world of use things and fall back upon the subjectivity of use itself.
Only in a strictly anthropocentric world, where the user, that is,
man himself, becomes the ultimate end which puts a stop to the
unending chain of ends and means, can utility as such acquire the
dignity of meaningfulness. Yet the tragedy is that in the moment
homo faber seems to have found fulfilment in terms of his own ac-
tivity, he begins to degrade the world of things, the end and end
product of his own mind and hands; if man the user is the highest
end, "the measure of all things," then not only nature, treated by
homo faber as the almost "worthless material" upon which to
work, but the "valuable" things themselves have become mere
means, losing thereby their own intrinsic "value."
The anthropocentric utilitarianism of homo faber has found its
greatest expression in the Kantian formula that no man must ever
become a means to an end, that every human being is an end in
himself. Although we find earlier (for instance, in Locke's in-
sistence that no man can be permitted to possess another man's
body or use his bodily strength) an awareness of the fateful con-
sequences which an unhampered and unguided thinking in terms of
means and ends must invariably entail in the political realm, it is
only in Kant that the philosophy of the earlier stages of the modern
age frees itself entirely of the common sense platitudes which we
r i s s )
The Human Condition
always find where homo faber rules the standards of society. The
reason is, of course, that Kant did not mean to formulate or con-
ceptualize the tenets of the utilitarianism of his time, but on the
contrary wanted first of all to relegate the means-end category to
its proper place and prevent its use in the field of political action.
His formula, however, can no more deny its origin in utilitarian
thinking than his other famous and also inherently paradoxical in-
terpretation of man's attitude toward the only objects that are not
"for use," namely works of art, in which he said we take "pleasure
without any interest."20 For the same operation which establishes
man as the "supreme end" permits him "if he can [to] subject the
whole of nature to it,"21 that is, to degrade nature and the world
into mere means, robbing both of their independent dignity. Not
even Kant could solve the perplexity or enlighten the blindness of
homo faber with respect to the problem of meaning without turning
to the paradoxical "end in itself," and this perplexity lies in the
fact that while only fabrication with its instrumentality is capable
of building a world, this same world becomes as worthless as the
employed material, a mere means for further ends, if the standards
which governed its coming into being are permitted to rule it after
its establishment.
Man, in so far as he is homo faber, instrumentalizes, and his in-
strumentalization implies a degradation of all things into means,
their loss of intrinsic and independent value, so that eventually not
only the objects of fabrication but also "the earth in general and
all forces of nature," which clearly came into being without the
help of man and have an existence independent of the human world,
lose their "value because [they] do not present the reification
which comes from work."22 It was for no other reason than this
attitude of homo fa her to the world that the Greeks in their classical
period declared the whole field of the arts and crafts, where men
work with instruments and do something not for its own sake but
20. Kant's term is "ein Wohlgefallen ohne alles Interesse" (Kritik der Urteils-kraft [Cassirer ed.], V, 272).
21. Ibid., p. 515.
22. "Der Wasserfall, wie die Erde uberhaupt, wie alle Naturkraft hat keinen
Wert, weil er keine in ihm vergegenstandlichte Arbeit darstellt" (Das Kapital, HI [Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abt. II, Zurich, 1933], 698).
[ M ]
Work
in order to produce something else, to be banausic, a term perhaps
best translated by "philistine," implying vulgarity of thinking
and acting in terms of expediency. The vehemence of this contempt
will never cease to startle us if we realize that the great masters of
Greek sculpture and architecture were by no means excepted from
the verdict.
The issue at stake is, of course, not instrumentality, the use of
means to achieve an end, as such, but rather the generalization of
the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are estab-
lished as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men. This
generalization is inherent in the activity of homo jaber because the
experience of means and end, as it is present in fabrication, does
not disappear with the finished product but is extended to its
ultimate destination, which is to serve as a use object. The instru-
mentalization of the whole world and the earth, this limitless de-
valuation of everything given, this process of growing meaning-
lessness where every end is transformed into a means and which
can be stopped only by making man himself the lord and master of
all things, does not directly arise out of the fabrication process; for
from the viewpoint of fabrication the finished product is as much
an end in itself, an independent durable entity with an existence of
its own, as man is an end in himself in Kant's political philosophy.
Only in so far as fabrication chiefly fabricates use objects does the
finished product again become a means, and only in so far as the
life process takes hold of things and uses them for its purposes does
the productive and limited instrumentality of fabrication change
into the limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists.
