which our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which
things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they
have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a
sudden catastrophic end. But if the ideal were already in existence
and we were truly nothing but members of a consumers' society,
we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by
a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and dis-
appear, manifest themselves and vanish, never to last long enough
to surround the life process in their midst.
The world, the man-made home erected on earth and made of
the material which earthly nature delivers into human hands, con-
sists not of things that are consumed but of things that are used.
If nature and the earth generally constitute the condition of human
life, then the world and the things of the world constitute the condi-
tion under which this specifically human life can be at home on
earth. Nature seen through the eyes of the animal laborans is the
great provider of all "good things," which belong equally to all her
children, who "take [them] out of [her] hands" and "mix with"
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Labor
them in labor and consumption.86 The same nature seen through
the eyes of homo faber, the builder of the world, "furnishes only the
almost worthless materials as in themselves," whose whole value
lies in the work performed upon them.87 Without taking things out
of nature's hands and consuming them, and without defending him-
self against the natural processes of growth and decay, the animal
laborans could never survive. But without being at home in the
midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for
erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast
to life, this life would never be human.
The easier that life has become in a consumers' or laborers' so-
ciety, the more difficult it will be to remain aware of the urges of
necessity by which it is driven, even when pain and effort, the
outward manifestations of necessity, are hardly noticeable at all.
The danger is that such a society, dazzled by the abundance of its
growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never-
ending process, would no longer be able to recognize its own futil-
ity—the futility of a life which "does not fix or realize itself in any
permanent subject which endures after [its] labour is past."88
86. Locke, op. cit., sec. 28.
87. Ibid., sec. 43.
88. Adam Smith, op. cit., I, 295.
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C H A P T E R IV
18
T H E D U R A B I L I T Y O F T H E W O R L D
The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our
bodies— homofaber who makes and literally "works upon"1 as dis-
tinguished from the animal laborans which labors and "mixes with"
—fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total
constitutes the human artifice. They are mostly, but not exclu-
sively, objects for use and they possess the durability Locke
needed for the establishment of property, the "value" Adam Smith
needed for the exchange market, and they bear testimony to pro-
ductivity, which Marx believed to be the test of human nature.
Their proper use does not cause them to disappear and they give
the human artifice the stability and solidity without which it could
not be relied upon to house the unstable and mortal creature which
is man.
The durability of the human artifice is not absolute; the use we
make of it, even though we do not consume it, uses it up. The life
process which permeates our whole being invades it, too, and if we
do not use the things of the world, they also will eventually decay,
return into the over-all natural process from which they were
1. The Latin word faber, probably related to facere ("to make something"
In the sense of production), originally designated the fabricator and artist who
works upon hard material, such as stone or wood; it also was used as translation
for the Greek tekton, which has the same connotation. The -wordfabri, often followed by tignarii, especially designates construction workers and carpenters. I have been unable to ascertain when and where the expression homofaber, certainly of modern, postmedieval origin, first appeared. Jean Leclercq ("Vers la society basfe sur le travail," Revue du travail, Vol. LI, No. 3 [March, 1950]) suggests that only Bergson "threw the concept of homo faber into the circulation of ideas."
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drawn and against which they were erected. If left to itself or dis-
carded from the human world, the chair will again become wood,
and the wood will decay and return to the soil from which the tree
sprang before it was cut off to become the material upon which to
work and with which to build. But though this may be the unavoid-
able end of all single things in the world, the sign of their being
products of a mortal maker, it is not so certainly the eventual fate
of the human artifice itself, where all single things can be con-
stantly replaced with the change of generations which come and
inhabit the man-made world and go away. Moreover, while usage
is bound to use up these objects, this end is not their destiny in the
same way as destruction is the inherent end of all things for con-
sumption. What usage wears out is durability.
It is this durability which gives the things of the world their
relative independence from men who produced and use them, their
"objectivity" which makes them withstand, "stand against"2 and
endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their
living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the
world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objec-
tivity lies in the fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean
saying that the same man can never enter the same stream-—men,
their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their
sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair
and the same table. In other words, against the subjectivity of men
stands the objectivity of the man-made world rather than the sub-
lime indifference of an untouched nature, whose overwhelming
elementary force, on the contrary, will compel them to swing re-
lentlessly in the circle of their own biological movement, which
fits so closely into the over-all cyclical movement of nature's
household. Only we who have erected the objectivity of a world of
our own from what nature gives us, who have built it into the
environment of nature so that we are protected from her, can look
upon nature as something "objective." Without a world between
men and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity.
