labor theorists, necessarily provides a kind of touchstone in these
discussions—labor's productivity is measured and gauged against
the requirements of the life process for its own reproduction; it
resides in the potential surplus inherent in human labor power, not
in the quality or character of the things it produces. Similarly,
Greek opinion, which ranked painters higher than sculptors, cer-
tainly did not rest upon a higher regard for paintings.30 It seems
{ibid., p. 171). It seems noteworthy that the elevation of the "intellectuals"
coincided with the establishment of a bureaucracy.
29. "The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value," says Adam Smith and ranks
among them "the whole army and navy," the "servants of the public," and the liberal professions, such as "churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds." Their work, "like the declamation of the actors, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician . . . perishes in the very instant of its production" (op. cit., I, 295-96). Obviously, Smith would not have had any difficulty classifying our "white-collar jobs."
30. On the contrary, it is doubtful whether any painting was ever as much
admired as Phidias' statue of Zeus at Olympia, whose magical power was cred-
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The Human Condition
that the distinction between labor and work, which our theorists
have so obstinately neglected and our languages so stubbornly pre-
served, indeed becomes merely a difference in degree if the worldly
character of the produced thing—its location, function, and length
of stay in the world—is not taken into account. The distinction
between a bread, whose "life expectancy" in the world is hardly
more than a day, and a table, which may easily survive generations
of men, is certainly much more obvious and decisive than the dif-
ference between a baker and a carpenter.
The curious discrepancy between language and theory which we
noted at the outset therefore turns out to be a discrepancy between
the world-oriented, "objective" language we speak and the man-
oriented, subjective theories we use in our attempts at understand-
ing. It is language, and the fundamental human experiences under-
lying it, rather than theory, that teaches us that the things of the
world, among which the vita activa spends itself, are of a very dif-
ferent nature and produced by quite different kinds of activities.
Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the
products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability with-
out which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this
world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through
which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our
bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their
own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear
in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to
which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed. As such,
they give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits
of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and
men. What consumer goods are for the life of man, use objects are
for his world. From them, consumer goods derive their thing-char-
acter; and language, which does not permit the laboring activity to
form anything so solid and non-verbal as a noun, hints at the strong
probability that we would not even know what a thing is without
having before us "the work of our hands."
Distinguished from both, consumer goods and use objects, there
ited to make one forget all trouble and sorrow; whoever had not seen it had
lived in vain, etc.
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Labor
are finally the "products" of action and speech, which together
constitute the fabric of human relationships and affairs. Left to
themselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but
are even less durable and more futile than what we produce for
consumption. Their reality depends entirely upon human plurality,
upon the constant presence of others who can see and hear and
therefore testify to their existence. Acting and speaking are still
outward manifestations of human life, which knows only one ac-
tivity that, though related to the exterior world in many ways, is
not necessarily manifest in it and needs neither to be seen nor heard
nor used nor consumed in order to be real: the activity of thought.
Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and
thought have much more in common than any one of them has with
work or labor. They themselves do not "produce," bring forth
anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become
worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of
thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered
and then transformed, reified as it were, into things—into sayings
of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or
sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments.
The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality
and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who
have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the trans-
formation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without
remembrance and without the reification which remembrance
needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, indeed, as the
Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action,
speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each
process and disappear as though they never had been. The ma-
terialization they have to undergo in order to remain in the world
at all is paid for in that always the "dead letter" replaces some-
thing which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed
as the "living spirit." They must pay this price because they them-
selves are of an entirely unworldly nature and therefore need the
help of an activity of an altogether different nature; they depend
for their reality and materialization upon the same workmanship
that builds the other things in the human artifice.
The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on
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The Human Condition
the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the
activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more
permanent than the lives of their authors. Human life, in so far as it
is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reification,
and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which all to-
gether form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or
lesser permanence in the world itself.
