specifically modern philosophy-—can explain the strange and even
with the help of imagination it can always persuade the body to experience the
same pleasure which it once has known" (pp. 278 and 294 ff.).
63. It is characteristic of all theories that argue against the world-giving
capacity of the senses that they remove vision from its position as the highest
and most noble of the senses and substitute touch or taste, which are indeed the
most private senses, that is, those in which the body primarily senses itself while
perceiving an object. All thinkers who deny the reality of the outer world would
have agreed with Lucretius, who said: "For touch and nothing but touch (by
all that men call holy) is the essence of all our bodily sensations" (op. cit., p.
72). This, however, is not enough; touch or taste in a non-irritated body still
give too much of the reality of the world: when I eat a dish of strawberries, I
taste strawberries and not the taste itself, or, to take an example from Galileo,
when "I pass a hand, first over a marble statue, then over a living man," I am aware of marble and a living body, and not primarily of my own hand that
touches them. Galileo, therefore, when he wishes to demonstrate that the sec-
ondary qualities, such as colors, tastes, odors, are "nothing else than mere names
[having] their residence solely in the sensitive body," has to give up his own
example and introduce the sensation of being tickled by a feather, whereupon
he concludes: "Of precisely a similar and not greater existence do I believe these various qualities to be possessed, which are attributed to natural bodies, such
as tastes, odours, colours and others" (// Saggiatore, in Opere, IV, 333 ff.; translation quoted from E. A. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science [1932]).
This argument can base itself only upon sense experiences in which the body
is clearly thrown back upon itself and therefore, as it were, ejected from the
world in which it normally moves. The stronger the inner bodily sensation, the
more plausible becomes the argument. Descartes in the same line of argument
says as follows: "The motion merely of a sword cutting a part of our skin
causes pain but does not on that account make us aware of the motion or the
figure of the sword. And it is certain that this sensation of pain is not less different from the motion that causes it. . . than are the sensation we have of colour,
sound, odour, or taste" (Principles, Part 4; translated by Haldane and Ross, Philosophical Works [1911]).
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Labor
absurd choice that uses phenomena which, like pain or tickling,
obviously prevent our senses' functioning normally, as examples of
all sense experience, and can derive from them the subjectivity of
"secondary" and even "primary" qualities. If we had no other
sense perceptions than these in which the body senses itself, the
reality of the outer world would not only be open to doubt, we
would not even possess any notion of a world at all.
The only activity which corresponds strictly to the experience
of worldlessness, or rather to the loss of world that occurs in pain,
is laboring, where the human body, its activity notwithstanding, is
also thrown back upon itself, concentrates upon nothing but its
own being alive, and remains imprisoned in its metabolism with
nature without ever transcending or freeing itself from the re-
curring cycle of its own functioning. We mentioned before the
twofold pain connected with the life process for which language
has but one word and which according to the Bible was imposed
upon the life of man together, the painful effort involved in the
reproduction of one's own life and the life of the species. If this
painful effort of living and fertility were the true origin of prop-
erty, then the privacy of this property would be indeed as world-
less as the unequaled privacy of having a body and of experiencing
pain.
This privacy, however, while it is essentially the privacy of ap-
propriation, is by no means what Locke, whose concepts were still
essentially those of the premodern tradition, understood by private
property. No matter what its origin, this property was to him still
an "enclosure from the common," that is, primarily a place in the
world where that which is private can be hidden and protected
against the public realm. As such, it remained in contact with the
common world even at a time when growing wealth and appropria-
tion began to threaten the common world with extinction. Prop-
erty does not strengthen but rather mitigates the unrelatedness to
the world of the laboring process, because of its own worldly se-
curity. By the same token, the process character of laboring, the
relentlessness with which labor is urged and driven by the life
process itself, is checked by the acquisition of property. In a so-
ciety of property-owners, as distinguished from a society of la-
[ n s )
The Human Condition
borers or jobholders, it is still the world, and neither natural
abundance nor the sheer necessity of life, which stands at the center
of human care and worry.
