most responsible of any man leading the practical or non-contemplative life, viz. the entire city or polis. Below praxis, there lies technē, viz. ‘art’, ‘skill’, ‘expertise’ or ‘craft’. Unlike politicians, say, technitai or craftsmen typically produce distinct, tangible products, such as shoes, clothes, carts or well-bred horses. In this way, they are what Aristotle calls poiētikoi, i.e. involved in making things, rather than merely in acting. [3] And last and certainly least, there is the activity characteristic of slaves [douloi], viz. getting and purveying life’s ‘necessities’, principally food and drink. As I’ll document further on, such activity relies on empeiria or mere ‘experience’, i.e. non-expert habit, which even the rationally defective can master. 4 This fourfold hierarchy is no doubt controversial, both in terms of its ordering and the specific content of each type of work. But at least in its broad privileging of the bios theōrētikos over the bios praktikos, the contemplative over the practical or ‘active’ life, it retained its authority until the modern period (for corroboration of this, see Craig 1987). So far as I can tell, there were only two main challenges to this authority in the history of Western philosophy. A challenge emerged first from some Christian thinkers, who drew on the person of Jesus – together with wider biblical tropes – to argue that the vita activa, even the life of manual labour, had great dignity (or even virtue), which at least equalled that of the vita contemplativa. After all, Jesus was trained in the humble discipline of carpentry, an example par excellence of the technai poiētikai. And if God Himself had deigned to become incarnate as a mere technitēs, or craftsman, this reflected not only a parallelism between human and divine creativity, but also the notion (wholly absent in the ancient Greek context) that human toil had a new champion in a God who voluntarily suffered on the Cross. These themes were taken up sporadically throughout Christian history, for example in the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum [‘On Capital and Labour’] (1891) and Laborem Exercens [‘On Human Work’] (1981). [4] But despite these overtures to the vita activa, and even to the life of manual labour – especially after the Reformation – Catholic Christian thought never officially abandoned the vita contemplativa as the highest form of life, something reflected in Josef Pieper’s famous study, Leisure the Basis of Culture (Pieper 1952). And although Catholic philosophers are now in a minority in taking this position, the persistent privileging of the contemplative life over ‘unfree’ or ‘illiberal’ occupations until well into the modern period is itself remarkable. 5 The second main challenge to Aristotle’s fourfold hierarchy comes from Marxist philosophy, much of which not only challenges, but also inverts Aristotle’s hierarchy. As Hannah Arendt notes, Marx elevates labour in virtue of its productivity, and ‘the seemingly blasphemous notion… that labour (and not God) created man’ (Arendt 1959, 76). For Marx, contemplation is assimilated to idle, unproductive, and thus parasitic activity, whose moral dubiousness is compounded by its metaphysical ill-foundedness (man’s ‘species-being’ is now shaped essentially by labour, or the ability to produce). Indeed, according to The German Ideology, and contra Aristotle, it is not reason but labour that properly distinguishes man from the other animals. As Marx writes, ‘The first historical act of this [human] individual, by which he distinguishes himself from the animals, is not that he thinks, but rather that he begins to produce his means of subsistence [Lebensmittel]’. [5] But despite this exaltation of proletarian work, Marx’s writings contain unmistakably Aristotelian elements. Rather than proletarian work, his real sympathy lies with proletarian workers, whose wellbeing ultimately requires the demise of labour. As he puts things in Das Kapital, ‘the realm of freedom begins only where labour determined through want and external utility ceases’, where ‘the rule of immediate physical needs ends’ (Marx 1932, 873). [6] Marx holds, in fact, that man’s species-being will be fulfilled only when human labour is replaced by machines, and his final vision of communist society lauds, if not the contemplative life, at least the life of leisured praxis. In such a society, he maintains, people will ‘do this today and that tomorrow, … hunt in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, are critics after dinner, as they see fit, without for that matter ever becoming hunters, fishermen, shepherds or critics’ (Marx and Engels 1970, 22, 373). 