It is quite obvious that the Greeks dreaded this devaluation of
world and nature with its inherent anthropocentrism—the "ab-
surd" opinion that man is the highest being and that everything
else is subject to the exigencies of human life (Aristotle)—no less
than they despised the sheer vulgarity of all consistent utilitarian-
ism. To what extent they were aware of the consequences of seeing
in homo jaber the highest human possibility is perhaps best illus-
trated by Plato's famous argument against Protagoras and his ap-
parently self-evident statement that "man is the measure of all use
things (chremata), of the existence of those that are, and of the non-
[ K7 ]
The Human Condition
existence of those that are not."23 (Protagoras evidently did not
say: "Man is the measure of all things," as tradition and the stand-
ard translations have made him say.) The point of the matter is
that Plato saw immediately that if one makes man the measure of
all things for use, it is man the user and instrumentalizer, and not
man the speaker and doer or man the thinker, to whom the world
is being related. And since it is in the nature of man the user and
instrumentalizer to look upon everything as means to an end—
upon every tree as potential wood—this must eventually mean
that man becomes the measure not only of things whose existence
depends upon him but of literally everything there is.
In this Platonic interpretation, Protagoras in fact sounds like the
earliest forerunner of Kant, for if man is the measure of all things,
then man is the only thing outside the means-end relationship, the
only end in himself who can use everything else as a means. Plato
knew quite well that the possibilities of producing use objects and
of treating all things of nature as potential use objects are as limit-
less as the wants and talents of human beings. If one permits the
standards of homo faber to rule the finished world as they must
necessarily rule the coming into being of this world, then homo
faber will eventually help himself to everything and consider every-
thing that is as a mere means for himself. He will judge every thing
as though it belonged to the class of chremata, of use objects, so
that, to follow Plato's own example, the wind will no longer be un-
derstood in its own right as a natural force but will be considered
exclusively in accordance with human needs for warmth or refresh-
ment—which, of course, means that the wind as something objec-
tively given has been eliminated from human experience. It is be-
cause of these consequences that Plato, who at the end of his life
recalls once more in the Laws the saying of Protagoras, replies
with an almost paradoxical formula: not man—who because of his
23. Theaetetus 152, and Cratylus 385E. In these instances, as well as in other ancient quotations of the famous saying, Protagoras is always quoted as follows:
panton chrematon metron estin anthropos (see Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
[4th ed.; 1922], frag. Bl). The word chremata by no means signifies "all things,"
but specifically things used or needed or possessed by men. The supposed
Protagorean saying, "Man is the measure of all things," would be rendered in Greek rather as anthropos metron panton, corresponding for instance to Heraclitus'
polemos pater ponton ("strife is the father of all things").
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wants and talents wishes to use everything and therefore ends by
depriving all things of their intrinsic worth—-but "the god is the
measure [even] of mere use objects."24
22
T H E E X C H A N G E MARKET
Marx—in one of many asides which testify to his eminent histori-
cal sense—once remarked that Benjamin Franklin's definition of
man as a toolmaker is as characteristic of "Yankeedom," that is, of
the modern age, as the definition of man as a political animal was
for antiquity.26 The truth of this remark lies in the fact that the
modern age was as intent on excluding political man, that is, man
who acts and speaks, from its public realm as antiquity was on ex-
cluding homofaber. In both instances the exclusion was not a matter
of course, as was the exclusion of laborers and the propertyless
classes until their emancipation in the nineteenth century. The
modern age was of course perfectly aware that the political realm
was not always and need not necessarily be a mere function of
"society," destined to protect the productive, social side of human
nature through governmental administration; but it regarded ev-
erything beyond the enforcement of law and order as "idle talk"
and "vain-glory." The human capacity on which it based its claim
of the natural innate productivity of society was the unquestion-
able productivity of homo faber. Conversely, antiquity knew full
well types of human communities in which not the citizen of the
polis and not the res publica as such established and determined the content of the public realm, but where the public life of the ordinary man was restricted to "working for the people" at large,
that is, to being a demiourgos, a worker for the people as distin-
guished from an oiketes, a household laborer and therefore a slave.26
24. Laws 716D quotes the saying of Protagoras textually, except that for the word "man" (anthropos), "the god" (ho theos) appears.