The matter becomes altogether different if the leading interest is
no longer property but the growth of wealth and the process of
accumulation as such. This process can be as infinite as the life
process of the species, and its very infinity is constantly challenged
and interrupted by the inconvenient fact that private individuals do
not live forever and have no infinite time before them. Only if the
life of society as a whole, instead of the limited lives of individual
men, is considered to be the gigantic subject of the accumulation
process can this process go on in full freedom and at full speed,
unhampered by limitations imposed by the individual life-span and
individually held property. Only when man no longer acts as an
individual, concerned only with his own survival, but as a "member
of the species," a Gattungsivesen as Marx used to say, only when
the reproduction of individual life is absorbed into the life process
of man-kind, can the collective life process of a "socialized man-
kind" follow its own "necessity," that is, its automatic course of
fertility in the twofold sense of multiplication of lives and the
increasing abundance of goods needed by them.
The coincidence of Marx's labor philosophy with the evolution
and development theories of the nineteenth century—the natural
evolution of a single life process from the lowest forms of organic
life to the emergence of the human animal and the historical devel-
opment of a life process of mankind as a whole—is striking and was
early observed by Engels, who called Marx "the Darwin of his-
tory." What all these theories in the various sciences—economics,
history, biology, geology—have in common is the concept of proc-
ess, which was virtually unknown prior to the modern age. Since
the discovery of processes by the natural sciences had coincided
with the discovery of introspection in philosophy, it is only natural
that the biological process within ourselves should eventually be-
come the very model of the new concept; within the framework of
experiences given to introspection, we know of no other process
but the life process within our bodies, and the only activity into
which we can translate it and which corresponds to it is labor.
[ U6 )
Labor
Hence, it may seem almost inevitable that the equation of produc-
tivity with fertility in the labor philosophy of the modern age
should have been succeeded by the different varieties of life phi-
losophy which rest on the same equation.64 The difference between
the earlier labor theories and the later life philosophies is chiefly
that the latter have lost sight of the only activity necessary to sus-
tain the life process. Yet even this loss seems to correspond to the
factual historical development which made labor more effortless
than ever before and therefore even more similar to the automati-
cally functioning life process. If at the turn of the century (with
Nietzsche and Bergson) life and not labor was proclaimed to be
"the creator of all values," this glorification of the sheer dynamism
of the life process excluded that minimum of initiative present even
in those activities which, like laboring and begetting, are urged
upon man by necessity.
However, neither the enormous increase in fertility nor the so-
cialization of the process, that is, the substitution of society or col-
lective man-kind for individual men as its subject, can eliminate the
character of strict and even cruel privacy from the experience of
bodily processes in which life manifests itself, or from the activity
of laboring itself. Neither abundance of goods nor the shortening of
the time actually spent in laboring are likely to result in the estab-
lishment of a common world, and the expropriated animal laborans
becomes no less private because he has been deprived of a private
place of his own to hide and be protected from the common realm.
Marx predicted correctly, though with an unjustified glee, "the
withering away" of the public realm under conditions of unham-
pered development of the "productive forces of society," and he
was equally right, that is, consistent with his conception of man as
an animal laborans, when he foresaw that "socialized men" would
64. This connection was dimly perceived by Bergson's pupils in France (see
esp. Edouard Berth, Les mefaits des intelkctuek [1914], ch. 1, and Georges Sorel, D'Aristote a Marx [1935]). In the same school belongs the work of the Italian scholar Adriano Tilgher (op. cit.) who emphasizes that the idea of labor is central and constitutes the key to the new concept and image of life (English ed., p. 55).
The school of Bergson, like its master, idealizes labor by equating it with work
and fabrication. Yet the similarity between the motor of biological life and
Bergson's elan vital is striking.
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The Human Condition
spend their freedom from laboring in those strictly private and es-
sentially worldless activities that we now call "hobbies."65
16
T H E I N S T R U M E N T S O F W O R K A N D
T H E D I V I S I O N OF L A B O R
Unfortunately, it seems to be in the nature of the conditions of life
as it has been given to man that the only possible advantage of the
fertility of human labor power lies in its ability to procure the
necessities of life for more than one man or one family. Labor's
products, the products of man's metabolism with nature, do not
stay in the world long enough to become a part of it, and the labor-
ing activity itself, concentrated exclusively on life and its main-
tenance, is oblivious of the world to the point of worldlessness.