6 So it seems that, even within traditions with the resources to resist Aristotle’s axiology of work, it has shown extraordinary resilience. Why so? And can that axiology be (at least partly) defended? I will argue that it can, but before doing so, I want to outline three respects in which it is clearly no longer defensible. First, Aristotle assumes a social hierarchy which unduly influences his hierarchy of occupations. Just as Plato’s Republic assigns theōria to a ruling ‘guardian’ class, and provisioning to the lower orders, so Aristotle assumes a similar correlation between class and occupation. But such guilt (or merit) by association hardly provides grounds for his fourfold hierarchy. What we need are reasons for valuing contemplation, and depreciating (e.g.) manual labour per se, rather than the suasion of contemporary class prejudice. [7] Secondly, Aristotle assumes an evaluative ontology which we have lost, and which, moreover, seems irrecoverable. For him, matter’s perishability is a mark of its disvalue, compared to the imperishability of the supralunary sphere (for evidence of this contrast, see, for instance, Metaphysics III.4). It follows that those who concern themselves with material, worldly things – i.e. most technitai, but pre-eminently douloi, who handle perishable foodstuffs – are involved with intrinsically less valuable objects. Thirdly, this defunct evaluative ontology is mirrored in Aristotle’s psychology. For according to the latter, human perception and cognition involve the mind’s taking on the ‘form’ of objects without their matter. [8] But if so, it seems inevitable that the comparative disvalue of perishable objects will inform the psychology of those who spend their time working on and/or with such objects. As Aristotle expresses matters, ‘the mind thinks all things [panta noei]’ (De Anima 429a18); the upshot here being that both craftsmen and slaves have minds that are, unavoidably, continually ‘brought low’. 7 In sum, there are bad reasons to affirm Aristotle’s fourfold hierarchy of occupations: neither correlation with class status, nor Aristotle’s highly controversial accounts of ontology and psychology should persuade us to move in its direction. But that does not mean there are no good reasons to affirm it (at least in part). In what follows, I will tackle Aristotle’s hierarchy from the bottom up: starting with empeiria or mere ‘experience’, I will document why this is both epistemically and practically an inferior condition to that of the technitēs. I will then argue that the life of technē has distinct disadvantages compared to the life of virtuous praxis, which, in turn, can be seen to hold less value, overall, than the life of theōria. Not that Aristotle’s argument will, in every respect, stand up – indeed, it has significant flaws. But my claim will be that the evaluative structure it proposes is fundamentally sound and deeply insightful. 8 To begin with, why think that the occupation of the technitēs, which typically centres on the production of durable objects, is superior to that of the doulos, which is typically concerned with providing life’s ‘necessities’, using ‘cookery and similar menial arts’ (Politics 1255b26-7)? Arendt, who construes this as a contrast between ‘work’ and ‘labour’, justifies the superiority of the former precisely in virtue of its end: viz. the production of durable objects. She writes: ‘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’ (Arendt 1959, 119). Labour, according to Arendt, ‘lacks the worldly permanence of a piece of work’, and moreover embodies a ‘compulsory repetition…, where one must eat in order to labour and must labour in order to eat’ (ibid. 125); it is ‘caught in the cyclical movement of the body’s life process, has neither a beginning nor an end’ (ibid. 126). All told, this argument is intriguing, but appears strangely under-motivated. Arendt places value on the durable, stable and solid as opposed to the temporary and evanescent, an evaluation which has some intuitive plausibility. [9] But it is hardly robust, let alone probative. The fact that something is continually necessary for the sustenance of life might be thought a mark of its value, rather than disvalue. Furthermore, even assuming Arendt is right to say that the process of provisioning lacks a clear beginning and end, it remains obscure why this is a mark against it (Aristotle thinks the continual revolution of the heavenly spheres is a mark of superior motion). All in all, Arendt seems under the impress of Aristotle’s Platonic assumption that the perishable is ontologically inferior to the eternal, with technē approximating the latter to a higher degree. But as I argued above, this is a very weak basis on which to systematically subordinate ‘labour’ to ‘work’. [10] 9 If we are looking for a stronger basis for this subordination, we must turn away from Arendt and back to Aristotle himself, and in particular to the first chapter of book one of the Metaphysics. It is here that Aristotle gives his account of how technē emerges from mere ‘experience’ or empeiria, an account that does not rely on dubious premises concerning durability or processes with clear beginnings and ends. Instead, Aristotle