25. Capital (Modern Library ed.), p. 358, n. 3.
26. Early medieval history, and particularly the history of the craft guilds,
offers a good illustration of the inherent truth in the ancient understanding of
laborers as household inmates, as against craftsmen, who were considered work-
ers for the people at large. For the "appearance [of the guilds] marks the second
[ /« ]
The Human Condition
The hallmark of these non-political communities was that their
public place, the agora, was not a meeting place of citizens, but a
market place where craftsmen could show and exchange their
products. In Greece, moreover, it was the ever-frustrated ambi-
tion of all tyrants to discourage the citizens from worrying about
public affairs, from idling their time away in unproductive ago-
reuein and politeuesthai, and to transform the agora into an assemblage of shops like the bazaars of oriental despotism. What char-
acterized these market places, and later characterized the medieval
cities' trade and craft districts, was that the display of goods for
sale was accompanied by a display of their production. "Con-
spicuous production" (if we may vary Veblen's term) is, in fact,
no less a trait of a society of producers than "conspicuous con-
sumption" is a characteristic of a laborers' society.
Unlike the animal laborans, whose social life is worldless and
herdlike and who therefore is incapable of building or inhabiting a
public, worldly realm, homo faber is fully capable of having a pub-
lic realm of his own, even though it may not be a political realm,
properly speaking. His public realm is the exchange market, where
he can show the products of his hand and receive the esteem which
is due him. This inclination to showmanship is closely connected
with and probably no less deeply rooted than the "propensity to
truck, barter and exchange one thing for another," which, accord-
ing to Adam Smith, distinguishes man from animal.27 The point
is that homo faber, the builder of the world and the producer of
things, can find his proper relationship to other people only by ex-
changing his products with theirs, because these products them-
stage in the history of industry, the transition from the family system to the
artisan or guild system. In the former there was no class of artisans properly so
called . . . because all the needs of a family or other domestic groups . . . were
satisfied by the labours of the members of the group itself" (W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory [1931], p. 76).
In medieval German, the word Storer is an exact equivalent to the Greek word demiourgos. "Der griechische demiourgos heisst 'Storer', er geht beim Volk arbeiten, er geht auf die Stor." Stbr means demos ("people"). (See Jost Trier, "Arbeit und Gemeinschaft," Studium Generate, Vol. Ill, No. 11 [November, 1950].) 27. He adds rather emphatically: "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and
deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog" (Wealth of Nations
[Everyman's ed.]( I, 12).
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Work
selves are always produced in isolation. The privacy which the
early modern age demanded as the supreme right of each member
of society was actually the guaranty of isolation, without which no
work can be produced. Not the onlookers and spectators on the
medieval market places, where the craftsman in his isolation was
exposed to the light of the public, but only the rise of the social
realm, where the others are not content with beholding, judging,
and admiring but wish to be admitted to the company of the crafts-
man and to participate as equals in the work process, threatened
the "splendid isolation" of the worker and eventually undermined
the very notions of competence and excellence. This isolation from
others is the necessary life condition for every mastership which
consists in being alone with the "idea," the mental image of the
thing to be. This mastership, unlike political forms of domination,
is primarily a mastery of things and material and not of people.
The latter, in fact, is quite secondary to the activity of craftsman-
ship, and the words "worker" and "master"— ouvrier and maitre—
were originally used synonymously.28
The only company that grows out of workmanship directly is in
the need of the master for assistants or in his wish to educate others
in his craft. But the distinction between his skill and the unskilled
help is temporary, like the distinction between adults and children.
There can be hardly anything more alien or even more destructive
to workmanship than teamwork, which actually is only a variety
of the division of labor and presupposes the "breakdown of opera-
tions into their simple constituent motions."29 The team, the multi-
28. E. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrieres et de Vindustrie en France truant 1789 (1900): "Les mots maitre et ouvrier etaient encore pris comme synonymes au 14e siecle" (p. 564, n. 2), whereas "au 15e siecle ... la maitrise est devenue un titre auquel il n'est permis a tous d'aspirer" (p. 572). Originally, "le mot ouvrier s'appliquait d'ordinaire k quiconque ouvrait, faisait ouvrage, maitre ou valet" (p. 309). In the workshops themselves and outside them in social life,
there was no great distinction between the master or the owner of the shop and
the workers (p. 313). (See also Pierre Brizon, Histoire du travail et des travailkurs
[4th ed.; 1926], pp. 39 ff.)
