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Work and Workman: A Philosophical and Sociological Inquiry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Yves R. Simon
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Extract

WHEN looking over the immense literature devoted to laborproblems by philosophers, moralists, economists and sociologists, the philosophically-minded reader cannot help being struck by the fact that these writers, for the most part, abstain from defining what they intend to designate by the terms work, labor, worker, and workman. When any definition is given, there is small likelihood that it may meet the elementary requirement of embracing all the defined object and only the defined object. This current deficiency of studies on labor, although worth noting, is not particularly astonishing: everybody knows that the most familiar realities, those with which we are ceaselessly concerned in our daily life, are exceedingly difficult to express in the form of a logically satisfactory definition. In that connection, the so-called Socratic dialogues of Plato are full of profitable lessons. As soon as the persons are asked to define virtues most commonly spoken of, they become entangled in a net of contradictions, and sometimes the dialogue comes to an end without bringing forth any conclusion.

Type
Articles
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , January 1940 , pp. 63 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1940

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References

1 On the conflict between the spirit of citizenship and that of workmanship, the works of Edouard Berth contain a lot of valuable observations; see, in particular Les Méfails des Iniellectuels, Rivière, Paris, 1914Google Scholar, and Guerre des Etats ou Guerre des Classes, Rivière, Paris, 1924Google Scholar. See also Borne, Etienne and Henry, François, A Philosophy of Work, Sheed and Ward, 1938, Ch. IGoogle Scholar.

2 On the notion of immobile activity, see Aristotle, Met., Theia, 6, 1048 b, 22. “Thus, at the same time one sees and has seen, one thinks and has thought; but one cannot at the same time learn and have learned, cure and have been cured. … It is impossible, indeed, to walk and to have walked at the same time, to build and have built, to become and to have become, to receive and to have received a movement; neither is it the same to move and to have moved. But it is the same thing that at the same time sees and has seen, thinks and has thought.” Eth., VII, 14, 1154 b., 26. “This is why God always enjoys a single and simple pleasure; for there is not only an activity of movement but an activity of immobility, and pleasure is found more in rest than in movement.” Eth., X, 4, 1174 a, 15. “Seeing seems to be at any moment complete, for it does not lack anything which coming into being later will complete its form; and pleasure also seems to be of this nature. For it is a whole, and at no time can one find a pleasure whose form will be completed if the pleasure lasts longer. For this reason, too, it is not a movement.” Saint Thomas, Sum. Theol. 1–11, 31, 2.

“Pleasure in itself is not in time; pleasure, indeed, lies in an already possessed good, which is in some way the term of the movement.”

Although Saint Thomas often says that immanent action is the act of a perfect subject (actus perfecli), in contradistinction to transitive action, which is a movement and consequently the act of an imperfect subject (actus imperfecti), he does not identify the notions of immanent action and immobile action. True, immanent action is not necessarily and always motionless, but it is able to be motionless in its higher forms. See Saint Thomas, Com. on De Anima, 1, lee. 8, and John of Saint Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, 1–11, disp. 2, art. 2; Vives edition, vol. 5. p. 174.

3 On the moral work of the will seeking its interior perfection, see Müller, Karl, Die Arbeit nach dem moralischen–philosophischen Grundsālzen des hl. Thomas von Aquino, Friburg, Switzerland, 1912Google Scholar. This book is, to my knowledge, the best study of the idea of work in Saint Thomas.

4 Tilgher, A., WOrk in Customs and Doctrines. A History of the Idea of Work in Western Civilization, French Translation, Paris, 1931, pp. 70 ff.Google Scholar

5 Müller, K., op. cit., p. 20Google Scholar “A closer examination reveals that we are dealing with an accomplishment with which effort and irksomeness are connected.” P. 24 “The more painful an activity and the more numerous the difficulties to overwhelm, the more it is a work in the proper sense.”

6 De Man, Henri, La joie an Travail, p. 117Google Scholar, “On account of its very nature, labor is felt to be a constraint. Even the worker who is socially free, for instance the farmer or the handicraftsmen, feels this constraint by the very fact that his activity, during the labor-time, is dominated and determined by the aim of the work, by the representation of a product that he desires or needs. Every work implies the subordination of the worker to a remote aim which is viewed as a necessity; consequently it implies also giving up the freedom and the pleasures of the present time in view of some ulterior advantage.” Tilgher, A., p. 142Google Scholar“Does the Action take itself and its result seriously? This is Work. Does the Action laugh about itself and about its result? This is Sport.” Plaquevent, J., Adventures de la notion de Travail, ESPRIT, 07 1933, p. 554Google Scholar “Every task is a work because it is commanded by the material needs, or by duty, which is a moral need. … One who picks cherries and eats them as he picks, does not work. One who gathers cherries for the evening meal, or for making jam, is working, all the more if one is paid for the gathering.”

7 De Man, Henry, op. cit, Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of ihe Leisure Class, New York, 1927, pp. 92 ffGoogle Scholar; The Instinct of Workmanship and ihe Irksomeness of Labor, in Essays on Our Changing Order, New York, 1934, pp. 78–96Google Scholar.