Although use and consumption, like work and labor, are not the
2. This is implied in the Latin verb obicere, from which our "object" is a late derivation, and in the German word for object, Gegenstand. "Object" means, literally, "something thrown" or "put against."
[ m ]
The Human Condition
same, they seem to overlap in certain important areas to such an
extent that the unanimous agreement with which both public and
learned opinion have identified these two different matters seems
well justified. Use, indeed, does contain an element of consump-
tion, in so far as the wearing-out process comes about through the
contact of the use object with the living consuming organism, and
the closer the contact between the body and the used thing, the
more plausible will an equation of the two appear. If one construes,
for instance, the nature of use objects in terms of wearing apparel,
he will be tempted to conclude that use is nothing but consumption
at a slower pace. Against this stands what we mentioned before,
that destruction, though unavoidable, is incidental to use but in-
herent in consumption. What distinguishes the most flimsy pair of
shoes from mere consumer goods is that they do not spoil if I do
not wear them, that they have an independence of their own, how-
ever modest, which enables them to survive even for a considerable
time the changing moods of their owner. Used or unused, they will
remain in the world for a certain while unless they are wantonly
destroyed.
A similar, much more famous and much more plausible, argu-
ment can be raised in favor of an identification of work and labor.
The most necessary and elementary labor of man, the tilling of the
soil, seems to be a perfect example of labor transforming itself into
work in the process, as it were. This seems so because tilling the
soil, its close relation to the biological cycle and its utter depend-
ence upon the larger cycle of nature notwithstanding, leaves some
product behind which outlasts its own activity and forms a durable
addition to the human artifice: the same task, performed year in
and year out, will eventually transform the wilderness into culti-
vated land. The example figures prominently in all ancient and
modern theories of laboring precisely for this reason. Yet, despite
an undeniable similarity and although doubtless the time-honored
dignity of agriculture arises from the fact that tilling the soil not
only procures means of subsistence but in this process prepares the
earth for the building of the world, even in this case the distinction
remains quite clear: the cultivated land is not, properly speaking, a
use object, which is there in its own durability and requires for its
permanence no more than ordinary care in preservation; the tilled
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soil, if it is to remain cultivated, needs to be labored upon time and
again. A true reification, in other words, in which the produced
thing in its existence is secured once and for all, has never come to
pass; it needs to be reproduced again and again in order to remain
within the human world at all.
19
R E I F I C A T I O N
Fabrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification. Solid-
ity, inherent in all, even the most fragile, things, comes from the
material worked upon, but this material itself is not simply given
and there, like the fruits of field and trees which we may gather or
leave alone without changing the household of nature. Material is
already a product of human hands which have removed it from its
natural location, either killing a life process, as in the case of the
tree which must be destroyed in order to provide wood, or inter-
rupting one of nature's slower processes, as in the case of iron,
stone, or marble torn out of the womb of the earth. This element
of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo
faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a de-
stroyer of nature. The animal laborms, which with its body and the
help of tame animals nourishes life, may be the lord and master of
all living creatures, but he still remains the servant of nature and
the earth; only homo faber conducts himself as lord and master of
the whole earth. Since his productivity was seen in the image of a
Creator-God, so that where God creates ex nihilo, man creates out
of given substance, human productivity was by definition bound to
result in a Promethean revolt because it could erect a man-made
world only after destroying part of God-created nature.3
3. This interpretation of human creativity is medieval, whereas the notion of
man as lord of the earth is characteristic of the modern age. Both are in contradic-
tion to the spirit of the Bible. According to the Old Testament, man is the master
of all living creatures (Gen. 1), which were created to help him (2:19). But
nowhere is he made the lord and master of the earth; on the contrary, he was put
into the garden of Eden to serve and preserve it (2:15). It is interesting to note
that Luther, consciously rejecting the scholastic compromise with Greek and
Latin antiquity, tries to eliminate from human work and labor all elements of
production and making. Human labor according to him is only "finding" the
[ B9 ]
The Human Condition
The experience of this violence is the most elemental experience
of human strength and, therefore, the very opposite of the painful,
exhausting effort experienced in sheer labor. It can provide self-
assurance and satisfaction, and can even become a source of self-
confidence throughout life, all of which are quite different from the
bliss which can attend a life spent in labor and toil or from the
fleeting, though intense pleasure of laboring itself which comes
about if the effort is co-ordinated and rhythmically ordered, and
which essentially is the same as the pleasure felt in other rhyth-
mic body movements. Most descriptions of the "joys of labor," in
so far as they are not late reflections of the biblical contented bliss
of life and death and do not simply mistake the pride in having done
a job with the "joy" of accomplishing it, are related to the elation
felt by the violent exertion of a strength with which man measures
himself against the overwhelming forces of the elements and which
through the cunning invention of tools he knows how to multiply
far beyond its natural measure.4 Solidity is not the result of
pleasure or exhaustion in earning one's bread "in the sweat of his
brow," but of this strength, and it is not simply borrowed or
plucked as a free gift from nature's own eternal presence, although
it would be impossible without the material torn out of nature; it
is already a product of man's hands.