presents technē as a distinct epistemic and practical achievement, one that presupposes yet transcends what is learnt through mere accumulated experience. Admittedly, he does not refer explicitly either to slaves, or to the practice of provisioning. But as I’ll elaborate, there are sufficient points of contact between his account in Metaphysics I.1 and his wider hierarchy of occupations to suggest that the category of empeiria correlates precisely and illuminatingly with the ‘servile’ life. 10 Aristotle opens his account by distinguishing human from other animal learning. ‘The animals other than man’, he holds, ‘live by imagination [phantasiais] and memories, and have but little of connected experience’ (980b25- 7). While experience requires memory, only in humans is memory systematic and ordered, yielding determinate experience: as Aristotle comments, ‘many memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience’ (980b29-81a1). This progress to empeiria is a clear cognitive gain, since it allows humans to refer to identical objects under a single category. But it still falls short of the cognitive sophistication of technē. As Aristotle writes, ‘technē arises, when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgement about similar objects is produced’ (981a5-7). In other words, the move to technē marks a graduation from using universal concepts to making universal judgements. To take Aristotle’s own example, ‘to have a judgement that when Callias was ill of this disease this did him good… is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution, marked off in one class, when they were ill of this disease… this is a matter of technē’ (981a7-12). So we can see a key respect in which technē constitutes an epistemic improvement over mere experience. Instead of a panoply of disconnected or ad hoc judgements about individuals, the technitēs or person of skill can form universal judgements about types or classes of object. And this, in turn, affords practical dividends, since such judgements make experience both more predictable, and more subject to control. Not that technē does away with the need for acquaintance with particular objects or individuals; [11] it is just that their nature and condition become more perspicuous, and open to more effective management. 11 The universality of technē-cognition is tied to two more respects in which it is superior to mere experience. First, the person of skill has explanatory knowledge, rather than simply a grasp of what tends to happen. As Aristotle maintains, ‘we think that knowledge and understanding belong to technē rather than to empeiria… because [technitai] know the cause, but [empeiroi] do not. For men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the others know the ‘why’ [to dioti] and the cause [tēn aitian]’ (981a24-30). Explanatory knowledge is powerful because rather than remaining at the childish, servile level of noting individual occurrences or successive events, it allows one to understand why such sequences occur in the first place. And this removes one from the condition of the doulos, who depends not on his own, but on his master’s explanatory understanding. A similar relation holds between those Aristotle calls ‘master-workers’ and ‘manual workers’: ‘the master-workers [architectonas] in each technē are more honourable’, he contends, ‘and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers [cheirotechnōn], because they know the causes of the things that are done (we think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire burns – but while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural tendency, the labourers perform them through habit)’ (981a30-b5). While this contrast is no doubt exaggerated, and coloured by ideology, it points up the parallelism between mere empeiria and the supposed condition of the slave, whom Aristotle compares to a rationally deficient instrument, wholly at the disposal of his rationally proficient master. [12] And to underline this contrast, he highlights a second disparity between experience and skill, namely that ‘it is a sign of the man who knows, that he can teach, and hence we think technē more truly knowledge than experience is; for technitai can teach, but men of mere experience cannot’ (981b7-10). 12 To summarise why the bridge from experience to skill or craft is worth crossing (assuming one has the rational capacity to do so). Technē is characterised primarily by the ability to make universal judgements, rather than ad hoc judgements about particulars. This is a clear epistemic gain, which has practical benefits as well. At a more fine-grained level, the cognitive progress technē embodies is crucially causal or explanatory in form, since part of what universal judgements enable is an understanding of why objects of type x or y behave as they do. In this way, the knowledge enjoyed by craftsmen is even further removed from that of mere douloi (where these include labourers or manual workers). Finally, technitai are privileged on account of their ability to teach and pass on their trade. Whereas the benighted empeiros can point merely to ‘knacks’ he has learnt along the way, the universal and causal knowledge gained through craft-learning is sufficiently systematic to constitute transmissible expertise. 