13
L A B O R A N D L I F E
The least durable of tangible things are those needed for the life
process itself. Their consumption barely survives the act of their
production; in the words of Locke, all those "good things" which
are "really useful to the life of man," to the "necessity of sub-
sisting," are "generally of short duration, such as—if they are not
consumed by use—-will decay and perish by themselves."81 After
a brief stay in the world, they return into the natural process which
yielded them either through absorption into the life process of the
human animal or through decay; in their man-made shape, through
which they acquired their ephemeral place in the world of man-
made things, they disappear more quickly than any other part of
the world. Considered in their worldliness, they are the least
worldly and at the same time the most natural of all things. Al-
though they are man-made, they come and go, are produced and
consumed, in accordance with the ever-recurrent cyclical move-
ment of nature. Cyclical, too, is the movement of the living or-
ganism, the human body not excluded, as long as it can withstand
the process that permeates its being and makes it alive. Life is a
process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes
it disappear, until eventually dead matter, the result of small,
single, cyclical, life processes, returns into the over-all gigantic
circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and
where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition.
Nature and the cyclical movement into which she forces all liv-
ing things know neither birth nor death as we understand them.
The birth and death of human beings are not simple natural oc-
31. Locke, op. cit., sec. 46.
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Labor
currences, but are related to a world into which single individuals,
unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities, appear and from
which they depart. Birth and death presuppose a world which is
not in constant movement, but whose durability and relative per-
manence makes appearance and disappearance possible, which ex-
isted before any one individual appeared into it and will survive
his eventual departure. Without a world into which men are born
and from which they die, there would be nothing but changeless
eternal recurrence, the deathless everlastingness of the human as of
all other animal species. A philosophy of life that does not arrive,
as did Nietzsche, at the affirmation of "eternal recurrence" (ewige
Wiederkehr) as the highest principle of all being, simply does not
know what it is talking about.
The word "life," however, has an altogether different meaning
if it is related to the world and meant to designate the time interval
between birth and death. Limited by a beginning and an end, that
is, by the two supreme events of appearance and disappearance
within the world, it follows a strictly linear movement whose very
motion nevertheless is driven by the motor of biological life which
man shares with other living things and which forever retains the
cyclical movement of nature. The chief characteristic of this spe-
cifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance consti-
tute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which
ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this
life, bios as distinguished from mere we, that Aristotle said that it
"somehow is a kind of praxis."32 For action and speech, which, as we saw before, belonged close together in the Greek understanding
of politics, are indeed the two activities whose end result will al-
ways be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how
accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may
appear to be.
It is only within the human world that nature's cyclical move-
ment manifests itself as growth and decay. Like birth and death,
they, too, are not natural occurrences, properly speaking; they
have no place in the unceasing, indefatigable cycle in which the
whole household of nature swings perpetually. Only when they
enter the man-made world can nature's processes be characterized
32. Politics 1254a7.
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The Human Condition
by growth and decay; only if we consider nature's products, this
tree or this dog, as individual things, thereby already removing
them from their "natural" surroundings and putting them into our
world, do they begin to grow and to decay. While nature manifests
itself in human existence through the circular movement of our
bodily functions, she makes her presence felt in the man-made
world through the constant threat of overgrowing or decaying it.
The common characteristic of both, the biological process in man
and the process of growth and decay in the world, is that they are
part of the cyclical movement of nature and therefore endlessly
repetitive; all human activities which arise out of the necessity to
cope with them are bound to the recurring cycles of nature and
have in themselves no beginning and no end, properly speaking;
unlike working, whose end has come when the object is finished,
ready to be added to the common world of things, laboring always
moves in the same circle, which is prescribed by the biological
process of the living organism and the end of its "toil and trouble"
comes only with the death of this organism.33
When Marx defined labor as "man's metabolism with nature,"
33. In the earlier literature on labor up to the last third of the nineteenth cen-
tury, it was not uncommon to insist on the connection between labor and the
cyclical movement of the life process. Thus, Schulze-Delitzsch, in a lecture Die Arbeit (Leipzig, 1863), begins with a description of the cycle of desire-effort-satisfaction—"Beim letzten Bissen fangt schon die Verdauung an." However,
in the huge post-Marxian literature on the labor problem, the only author who
emphasizes and theorizes about this most elementary aspect of the laboring
activity is Pierre Naville, whose La vie de travail et ses problimes (1954) is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most original recent contribution. Discussing the particular traits of the workday as distinguished from other measure-
ment of labor time, he says as follows: "Le trait principal est son caractere
cyclique ou rythmique. Ce caractere est lie a la fois a l'esprit naturel et cosmolo-
gique de la journee ... et au caractere des fonctions physiologiques de l'etre
humain, qu'il a en commun avec Ies especes anirnales superieures, ... II est evi-
dent que le travail devait etre de prime abord lie a des rythmes et fonctions
naturels." From this follows the cyclical character in the expenditure and re-
production of labor power that determines the time unit of the workday.