The animal laborans, driven by the needs of its body, does not use
this body freely as homo faber uses his hands, his primordial tools,
which is why Plato suggested that laborers and slaves were not
only subject to necessity and incapable of freedom but also unable
to rule the "animal" part within them.66 A mass society of la-
borers, such as Marx had in mind when he spoke of "socialized
mankind," consists of worldless specimens of the species man-
kind, whether they are household slaves, driven into their predica-
ment by the violence of others, or free, performing their functions
willingly.
This worldlessness of the animal laborans, to be sure, is entirely
different from the active flight from the publicity of the world
which we found inherent in the activity of "good works." The
animal laborans does not flee the world but is ejected from it in so
far as he is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the
65. In communist or socialist society, all professions would, as it were, be-
come hobbies: there would be no painters but only people who among other
things spend their time also on painting; people, that is, who "do this today and that tomorrow, who 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, fisherman, shepherds or critics" (Deutsche Ideologic, pp.
22 and 373).
66. Republic 59OC.
r u s i
Labor
fulfilment of needs in which nobody can share and which nobody
can fully communicate. The fact that slavery and banishment into
the household was, by and large, the social condition of all laborers
prior to the modern age is primarily due to the human condition
itself; life, which for all other animal species is the very essence of
their being, becomes a burden to man because of his innate "re-
pugnance to futility."67 This burden is all the heavier since none of
the so-called "loftier desires" has the same urgency, is actually
forced upon man by necessity, as the elementary needs of life.
Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because
it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnis vita
servitium est.m
The burden of biological life, weighing down and consuming the
specifically human life-span between birth and death, can be elimi-
nated only by the use of servants, and the chief function of ancient
slaves was rather to carry the burden of consumption in the house-
hold than to produce for society at large.69 The reason why slave
labor could play such an enormous role in ancient societies and
why its wastefulness and unproductivity were not discovered is that
the ancient city-state was primarily a "consumption center,"
unlike medieval cities which were chiefly production centers.70
The price for the elimination of life's burden from the shoulders of
all citizens was enormous and by no means consisted only in the
violent injustice of forcing one part of humanity into the darkness
of pain and necessity. Since this darkness is natural, inherent in the
human condition—only the act of violence, when one group of men
tries to rid itself of the shackles binding all of us to pain and neces-
sity, is man-made—the price for absolute freedom from necessity
67. Veblen, op. cit., p. 33.
68. Seneca De tranquillitate animae ii. 3.
69. See the excellent analysis in Winston Ashley, The Theory of Natural
Slavery, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas (Dissertation, University of Notre Dame [1941], ch. 5), who rightly emphasizes: "It would be wholly to miss
Aristotle's.argument, therefore, to believe that he considered slaves as universally necessary merely as productive tools. He emphasizes rather their necessity for
consumption."
70. Max Weber, "Agrarverhaltnisse im Altertum," in Gesammelte Aufsatze
%ur Sozial- und Wirtschajtsgeschkhte (1924), p. 13.
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The Human Condition
is, in a sense, life itself, or rather the substitution of vicarious life
for real life. Under the conditions of slavery, the great of the earth
could even use their senses vicariously, could "see and hear
through their slaves," as the Greek idiom used by Herodotus
expressed it.71
On its most elementary level the "toil and trouble" of obtaining
and the pleasures of "incorporating" the necessities of life are so
closely bound together in the biological life cycle, whose recurrent
rhythm conditions human life in its unique and unilinear move-
ment, that the perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor
would not only rob biological life of its most natural pleasures but
deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vital-
ity. The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just
symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they
are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity
to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy
life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.
For our trust in the reality of life and in the reality of the world
is not the same. The latter derives primarily from the permanence
and durability of the world, which is far superior to that of mortal
life. If one knew that the world would come to an end with or soon
after his own death, it would lose all its reality, as it did for the
early Christians as long as they were convinced of the immediate
fulfilment of their eschatological expectations. Trust in the reality
of life, on the contrary, depends almost exclusively on the intensity
with which life is felt, on the impact with which it makes itself felt.