13 Having crossed the bridge from experience to skill, we move next to the bridge from skill to praxis. In some ways this is the most straightforward bridge to cross, because the benefits of doing so are palpable. They are at least threefold. First, technē as I’ve outlined it characteristically concerns the production of objects. [13] On this construal, there is evidently a narrowness of content that afflicts the work of a technitēs. For he or she deals primarily not with humans, but with the material aspects of human life. On the one hand, there is a distinct good to be realised in producing shoes, or clothes, or any number of kinds of object. The precision and attention to detail required is valuable per se, and indeed, has been the topic of monographs like Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (Sennett 2008), and Matthew Crawford’s Shopclass as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Crawford 2009). But on the other hand, one does not have to affirm Aristotle’s metaphysical depreciation of matter to see that continual attention to material goods involves a narrowness of focus that has moral psychological costs. At its worst, it can involve a dramatic impoverishment of sensibility, where the concern with precision, say, becomes obsessive, and the human teleology of craft-production is lost sight of altogether. [14] Secondly, this narrowness of focus has a further aspect, viz. one of scope: for each technitēs is preoccupied with only one, particular, restricted domain. Granted, there can be hierarchies of crafts, where some are systematically subordinated to others that are less narrow in scope. For instance, ‘bridle-making… fall [s] under the technē of riding, and this… under strategy’ (NE 1094a10-13). But these ‘master technai’ (NE 1094a14) – skilled activities such as generalship, navigation or medicine – are effectively already forms of praxis. They privilege action, that is, over making, and in virtue of this their ends ‘are to be preferred to all the subordinate [narrowly technical] ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued’ (NE 1094a15-16). 14 A third, related reason to cross the bridge from technē to praxis is that craft-work per se is too narrow in content and scope to give itself moral direction. In Aristotle’s terms, craft-knowledge is not the same as virtue, which must be supplied by what he calls ‘practical wisdom’ [phronēsis]. As he puts matters, ‘it is thought to be a mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient… not in some particular respect, … but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general. This is shown by the fact that we credit men with practical wisdom… when they have calculated well with a view to some good end which is one of those that are not the object of any technē’ (NE 1140a25-30). In other words, although craftsmen can be virtuous, they are so not because of their own technical expertise, but because they subordinate that expertise to moral ends. And this is no easy task: it involves being properly habituated from one’s youth up in virtuous practices (see NE II.1; cf. Eudemian Ethics 1220a22-b20), practices that may favour particular technical achievements, but may well come into conflict with them. To take a modern example, the nuclear scientist or embryologist may have to forego professional opportunities and advancement in order to keep his or her technē within the bounds prescribed by phronēsis. There is always the possibility, that is, that skills and virtues will come apart, [15] and it is integral to Aristotle’s fourfold hierarchy that, in cases of conflict, the latter always trump the former. True, Aristotle’s judgement that ‘no man can practise virtue who is living the life of a mechanic or labourer’ (Politics 1278a20-21) is harsh and unwarranted. But his concern that the technai can overstep their moral bounds is not unfounded, neither is his insistence on the hegemony of virtuous praxis. [16] 15 We now come to the third and final bridge, from virtuous praxis to theōria or contemplation. This is the hardest bridge to cross, since the idea that intellectual work is the crowning achievement of human life appears both self-indulgent and ‘elitist’ to the modern mind. Nonetheless, it is the most important bridge to secure, since without it Aristotle’s entire axiology of work is deprived of its telos and ultimate rationale. In what follows, I will not discuss how, exactly, contemplation is privileged within Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia (or ‘flourishing’). This debate is too complex to treat in a small space (for details, see Angier 2010, ch. 3). Instead, I will simply assume that Aristotle strongly privileges contemplation over the life of active, character virtue, and ask: on what grounds does he do so? His weakest reasons, I will argue, are given in NE X.7, while his strongest are found in Metaphysics I.2. I will begin with the former. 