8 Borne, Etienne and Henri, Francois, op. cit., p. 118Google Scholar. “A general principle takes command of the solution of the problem: every natural tendency which is displayed naturally is crowned with a joy which is proper to it and belongs to it. Aristotle's analysis is beyond reproach: every person from whom power passes into an act derives enjoyment from the act. … To the extent to which work responds to the need natural to man to make use of things with a view to his own advantage, or for the common weal of the city and of humanity, it must be accompanied by joy. … So we shall feel no astonishment when we read in the Holy Scriptures that God gave to man his first garden: ul operarelur illud. … If indeed work existed before sin in the world, it cannot be a consequence of a sin. Even in the condition of innocence, adds St. Thomas, man was a farmer, but, an essential reservation must be made, his work was not painful. We must therefore draw a distinction between the joy in work which issues from the nature of man, as does the. activity of work itself, and the pains of work which are the result of his human lot and his condition as a sinner who will be called upwards to redemption. The sweat of his face has nothing mysterious in it. It is nothing but that heaviness and that lack of suppleness attached, since the fall of man, to the exercise of reason and the practice of virtue which have to lift up so heavy a weight of matter.” P. 130, “This pain, normal in our condition, can pass as abnormal in connection with an integral state of nature. The original sin of man is responsible for dulling the human will-power. We feel our effort bruised by the vulnera peccati, the wounds of sin. Since the fact of original sin, a heaviness and a stiffness have become attached to the practice of every act of reason and virtue. … If then work appears to do a violence to human nature, it is because man's nature has already suffered the violence of original sin.”

9 Although the irksomeness of labor would have existed in a state of pure nature, the unnatural uneasiness introduced by original sin in the practice of every rational activity has surely aggravated it. This aggravation, the limits of which cannot, indeed, be denned, is a de jure consequence of original sin.

10 See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Ch. IX. Numerous observations of a psychological character on “pecuniary” and “industrial” employments.

11 Maritain, J., Action et Contemplation, in Questions de Conscience, Paris, 1938, p. 103 ff.Google Scholar

12 Main texts of St. Thomas directly concerning the notion of labor: Sent., 11, d. 17, 3, 2 ad 7; Qdl. 7, 17 (Utrum operari manibus sit in praecepto); Qdl. 7, 18 (Utrum illi qui spiritualibus operibus vacant, excusantur a labore manuum); Contra Impugnantes, 7, 12; 11–11, 187, 3 (Utrum religiosi manibus operari teneantur); C. G., 111. 136; Com. in 11 ad Thess., 111, 10, lec. 2; in ad Eph., IV, 27, lec. 9.

13 Here, a possibility of equivocation results from the fact that the term workingclass is often used as equivalent to the term proletariat. As Prof. G. Briefs has shown, the proletarian condition is not determined by any particular professional occupation, but rather by a particular fashion of earning one's living: a proletarian is a permanent and hereditary wage-earner. A number of persons (in the first place, farmers and handicraftsmen) belong unquestionably to the laboring section of the society without belonging in any way to the proletarian class. See Goetz Briefs, The Proletariat, Ch. 2.

14 It is to be recalled that political welfare is essentially a moral welfare, that political activity is essentially a moral activity, that political wisdom is not primarily a kind of art or technique, but a kind of prudence. Thus, all the people whose calling is specifically ordinated to political welfare belong to the category of those non-manual workers who do not work for the directing of manual work and the mastering of nature, but for the interior perfection of man as a moral agent. However, the civil power, particularly in modern states, assumes a number of technical tasks, of industrial tasks; it is quite clear that, insofar as the representatives of the civil power are dealing with such tasks, they belong to the category of those workers whose function is to direct manual work. But it is only by accident that the civil power assumes technical tasks.

A number of my readers and auditors were astounded that I dared to place statesmen and their instruments (armymen, policemen, diplomats) in the category of those non-manual workers whose activity takes place in the field of attraction of what we have called, for lack of a better expression, the pole of contemplation (understanding by contemplation not only the terminal perfection of the intellect, but also the final perfection of the will). Someone asked me, ironically, if a general should be considered as a contemplative. It would be equally unhumorous to ask whether a colonel is a workman. It cannot be denied, indeed, that the aim of politics and of its instruments is not of a technical character, that it does not, as such, intend the domination of man over physical nature. Nobody would state that the ideal embodied in the Roman society was a demiurgical ideal. Just as the ideal of China was that of the moral welfare of men in their personal and familial life, so the ideal of the Romans was that of the moral welfare of men associated in a state and an empire. (Whether this welfare was conceived rightly or wrongly, this is another story; the main thing, from our present point of view, is that it was conceived as a moral welfare.) Significantly enough, St. Thomas characterizes the matter of prudence as an agibile interius and that of art as a faclibile exterius (Sum. theol., 1–11, 57, 5, ad 3); as everybody knows, he considers political wisdom as a kind of prudence and in that way he ascribes to it, as its proper matter, a certain agibile interius.