PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HUMAN LABOR
by Manuel B. Dy, Jr.
The topic of this paper is propelled by the many social issues plaguing the country today; the numerous strikes of workers, teachers included, against management; the increasing rate of unemployment with the accompanying growing demand for higher and the predominant attitude of looking down upon the latter; the industrialization gap between the urban and rural sectors, resulting in the migration of workers to the cities; and the ethical dilemma of the lagay and the pakikisama system that goes with the bureaucracy of large institutions. Overshadowing these issues are still the conflict of the ideologies, capitalism versus communism, individualism versus collectivism, and the problem of objectification, depersonalization or functionalization of the worker in a highly technological industrial set-up.
It would be much easier to tackle these social issues separately and propose an appropriate solution, but that, I feel, would not be solving the problems at their root: I agree with Pope John Paul II that the social problems of man today are related to work and the key to their understanding is the dignity of labor. The dignity of labor, however, cannot be seen merely from an economic point of view – it is properly speaking, a philosophical and technological question.
I shall not begin with a definition of work for the notion of work has undergone a long evolution in the history of civilization. Rather, my intent is precisely to trace this evolution of the notion of work in history and to link this with a philosophy or philosophies of man.
I think this is one way of finding the philosophical basis of the dignity of labor, and the first step in clarifying the social issues related to work.
The presupposition of this paper is thus in line with what Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical Laborem Exercens: “The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimensions, not in the objective one.”
Historical Valuation of Work
It seems that primitive man knows no specific value for work. Living in an undifferentiated world, where everything is thought to be under the control of the hidden forces of nature or gods, primitive man hunts and gathers food to keep himself alive. But more than mere security, man works in order to offer sacrifice to the gods. The switch from food gathering and hunting to agriculture and cattle breeding is prompted more by the desire to offer to the gods a more worthy sacrifice than by the motive of security of life. Barter assumes a symbolic significance that transcends mere necessity: an exchange of selves in a mythical bond.
For primitive man, work is not to change and manipulate the world but to appease the gods through ritual and magic.
The Greeks are said to have initiated the breakthrough from the primitive world of myth and magic to the world of reason. Logos governs the cosmos, and man is supposed to discover this order in the universe of contemplation. Man is different from the brute animal because of his capacity to perceive order, form, harmony in the cosmos. Thus the ideal is to philosophize and to take part in the activities of the polis, the city, by the standard of arête, excellence, harmony of the whole man.
The Greeks consequently cut off work from the sacredness of nature and made it profane. They now look upon it as fitting only for the slaves and the animals. Citizen is divided between the free and the unfree with the freemen living on the work of others. The notion of work follows the Greek notion of Logos. Work is not supposed to disrupt the order of nature but to harmonize with it, to repeat its rhythm. This is evident in the Greek techne which is simply the development of man’s natural abilities. The division of labor is patterned after man’s natural needs and capacities. Greek economy is simply the exchange of goods between consumers.
The predominance of Christianity in the Middle Ages puts an end to the devaluation of work by the Greeks. The Medieval man tends to look at work in the light of God’s creation. In the Genesis, God worked for six days and rested on the seventh day. Thus man must do likewise. To work is an imitation of God, a participation in His creative act.
Yet the Genesis also tells us that after Adam and Eve fell, God put a curse to Adam. “You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything, until you go back to the soil from which you were formed.” (Genesis 3, 19) Work is also toil, a consequence of sin.
This ambiguity in work can be seen in the kind of work prevalent in the Middle Ages. The polis of the Greeks gives way to the towns of the medieval man, centers of crafts and industries. The craftsmen group themselves into guilds according to their kind of craft and call themselves (fraternities), working on the basis of mutual trust. Their work is duty to maintain their position but not to extract profit. Merchants are looked down because, more than often, they do commerce for profit rather than for the consumer’s needs. Those who do not have to work with their hands are the feudal lords who own properties and have the leisure of study. At this time, studying is not work. Thus work is limited to the manual labor of the craftsmen to preserve their community but not to derive profit.
The ambiguity of work is resolved in the motto of the monks, “ora et labora.” Work is noble as long as one is not attached to the fruits of one’s labor but offer it to God. Thus
The next centuries, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, bring a new valuation to work. Gradually, the power of the guilds decline, and industry and technique merge to form big capitalistic enterprises. This is due to the growing individualistic spirit of the time (philosophically initiated by Rene Descartes) and the consequent rise of the spirit of the natural sciences. Now, there is no limit to making profit, to accumulating interest bearing capital. The natural sciences with their empirical investigations bring out the knowledge and power of man to control nature to make nature conform to man. This new impetus gives rise to cult of work: everyone must work, and man is the homo economicus.
It is at this point that we must turn our attention to the great philosopher of work, the young Karl Marx.