16 Aristotle opens NEX.7 by claiming that theōria not only makes use of the best part of us, but also has the best objects of any human activity. ‘ [T] his activity is the best’, he declares, ‘since not only is intellect [nous] the best thing in us, but the objects of intellect are the best of knowable objects’ (1177a19-21). While I will defend the latter claim below, the former claim is clearly very controversial, and depends on Aristotle’s Platonic notion that the soul is superior to the body. This is hardly self-evident, and anyway relies on a disjunction between soul and body that is inimical to much modern philosophy. He goes on to argue that ‘the activity of wisdom [sophia]… is thought to offer pleasures marvellous for their purity and their enduringness’ (1177a24-6), since ‘we can contemplate truth more continuously than we can do anything’ (1177a21-2). But not only is the latter view empirically very dubious – at best, it is true of intellectuals – the former claim about intellectual pleasures is also insufficiently robust. Anticipating John Stuart Mill’s argument that competent judges find intellectual pleasures ‘higher’, [17] it depends on a notion of ‘purity’ that remains tendentious and wholly unanalysed. Next, Aristotle holds that contemplation is best because, unlike the person devoted to a career of justice, bravery, temperance, etc., the philosophos ‘even when by himself can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is’ (1177a32-4). But this argument from self-sufficiency simply assumes that dependence on others is a disvalue – a view which appeals, no doubt, to the risk-averse, but otherwise does not recommend itself. And this argument is followed by another from self-sufficiency, this time in relation to the activity of theōria itself. ‘ [T] his activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake’, Aristotle maintains, ‘for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action’ (1177b1-4). Again, however, this reasoning lacks suasive power. Even if Theōria may be the antithesis of a utilitarian good, [18] and this may make it unique, but without more argument it does not make it uniquely valuable. 17 NE X.7 offers three more arguments for the superiority of intellectual over other types of work – viz. active and interpersonal, technical, and laborious work – but they are no more convincing. [19] By contrast, Metaphysics I.2 contains powerful arguments, which at least put the opposition on the defensive, and at most establish the primacy of contemplation beyond doubt. Aristotle begins by arguing that the goal of theōria – namely, wisdom or sophia – is supremely valuable. It is so because wisdom ‘deal [s] with the first causes and the principles [archas] of things’ (981b28-9). That is, sophia is a kind of architectonic knowledge, which discerns the foundations of the other sciences [epistēmai]. As Aristotle puts things, ‘the first principles and the causes are the most knowable; for by reason of these, and from these, all other things are known, but these are not known by means of the things subordinate to them. And the science which knows to what end each thing must be done is the most authoritative of the sciences… and this end is the good in each class, and in general the supreme good in the whole of nature’ (982b2-7). From this it is evident that wisdom, on Aristotle’s construal, is not some dry, ‘purely intellectual’ attainment, which brackets all considerations of value. On the contrary, it is most ‘authoritative’ [archikōtatē] precisely because it covers both the inanimate and the animate, integrating the ‘factual’ with the normative. And it is in virtue of this architectonic function that sophia acts as the telos of all enquiry. It is, as it were, that which undergirds all subordinate forms of knowledge and practice. As Aristotle summarises this (by now familiar) hierarchy: ‘the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any perception whatever, the technitēs wiser than the men of experience, the master-worker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of wisdom than the productive’ (981b30-2a1). 