The actual work of fabrication is performed under the guidance
of a model in accordance with which the object is constructed.
This model can be an image beheld by the eye of the mind or a
blueprint in which the image has already found a tentative ma-
terialization through work. In either case, what guides the work of
fabrication is outside the fabricator and precedes the actual work
treasures God has put into the earth. Following the Old Testament, he stresses
the utter dependence of man upon the earth, not his mastery: "Sage an, wer legt das Silber und Gold in die Berge, dass man es findet? Wer legt in die Acker solch
grosses Gut als heraus wachst . . . ? Tut das Menschen Arbeit? Ja wohl, Arbeit
findet es wohl; aber Gott muss es dahin legen, soil es die Arbeit finden. . . . So
finden wir denn, dass alle unsere Arbeit nichts ist denn Gottes Gu'ter finden und
aufheben, nichts aber moge machen und erhalten" (Werke, ed. Walch, V, 1873).
4. Hendrik de Man, for instance, describes almost exclusively the satisfactions
of making and workmanship under the misleading title: Der Kampf um die
Arbeitsfreude (1927).
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process in much the same way as the urgencies of the life process
within the laborer precede the actual labor process. (This descrip-
tion is in flagrant contradiction to the findings of modern psychol-
ogy, which tell us almost unanimously that the images of the mind
are as safely located in our heads as the pangs of hunger are located
in our stomachs. This subjectivization of modern science, which is
only a reflection of an even more radical subjectivization of the
modern world, has its justification in this case in the fact that, in-
deed, most work in the modern world is performed in the mode of
labor, so that the worker, even if he wanted to, could not "labor
for his work rather than for himself,"5 and frequently is instru-
mental in the production of objects of whose ultimate shape he has
not the slightest notion.6 These circumstances, though of great his-
torical importance, are irrelevant in a description of the funda-
mental articulations of the vita activa.) What claims our attention
is the veritable gulf that separates all bodily sensations, pleasure or
pain, desires and satisfactions—which are so "private" that they
cannot even be adequately voiced, much less represented in the
outside world, and therefore are altogether incapable of being
reified—from mental images which lend themselves so easily and
naturally to reification that we neither conceive of making a bed
without first having some image, some "idea" of a bed before our
inner eye, nor can imagine a bed without having recourse to some
visual experience of a real thing.
It is of great importance to the role fabrication came to play
within the hierarchy of the vita activa that the image or model
whose shape guides the fabrication process not only precedes it,
but does not disappear with the finished product, which it survives
intact, present, as it were, to lend itself to an infinite continuation
of fabrication. This potential multiplication, inherent in work, is
5. Yves Simon, Trois k(on$ sur le travail (Paris, n.d.). This type of idealization is frequent in liberal or left-wing Catholic thought in France (see especially Jean
Lacroix, "La notion du travail," La vie intelkctuelle [June, 1952], and the Dominican M. D. Chenu, "Pour une theologie du travail," Esprit [1952 and 1955]:
"Le travailleur travaille pour son ceuvre plut6t que pour lui-meme: loi de
generosite metaphysique, qui definit l'activite' laborieuse").
6. Georges Friedmann (Ptoblemes humains du machinisme industriel [1946], p.
211) relates how frequently the workers in the great factories do not even know
the name or the exact function of the piece produced by their machine.