29. Charles R, Walker and Robert H. Guest, The Man on the Assembly Line
(1952), p. 10. Adam Smith's famous description of this principle in pin-making
(op. cit., I, 4 ff.) shows clearly how machine work was preceded by the division of labor and derives its principle from it.
[ 161 ]
The Human Condition
headed subject of all production carried out according to the prin-
ciple of division of labor, possesses the same togetherness as the
parts which form the whole, and each attempt of isolation on the
part of the members of the team would be fatal to the production
itself. But it is not only this togetherness which the master and
workman lacks while actively engaged in production; the spe-
cifically political forms of being together with others, acting in
concert and speaking with each other, are completely outside the
range of his productivity. Only when he stops working and his
product is finished can he abandon his isolation.
Historically, the last public realm, the last meeting place which
is at least connected with the activity of homo faber, is the ex-
change market on which his products are displayed. The commer-
cial society, characteristic of the earlier stages of the modern age
or the beginnings of manufacturing capitalism, sprang from this
"conspicuous production" with its concomitant hunger for uni-
versal possibilities of truck and barter, and its end came with the
rise of labor and the labor society which replaced conspicuous pro-
duction and its pride with "conspicuous consumption" and its
concomitant vanity.
The people who met on the exchange market, to be sure, were
no longer the fabricators themselves, and they did not meet as
persons but as owners of commodities and exchange values, as
Marx abundantly pointed out. In a society where exchange of
products has become the chief public activity, even the laborers,
because they are confronted with "money or commodity owners,"
become proprietors, "owners of their labor power." It is only at
this point that Marx's famous self-alienation, the degradation of
men into commodities, sets in, and this degradation is characteristic
of labor's situation in a manufacturing society which judges men
not as persons but as producers, according to the quality of their
products. A laboring society, on the contrary, judges men accord-
ing to the functions they perform in the labor process; while labor
power in the eyes of homo faber is only the means to produce the
necessarily higher end, that is, either a use object or an object for
exchange, laboring society bestows upon labor power the same
higher value it reserves for the machine. In other words, this so-
ciety is only seemingly more "humane," although it is true that
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under its conditions the price of human labor rises to such an extent
that it may seem to be more valued and more valuable than any
given material or matter; in fact, it only foreshadows something
even more "valuable," namely, the smoother functioning of the
machine whose tremendous power of processing first standardizes
and then devaluates all things into consumer goods.
Commercial society, or capitalism in its earlier stages when it
was still possessed by a fiercely competitive and acquisitive spirit,
is still ruled by the standards of homo faber. When homo faber
comes out of his isolation, he appears as a merchant and trader and
establishes the exchange market in this capacity. This market
must exist prior to the rise of a manufacturing class, which then
produces exclusively for the market, that is, produces exchange
objects rather than use things. In this process from isolated crafts-
manship to manufacturing for the exchange market, the finished
end product changes its quality somewhat but not altogether. Dura-
bility, which alone determines if a thing can exist as a thing and
endure in the world as a distinct entity, remains the supreme cri-
terion, although it no longer makes a thing fit for use but rather fit
to "be stored up beforehand" for future exchange.30
This is the change in quality reflected in the current distinction
between use and exchange value, whereby the latter is related to
the former as the merchant and trader is related to the fabricator
and manufacturer. In so far as homo faber fabricates use objects, he
not only produces them in the privacy of isolation but also for the
privacy of usage, from which they emerge and appear in the public
realm when they become commodities in the exchange market. It
has frequently been remarked and unfortunately as frequently been
forgotten that value, being "an idea of proportion between the pos-
session of one thing and the possession of another in the conception
of man,"31 "always means value in exchange."32 For it is only in
the exchange market, where everything can be exchanged for
something else, that all things, whether they are products of labor
30. Adam Smith, op. cit., II, 241.
31. This definition was given by the Italian economist Abbey Galiani. I quote
from Hannah R. Sewall, The Theory of Value before Adam Smith (1901) ("Publications of the American Economic Association," 3d Ser., Vol. II, No. 3), p. 92.
32. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1920), I, 8.
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The Human Condition
or work, consumer goods or use objects, necessary for the life of
the body or the convenience of living or the life of the rnind, be-
come "values." This value consists solely in the esteem of the
public realm where the things appear as commodities, and it is
neither labor, nor work, nor capital, nor profit, nor material,
which bestows such value upon an object, but only and exclusively
the public realm where it appears to be esteemed, demanded, or
neglected. Value is the quality a thing can never possess in privacy
but acquires automatica