Naville's most important insight is that the time character of human life, inas-
much as it is not merely part of the life of the species, stands in stark contrast to the cyclical time character of the workday. "Les limites naturelles superieures de la vie ... ne sont pas dictees, comme celle de la journee, par la necessite et la possibilite de se reproduire, mais au contraire, par I'impossibilit6 de se renouveler,
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Labor
in whose process "nature's material [is] adapted by a change of
form to the wants of man," so that "labour has incorporated itself
with its subject," he indicated clearly that he was "speaking
physiologically" and that labor and consumption are but two stages
of the ever-recurring cycle of biological life.34 This cycle needs to
be sustained through consumption, and the activity which provides
the means of consumption is laboring.36 Whatever labor produces
is meant to be fed into the human life process almost immediately,
and this consumption, regenerating the life process, produces—or
rather, reproduces—new "labor power," needed for the further
sustenance of the body.36 From the viewpoint of the exigencies of
sinon a Fechelle de l'espece. Le cycle s'accomplit en une fois, et ne se renouvelle
pas" (pp. 19-24).
34. Capital (Modern Library ed.), p. 201. This formula is frequent in Marx's work and always repeated almost verbatim: Labor is the eternal natural necessity to effect the metabolism between man and nature. (See, for instance, Das Kapital, Vol. I, Part 1, ch. 1, sec. 2, and Part 3, ch. 5. The standard English translation,
Modern Library ed., pp. 50, 205, falls short of Marx's precision.) We find
almost the same formulation in Vol. Ill of Das Kapital, p. 872. Obviously, when Marx speaks as he frequently does of the "life process of society," he is not thinking in metaphors.
35. Marx called labor "productive consumption" (Capital [Modern Library ed.], p. 204) and never lost sight of its being a physiological condition.
36. Marx's whole theory hinges on the early insight that the laborer first of
all reproduces his own life by producing his means of subsistence. In his early
writings he thought "that men begin to distinguish themselves from animals when they begin to produce their means of subsistence" (Deutsche Ideologic, p. 10).
This indeed is the very content of the definition of man as animal laborans. It is all the more noteworthy that in other passages Marx is not satisfied with this
definition because it does not distinguish man sharply enough from animals. "A
spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes
the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-
process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at
its commencement" (Capital [Modern Library ed.], p. 198). Obviously, Marx no longer speaks of labor, but of work—with which he is not concerned; and the
best proof of this is that the apparently all-important element of "imagination"
plays no role whatsoever in his labor theory. In the third volume of Das Kapital he repeats that surplus labor beyond immediate needs serves the "progressive
extension of the reproduction process" (pp. 872, 278). Despite occasional hesi-
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The Human Condition
the life process itself, the "necessity of subsisting," as Locke put
it, laboring and consuming follow each other so closely that they
almost constitute one and the same movement, which is hardly
ended when it must be started all over again. The "necessity of
subsisting" rules over both labor and consumption, and labor, when
it incorporates, "gathers," and bodily "mixes with" the things provided by nature,37 does actively what the body does even more
intimately when it consumes its nourishment. Both are devouring
processes that seize and destroy matter, and the "work" done by
labor upon its material is only the preparation for its eventual
destruction.