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The Human Condition
different in principle from the repetition which is the mark of
labor. This repetition is urged upon and remains subject to the
biological cycle; the needs and wants of the human body come and
go, and though they reappear again and again at regular intervals,
they never remain for any length of time. Multiplication, in dis-
tinction from mere repetition, multiplies something that already
possesses a relatively stable, relatively permanent existence in the
world. This quality of permanence in the model or image, of being
there before fabrication starts and remaining after it has come to
an end, surviving all the possible use objects it continues to help
into existence, had a powerful influence on Plato's doctrine of
eternal ideas. In so far as his teaching was inspired by the word
idea or eidos ("shape" or "form"), which he used for the first time in a philosophical context, it rested on experiences in poiesis or
fabrication, and although Plato used his theory to express quite
different and perhaps much more "philosophical" experiences, he
never failed to draw his examples from the field of making when he
wanted to demonstrate the plausibility of what he was saying.7
7. Aristotle's testimony that Plato introduced the term idea into philosophic terminology occurs in the first book of his Metaphysics (987b8). An excellent account of the earlier usage of the word and of Plato's teaching is Gerard F.
Else, "The Terminology of Ideas," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol.
XLVII (1936). Else rightly insists that "what the doctrine of Ideas was in its
final and complete form is something we cannot learn from the dialogues." We
are equally uncertain about the doctrine's origin, but there the safest guide may
still be the word itself which Plato so strikingly introduced into philosophic ter-
minology, even though the word was not current in Attic speech. The words
eidos and idea doubtlessly relate to visible forms or shapes, especially of living creatures; this makes it unlikely that Plato conceived the doctrine of ideas under
the influence of geometrical forms. Francis M. Cornford's thesis (Plato and
Parmenides [Liberal Arts ed.], pp. 69-100) that the doctrine is probably Socratic in origin, in so far as Socrates sought to define justice in itself or goodness in itself, which cannot be perceived with the senses, as well as Pythagorean, in so far as
the doctrine of the ideas' eternal and separate existence (chorismos) from all perishable things involves "the separate existence of a conscious and knowing
soul, apart from the body and the senses," sounds to me very convincing. But
my own presentation leaves all such assumptions in abeyance. It relates simply
to the tenth book of the Republic, where Plato himself explains his doctrine by taking "the common instance" of a craftsman who makes beds and tables "in accordance with [their] idea," and then adds, "that is our way of speaking in this and similar instances." Obviously, to Plato the very word idea was suggestive,
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The one eternal idea presiding over a multitude of perishable
things derives its plausibility in Plato's teachings from the per-
manence and oneness of the model according to which many and
perishable objects can be made.
The process of making is itself entirely determined by the cate-
gories of means and end. The fabricated thing is an end product in
the twofold sense that the production process comes to an end in it
("the process disappears in the product," as Marx said) and that it
is only a means to produce this end. Labor, to be sure, also pro-
duces for the end of consumption, but since this end, the thing to be
consumed, lacks the worldly permanence of a piece of work, the
end of the process is not determined by the end product but rather
by the exhaustion of labor power, while the products themselves,
on the other hand, immediately become means again, means of
subsistence and reproduction of labor power. In the process of
making, on the contrary, the end is beyond doubt: it has come
when an entirely new thing with enough durability to remain in the
world as an independent entity has been added to the human arti-
fice. As far as the thing, the end product of fabrication, is con-
cerned, the process need not be repeated. The impulse toward repe-
tition comes from the craftsman's need to earn his means of sub-
sistence, in which case his working coincides with his laboring; or
it comes from a demand for multiplication in the market, in which
case the craftsman who wishes to meet this demand has added, as
Plato would have said, the art of earning money to his craft. The
point here is that in either case the process is repeated for reasons
outside itself and is unlike the compulsory repetition inherent in
laboring, where one must eat in order to labor and must labor in
order to eat.
To have a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end is the
mark of fabrication, which through this characteristic alone dis-
and he wanted it to suggest "the craftsman who makes a couch or a table not by
looking . . . at another couch or another table, but by looking at the idea of the
couch" (Kurt von Fritz, The Constitution of Athens [1950], pp. 34-35). Needless to say, none of these explanations touches the root of the matter, that is, the
specifically philosophic experience underlying the concept of ideas on the o