18 The supreme significance of wisdom lies, then, in the fact that it comprehends and coordinates all other forms of knowledge and practice. Just as political science achieves this within the domain of the city or polis, and physical science does so within the realm of nature or phusis, so sophia transcends all the sciences, ordering them and interrelating their contents systematically. In this way, sophia is maximal in scope: as Aristotle writes, ‘the wise man knows all things, as far as possible’ (982a8-9); ‘ [he] has in the highest degree universal knowledge; for he knows, in a sense, all the subordinate objects’ (982a21-3). And this encyclopaedic grasp is evidently a great achievement. As Aristotle remarks, ‘he who can learn things that are difficult, and not easy for man to know, is wise (sense-perception is common to all, and therefore easy and no mark of wisdom)’ (982a10-12); ‘these things, the most universal, are on the whole the hardest for men to know; for they are furthest from the senses’ (982a24-5). The sophos is admirable not only for the breadth of his knowledge, but also for its precision. As Aristotle continues, ‘the most exact of the sciences are those which deal most with first principles; for those which involve fewer principles are more exact than those which involve additional principles, e.g. arithmetic than geometry’ (982a25-8); ‘he who is more exact and more capable of teaching the causes is wiser’ (982a12-14). It follows from the scope, precision, and foundational nature of sophia that it is the most worthwhile of any human pursuit. And this is borne out nicely by Aristotle’s paean to wisdom in NE VI.7: ‘wisdom must plainly be the most finished of the forms of knowledge’, he adjures; ‘the wise man must not only know what follows from the first principles, but must also possess truth about the first principles. Therefore wisdom must be comprehension combined with knowledge – knowledge of the highest objects which has received, as it were, its proper completion’ (1141a16-20). 19 The ambition of Aristotle’s vision here is beyond doubt. If wisdom of the synoptic kind he proposes is possible, then intellectual work which takes this as its aim is, plausibly, the highest form of work available to man. The question is, however, whether Aristotle’s vision is realisable. And on this score there are, I think, at least two major obstacles to be overcome: one issuing from the field of intellectual enquiry itself, and one from the sphere of economics. As to the former, since Aristotle’s time it has become progressively more difficult to maintain the ideal of philosophia, or ‘love of wisdom’, as a totalising discipline that incorporates the results and methods of all other disciplines. This is because, uncontroversially, those other disciplines have multiplied, becoming increasingly specialised and complex. It is therefore difficult to envisage any ‘queen of the sciences’ whose task is to adjudicate and order the claims and procedures of all subordinate sciences. As to the latter obstacle, there are pressures emanating from modern market capitalism which mean that any vision of the whole, any discipline that tries to synthesise the entirety of human knowledge and practice, is likely to fail. This is because the market primarily rewards specialists, even if it also has a place for those who collect information (rather than knowledge) in various disparate databases. Moreover, it tends to reward specialists whose expertise has clear, especially short-term utilitarian benefits – precisely the kind of benefits of which Aristotle is most sceptical. In the face of these two obstacles, intellectual work of the kind Aristotle lauds looks difficult to uphold. It may nevertheless still be worth the effort, not least in the light of his claim that ‘even if [contemplation] is small in bulk, much more does it in power and honour surpass everything’ (NE 1177b34-8a2). Notes [1] Hannah Arendt makes a great deal of the distinction between ‘labour’ and ‘work’ in The Human Condition (Arendt 1959). I shall come back to this later on. [2] Praxis has the semantic range of action, doing, practice, or business, and therefore is more concrete in sense than energeia, which denotes activity, operation, performance or actuality. Whereas contemplation constitutes an energeia, it does not constitute a praxis, since it is abstract in content and (per se) involves only the intellectual virtues (not the character virtues, or ēthikai aretai). [3] Put otherwise, they have ‘ends apart from [their] actions’ (NE 1094a5). True, technē is a very capacious term, and at times covers mathematics, navigation, generalship and even politics [politikē technē] (see Angier 2010, 36-41). Clearly, none of these activities is strictly poiētikē (a type of making). Nonetheless, in NE VI.4, Aristotle gives technē a narrower definition, saying ‘making and acting being different, technē must be a matter of making, not acting’ (1140a16-17). It is this generic contrast which informs my taxonomy of work. [4] For Jesus the carpenter, see John Paul II 1981, II.6, V.26 (cf. Leo XIII 1891, 223); for human co-creation with God, see John Paul II 1981, II.4, V.25 (cf. Leo XIII 1891, 219); for toil as participation in the Cross, see John Paul II 1981, V.27 (cf. Leo XIII 1891, 221). See also, in general, Berdyaev 1960, 215-16. [5] Marx and Engels 1970, 568. For further references, see Arendt 1959, 325-6 n. 14, 330-31 