This destructive, devouring aspect of the laboring activity, to be
sure, is visible only from the standpoint of the world and in distinc-
tion from work, which does not prepare matter for incorporation
but changes it into material in order to work upon it and use the
finished product. From the viewpoint of nature, it is work rather
than labor that is destructive, since the work process takes matter
out of nature's hands without giving it back to her in the swift
course of the natural metabolism of the living body.
Equally bound up with the recurring cycles of natural move-
ments, but not quite so urgently imposed upon man by "the condi-
tion of human life" itself,38 is the second task of laboring—its con-
stant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay
through which nature forever invades the human artifice, threat-
ening the durability of the world and its fitness for human use.
The protection and preservation of the world against natural
processes are among the toils which need the monotonous perform-
ance of daily repeated chores. This laboring fight, as distinguished
from the essentially peaceful fulfilment in which labor obeys the
orders of immediate bodily needs, although it may be even less
"productive" than man's direct metabolism with nature, has a
much closer connection with the world, which it defends against
tations, Marx remained convinced that "Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason a silk worm produces silk" (Theories of Surplus Value [London, 1951], p. 186).
37. Locke, op. cit., sees. 46, 26, and 27, respectively.
38. Ibid., sec. 34.
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Labor
nature. In old tales and mythological stories it has often assumed
the grandeur of heroic rights against overwhelming odds, as in the
account of Hercules, whose cleaning of the Augean stables is
among the twelve heroic "labors." A similar connotation of heroic
deeds requiring great strength and courage and performed in a
fighting spirit is manifest in the medieval use of the word: labor,
travail, arebeit. However, the daily fight in which the human body
is engaged to keep the world clean and prevent its decay bears little
resemblance to heroic deeds; the endurance it needs to repair every
day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes
the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition. The
Herculean "labors" share with all great deeds that they are unique;
but unfortunately it is only the mythological Augean stable that
will remain clean once the effort is made and the task achieved.
14
L A B O R A N D F E R T I L I T Y
The sudden, spectacular rise of labor from the lowest, most de-
spised position to the highest rank, as the most esteemed of all
human activities, began when Locke discovered that labor is the
source of all property. It followed its course when Adam Smith
asserted that labor was the source of all wealth and found its cli-
max in Marx's "system of labor,"39 where labor became the
source of all productivity and the expression of the very humanity
of man. Of the three, however, only Marx was interested in labor
as such; Locke was concerned with the institution of private prop-
erty as the root of society and Smith wished to explain and to se-
cure the unhampered progress of a limitless accumulation of
wealth. But all three, though Marx with greatest force and con-
sistency, held that labor was considered to be the supreme world-
building capacity of man, and since labor actually is the most nat-
ural and least worldly of man's activities, each of them, and again
none more than Marx, found himself in the grip of certain genuine
contradictions. It seems to lie in the very nature of this matter that
39. The expression is Karl Dunkmann's (Soziologie der Arbeit [1933], p. 71), who rightly remarks that the title of Marx's great work is a misnomer and
should better have been called System der Arbeit.
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The Human Condition
the most obvious solution of these contradictions, or rather the
most obvious reason why these great authors should have remained
unaware of them is their equation of work with labor, so that labor
is endowed by them with certain faculties which only work pos-
sesses. This equation always leads into patent absurdities, though
they usually are not so neatly manifest as in the following sentence
of Veblen: "The lasting evidence of productive labor is its mate-
rial product—commonly some article of consumption,"40 where
the "lasting evidence" with which he begins, because he needs it
for the alleged productivity of labor, is immediately destroyed by
the "consumption" of the product with which he ends, forced, as it
were, by the factual evidence of the phenomenon itself.
Thus Locke, in order to save labor from its manifest disgrace of
producing only "things of short duration," had to introduce money
—a "lasting thing which men may keep without spoiling"—a kind
otdeus ex machina without which the laboring body, in its obedience
to the life process, could never have become the origin of anything
so permanent and lasting as property, because there are no "du-
rable things" to be kept to survive the activity of the laboring proc-
ess. And even Marx, who actually defined man as an animal
laborans, had to admit that productivity of labor, properly speak-
ing, begins only with reiflcation (Vergegenstmdlichung), with "the