Marx’s Philosophy of Work
The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 of Karl Marx speaks of the interdependence and interaction of man and nature achieved in labor. Labor is central to the humanist Marx because it is through labor that man becomes man, and nature becomes nature for man. In his own words, “the whole of world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man.” (p.139, Eric Fromm’s edition)
Marx contrasts human labor and animal labor. The animals produce, but what they produce is only what is necessary for themselves and for their young to survive. In other words, they produce under the compulsion of direct physical need; they produce only themselves, in a single direction. As such their products belong directly to their physical bodies. Their construction is limited only to the standard needs of their own species. We can see that through their labor, animals are one with their life activity, they do not distinguish themselves from their own activities.
On the other hand, when man works, he works universally. He does not only produce out of physical need; he also produces when free from such need. And when he produces, he reproduces the whole of nature; he is not confined to his own species. (he can produce a plane which can make him fly like the birds). He knows how to produce in accordance with the standards of every species, and also with the laws of beauty. Man then is free in the face of his product. He is not completely identified with his work. “Man can make his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness” (p.101). His own life becomes an object for him, and thus his labor is a free activity.
From Marx, human labor is a process between man and nature, a metabolism of some sort established by man which man himself regulates and controls. Man transforms the earth by work, but by changing nature, man also changes himself: he develops powers, abilities lying dormant in his being – he develops himself. The development of work is likewise the development of man.
The development of labor is the process of production. Strictly speaking, only man can produce. Man produces when he utilizes mechanical, physical, and chemical forces to make instruments, tools, and machines which are extensions of his body. Work develops as man evaluates his labor by the perfection of the means of work. Human civilization, thus, is to be judged not so much by the things produced as by the complexity of the means of production.
Human labor is productive only when man uses tools. But the use of tools implies divisions of labor. The hammer is a tool for the carpenter only because someone else makes the nails. The division of labor, however, makes man independent with fellowman. Thus, productive labor makes man social, makes people work for one another. Work makes man a fellowman.
This human co-existence in work provides an interconnection in mankind’s history. Every generation finds at its disposal the means of work produced by the preceding generation and leaves behind certain means of production that will serve as the starting point for the future generation. Thus history becomes common history through work.
Consequently, for Marx, work is not simply a means to a goal outside; rather, work is an end in itself, a value in itself. It is not surprising then, that Marx is against working for the sake of a wage and the capitalistic system that makes work and worker a commodity in the market. Work cannot be simply reduced to a means to live. In fact man lives in order to work, for work is the way for man to realize his true humanity.
Implications in the History of Work
The history of work indicates that change, an evolution of an understanding of man. Human nature may be said to remain essentially the same throughout history; nevertheless, man’s understanding of himself develops. And this can be seen in our historical sketch of the valuation of work.
It is doubtful whether primitive man has any unique understanding of himself or his humanity as a value outside that of the tribe he belongs to and the gods that the tribe worships. His work is all part of sacred nature, his activity not dissimilar from the beings around him. His humanity is but the outcome of mechanisms, processes and forces in the cosmos.
The Greeks look down upon work and contrast it with their ideal contemplation. While man indeed may be a part of nature, he is no insignificant part for his rationality makes him different from the beast and liberates him from the finitude of nature. It is in the contemplative activity that man’s dignity is to be found, but not in work, for work is servile. The true man is the free man, free from the servitude to nature.
Christianity in the Middle Ages begins to appreciate the value of work as an imitation of God’s creation but is not unaware of the toil involved in the work of the craftsman. Work is still contrasted with study, with rational activity. Work is a noble duty insofar as it reflects man as a creature of God and a member of the Christian community. Nevertheless, the dignity of man lies in his being created in the image and likeness of God, which is to be found in his rational soul. As an activity of a rational animal, man’s duty to work is to serve as a means to attain his final destiny – the Beatific vision of God.
The cult of work in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries brought about by the gradual rise to capitalism gives us a view of man as a controller and master of nature, because of his independent thinking. Man’s dignity lies in his own ability to stand for himself, to acquire mastery over nature and his own passions. Here we have a notion of man as a subject but a subjectivity imprisoned in itself.
The intrinsic value of work reaches its culmination and exaggeration in Marx’s thought. For Marx, through labor, man confirms his own being as a species-being.
…the practical construction of an objective world, the manipulation of organic nature, is the confirmation of man as a conscious species-being, i.e., a being who treats the species of his own being or himself as a species-being. (p.102).
For Marx, man is not merely a natural being; he is also a human natural being. By this, he means to say that man is a being who treats himself as the present, living species. By this, he means to say that man is a being who treats himself as the present, living species. Man is the only being who can make the community his object both practically (in labor) and theoretically (in reflection). The theoretical, i.e., intellectual work, however, is simply an abstraction of the practical. This ability of man to make himself and his humanity his own object proves the universal and the freedom of man. Through labor, man shows the practical universality of his own being – by making the whole of nature his own inorganic body, as a direct means of life and as the material object and instrument of life activity.
Thus, for Marx, man is man because he can objectify himself through labor. By making a chair, for example, man is as it were transcending himself, making himself (as individual and as species) an object of himself (for-itself) by means of nature; thus asserting his being as a free being. So, the chair becomes an expression; externalization and realization of man’s species life, an embodiment of man’s creativity. We see therefore the human stamp in the chair; nature becomes humanized, reflecting man’s being as man, as species being – creative, free, universal.