n. 36. [6] For further references, see Arendt 1959, 90, 113, 332 n. 49. [7] Such prejudice is more evident in Aristotle than in Plato, since unlike Plato, Aristotle tries to justify most slavery as ‘natural’ (see Politics I.3-7). According to him, ‘slave[s] ha[ve] no deliberative faculty at all’ (1260a12), a key mark of their rational deficiency. As he holds at 1254b20-22, ‘he who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature’. This is clearly an artefact of ideology, rather than of careful observation. For our purposes, its interest lies solely in the idea that types of occupation – rather than types of person – constitute a hierarchy. [8] See esp. De Anima 418a3–6, 424a17–21, III.4-5. As Aristotle puts things with regard to perception, ‘the perceptive faculty is in potentiality such as the object of perception already is in actuality’, so that when something is affected by an object of perception, ‘it is made like it and is such as that thing is’ (418a3–6). [9] Elizabeth Telfer relies on the insubstantiality and transience of food and drink to argue that they cannot constitute an art form (see Telfer 2008). [10] Arendt’s deprecation of being ‘caught in the cyclical movement of the body’s life process’ also has Platonic overtones: the Phaedo presents the soul as trapped in the body, while the Republic associates the body with base desires, which need to be transcended. (For a critique of Plato’s hostility to the body and to impermanence in general, see Nussbaum 2001.) Overall, Arendt does too little to question her dichotomy between ‘labour’ and ‘work’. By the twentieth century, industrial mechanisation had brought the latter far closer to a repetitive process, and made its products far less solid and durable than in previous centuries. Indeed, although Arendt shows some limited acknowledgement of these points (see Arendt 1959, 294-5), her strong contrast between animal laborans and homo faber is notable for its anachronism. [11] Aristotle recognises this explicitly when he comments that ‘With a view to action, experience seems in no respect inferior to technē, and we even see men of experience succeeding more than those who have theory
— Access to the full content is only available to members of institutions that have purchased access. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order. Share Cite Cite close Loading content We were unable to load the content Print Contents Article Summary content locked 1 Work versus play; work versus leisure content locked 2 Work as occupation content locked 3 Other perspectives content locked Bibliography Thematic Work, philosophy of By Arneson, Richard DOI 10.4324/9780415249126-S068-1 DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-S068-1 Version: v1, Published online: 1998 Retrieved April 27, 2023, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/work-philosophy-of/v-1 Article Summary Unlike play, work is activity that has to involve significant expenditure of effort and be directed toward some goal beyond enjoyment. The term ‘work’ is also used to signify an individual’s occupation, the means whereby they gain their livelihood. In modern market economies individuals contract to work for other individuals on specified terms. Beyond noting this formal freedom to choose how one shall work, critics of market economies have maintained that one’s occupation should be a realm of substantive freedom, in which work is freely chosen self-expression. Against this unalienated labour norm, others have held that the freedom of self-expression is one good among others that work can provide, such as lucrative pay, friendly social contact and the satisfaction of the self-support norm, and that none of these various work-related goods necessarily should have priority over others. Some philosophers place responsibility on society for providing opportunities for good work for all members of society; others hold that the responsibility for the quality of one’s occupational life appropriately falls on each individual alone. Finally, some theorists of work emphasize that performance of hard work renders one deserving of property ownership (John Locke) or enhances one’s spiritual development (Mahatma Gandhi). Share Cite Cite close Loading content We were unable to load the content Print Citing this article: Arneson, Richard. Work, philosophy of, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-S068-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/work-philosophy-of/v-1. Copyright © 1998-2023 Routledge. Related Searches Topics Ethics Political philosophy Philosophy of social science
— The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards.Beginning with Plato's extensive thinking about work's relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world's only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe.This original study of Plato and his inheritors' ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality.