This intensity is so great and its force so elementary that wherever
it prevails, in bliss or sorrow, it blacks out all other worldly real-
ity. That the life of the rich loses in vitality, in closeness to the
"good things" of nature, what it gains in refinement, in sensitivity
to the beautiful things in the world, has often been noted. The fact
is that the human capacity for life in the world always implies an
71. Herodotus i. 113 for instance: tide te dia tauton, and passim. A similar expression occurs in Plinius, Naturalis hhtoria xxix. 19: alknispedibus ambulamus; alums oculis agnoscimus; aliena memoria salutamus; aliena vivimus opera (quoted from R. H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire [1928], p. 26). "We walk with alien feet; we see with alien eyes; we recognize and greet people with an alien
memory; we live from alien labor."
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Labor
ability to transcend and to be alienated from the processes of life
itself, while vitality and liveliness can be conserved only to the
extent that men are willing to take the burden, the toil and trouble
of life, upon themselves.
It is true that the enormous improvement in our labor tools—the
mute robots with which homo faber has come to the help of the
animal laborans, as distinguished from the human, speaking instru-
ments (the instrumentum vocale, as the slaves in ancient house-
holds were called) whom the man of action had to rule and oppress
when he wanted to liberate the animal laborans from its bondage—
has made the twofold labor of life, the effort of its sustenance and
the pain of giving birth, easier and less painful than it has ever
been. This, of course, has not eliminated compulsion from the la-
boring activity or the condition of being subject to need and neces-
sity from human life. But, in distinction from slave society, where
the "curse" of necessity remained a vivid reality because the life of
a slave testified daily to the fact that "life is slavery," this condi-
tion is no longer fully manifest and its lack of appearance has made
it much more difficult to notice and remember. The danger here is
obvious. Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject
to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly
successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. And while it
may be true that his strongest impulse toward this liberation comes
from his "repugnance to futility," it is also likely that the impulse
may grow weaker as this "futility" appears easier, as it requires
less effort. For it is still probable that the enormous changes of the
industrial revolution behind us and the even greater changes of the
atomic revolution before us will remain changes of the world, and
not changes in the basic condition of human life on earth.
Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor con-
siderably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they
do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel
of the world of use objects. Their role, no matter how great it
may be in the labor of any given civilization, can never attain the
fundamental importance of tools for all kinds of work. No work
can be produced without tools, and the birth of homo faber and the
coming into being of a man-made world of things are actually
coeval with the discovery of tools and instruments. From the
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The Human Condition
standpoint of labor, tools strengthen and multiply human strength
to the point of almost replacing it, as in all cases where natural
forces, such as tame animals or water power or electricity, and not
mere material things, are brought under a human master. By the
same token, they increase the natural fertility of the animal laborans
and provide an abundance of consumer goods. But all these changes
are of a quantitative order, whereas the very quality of fabricated
things, from the simplest use object to the masterwork of art,
depends intimately on the existence of adequate instruments.
Moreover, the limitations of instruments in the easing of life's
labor—the simple fact that the services of one servant can never be
fully replaced by a hundred gadgets in the kitchen and half a dozen
robots in the cellar—are of a fundamental nature. A curious and
unexpected testimony to this is that it could be predicted thousands
of years before the fabulous modern development of tools and ma-
chines had taken place. In a half-fanciful, half-ironical mood, Aris-
totle once imagined what has long since become a reality, namely
that "every tool could perform its own work when ordered . . .
like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, which,
says the poet, 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the
gods.' " Then, "the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch
the lyre without a hand to guide them." This, he goes on to say,
would indeed mean that the craftsman would no longer need human
assistants, but it would not mean that household slaves could be
dispensed with. For slaves are not instruments of making things or
of production, but of living, which constantly consumes their serv-
ices.72 The process of making a thing is limited and the function of
the instrument comes to a predictable, controllable end with the
finished product; the process of life that requires laboring is an
endless activity and the only "instrument" equal to it would have
to be a perpetuum mobile, that is, the instrumentum vocale which is as alive and "active" as the living organism which it serves. It is
precisely because from "the instruments of the household nothing
else results except the use of the possession itself" that they cannot
be replaced by tools and instruments of workmanship "from which
results something more than the mere use of the instrument."73
72. Aristotle Politics 1253b3O-1254al8.
73. Winston Ashley, op. cit., ch. 5.
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Labor
While tools and instruments, designed to produce more and
something altogether different from their mere use, are of second-
ary importance for laboring, the same is not true for the other great
principle in the human labor process, the division of labor. Division
of labor indeed grows directly out of the laboring process and
should not be mistaken for the apparently similar principle of spe-