Originally, the nature is not necessarily human. “Neither objective nature nor subjective nature is directly presented in a form adequate to the human being.” (p.183) The natural only becomes human for Marx when it assumes a social dimension.
As society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social mind. The human significance of nature exists for social man, because only in this case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence… The natural existence for man has here become human for him. Thus Society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.
It is enough, therefore, to simply interact with nature. When man produces, he must produce for society and with the consciousness of acting as a social being. Only then is the work human, and the object, a human object, a social object. Only then does man not become lost in it. Man becomes a social being, and society a being for man in this object.
Marx does not make a distinction between individual human life and the species-life. Although man is a unique individual, he is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as though and experienced. Even when man does a purely scientific work, an activity that many be done without direct association with other men, he is still engaged in a social activity. Language itself is already a social product. The individual himself is the social-being. Man as a species-being is man conscious not only of himself as an individual but also of his own species and of his own being a member of his species. And it is in labor that man actively manifests his being a species-being. Through his work upon objective nature, man relates himself with other man – not only in the sense that he needs the help of others to do the work but also because he produces universally; he takes upon his work the whole of nature and humanity. His work can be called human only when he goes beyond considering the means of his individual subsistence to include the community. A human work is truly communal in nature and purpose, and the real human being is one who has re-incorporated in himself the social.
Work and Man in the Technological Era
The exaggeration of Marx in making all human realization governed by labor is understandable in the context of the dehumanization of the worker in the capitalistic system predominating in his time (and in our time?). Aside from the problem of alienated labor attributable to capitalism, history has given rise to a new phenomenon – technological work.
The present age is technological, and to the extent that technology has dominated man’s thinking and behavior, it has aptly been called “technocracy”. Ours is an age of machines and computers, of mass communication, video, print and telecommunication; of energized land, sea, and air travel. Technology has no longer just transformed nature; it has forced nature to reveal its secrets. Thinking that it is unformed and disorderly, man has interfered in nature, creating an artificial world of machines and computers. Rather than merely conforming to his given surroundings, man has made the earth become; he has in a sense created his own world of structures and institutions. While before the natural needs of man determined production, now man produces to stock and to create a demand by means of advertising. Intellectual activity has itself become work, for in order to survive, the technico-economico order needs constant growth through inventions and this requires rational planning, market strategies. Man has indeed become truly productive.
Much of what Marx says of work and man are true in the technological era: modern work is mastery over nature, humanizing nature and realizing man as species-being. Work has become very important that it now determines where man is to live – it has mobilized man to overcome spatio-geographical limitations, and yet there do exist the negative aspects of contemporary labor: the anonymous ties of urban life, the identification of the person with his function, the drudgery of repetitious specialized labor, the bureaucracy of institutions – in short, the functionalization and depersonalization of the person.
It seems that work is not the only way for man to realize himself. It seems that man’s work has come to assume a quasi-independent existence, threatening to swallow man.
At this juncture, we need to see work and man then from a new vantage point, from a viewpoint that overcomes the dualism of matter and spirit, body and soul, physical and spiritual.
Indeed, insofar as man is body, he is limited, he needs to provide for his physical well-being. He has to struggle against nature. But man’s body is none other than his subjectivity, his spirit embodying itself. Man is incarnate subjectivity manifests his interiority, his freedom and rationality, not only in work but also in word. Word, is as much an embodiment of man’s subjectivity as work, but with the advantage of providing a more total grasp of the world than work, modern work. As Paul Ricoeur says, word can provide a corrective for work, taking form as seminars and “tsismis” for functional workers.
As embodied spirit, when man works, he wrests a surplus from nature. Modern work has reached a point where man is able to wrest this surplus from nature, leaving room for other modes of self-realization beyond the self-realization of work concerned with “production.” By his rationality, man transforms nature in order to build up forces for higher purpose; this surplus becomes leisure, the basis of culture, as Josef Peiper would say.
Modern work has shown that besides productive labor, there is something more (surplus) to our earthly existence. It is enough for us to have food, clothing, and shelter. In the way we cook and prepare our food, dress ourselves, build and decorate our houses, we exteriorize ourselves, manifesting our personalities and culture. We cannot work eight days a week, especially when work is too specialized and boring, we seek for leisure or play, to be with our friends and families, to simply take nature as it is and not as a means – in short, to be just ourselves.
The danger is to make everything of human existence work. To work is a way of realizing oneself but not only the way. There is a counterpart of work, other ways of self-realization, call it leisure, word, contemplation, culture. In a sense, modern work is becoming leisure, but there will always be an aspect of “toil”, whether manual or intellectual labor. Modern work can also be contemplation and culture. They can no longer be separated. When modern man works, his activity aims at the world to change it, resulting in a product which man can use to perfect himself and for his fellowman. Yet, this activity also aims at man himself, expressing and communicating himself, resulting in a sign in order to speak of human existence to his fellowman in communion. Every product is a sign to some extent, bearing the stamp of interiority of the person.
Notwithstanding and because of the many kinds of work, the value of work lies in the worker, the dignity of man as an embodied person, free, communicating (social) and one in the diversity of his acts.
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