— The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards.Beginning with Plato's extensive thinking about work's relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world's only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe.This original study of Plato and his inheritors' ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality.
— Video Recording of "Work and Well-Being in 21st Century America: Promoting Productive & Purposeful Communities" webinar co-sponsored by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and the Abigail Adams Institute, held on September 17, 2021. Link to the event: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/work-and-well-being-in-21st-Century-America
— Video Recording of "Work and Well-Being in 21st Century America: Promoting Productive & Purposeful Communities" webinar co-sponsored by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and the Abigail Adams Institute, held on September 17, 2021. Link to the event: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/work-and-well-being-in-21st-Century-America
— 2021 Tanner Lecture on Human Values Kwame Anthony Appiah "Work: What is it? Do most of us need it, and why?" September 16, 2021 Rackham Auditorium Ann Arbor, Michigan
— Is work as we know it disappearing? And if so why should we care? These questions are explored by Raymond Geuss in this compact but sweeping survey which integrates conceptual analysis, historical reflection, autobiography and social commentary. Geuss explores our concept of work and its origins in industrial production, the incentives and compulsions which societies use to get us to work, and the powerful hold which the work ethic has over so many of us. He also looks at dissatisfaction with work - which is as old as work itself - and at various radical proposals for doing away with it, and at the seemingly irreversible growth of unemployment as a result of mechanisation. His book will interest anyone who wishes to understand the place of work in our world. This new series offers short and personal perspectives by expert thinkers on topics that we all encounter in our everyday lives.
— On March 25, 2021, the Global Wellbeing Initiative and Dr. Tyler VanderWeele's offered a discussion on promoting human flourishing: Global Wellbeing Initiative: Promoting Human Flourishing. Flerish is proud to work with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University headed up by Dr. VanderWeele. His comments in this presentation about Flourishing at Work were particularly insightful for those organizations who are focused on helping their people flourish.
Work and ethics are joined in different ways. The phrase ‘the work ethic’ refers to habits of self-discipline, responsibility, reliability and efficiency that improve the quality of one’s work but are also held to be more generally desirable character features and so relate to the topic of virtues. Similarly, negative work habits of laziness, distraction, non-completion of tasks, etc. are not just bad work features but manifest broader vices. Related to this is the idea that work itself is a worthwhile kind of activity, giving structure to one’s life, providing a means of self-expression and offering a sense of purpose and fulfilment. For these reasons there is particular concern about forms and conditions of work that are frustrating, mindless, purposeless, physically diminishing or involve coercion, as in forced labour. Related to the latter are issues raised by several authors in the 19th century in response to industrialisation and factory labour concerning the loss of meaning and purpose in work. Figures such as John Ruskin and Karl Marx argued that features of the contemporary world meant that work had become detached from human nature and people were forced from craft-like activities in which they were invested and from which they took satisfaction to forms of labour in which they were merely ‘cogs in a machine’. These problems also attracted the interest of the Catholic Church beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) where he writes “It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies” and including the defence of unions and the requirement of a just wage.