Relation to the world· Work and technology
Necessity, leisure as the end
Axis: Meaning of work — Does work fulfill us, alienate us, or is it merely a necessity?
Work answers the needs of life, but it is not the end of existence: , action, or contemplation, is what gives human life its meaning. We work in order to be free not to work.
Philosophers 5
Russellexplicit
The argument is arithmetical before it is moral: modern technique has greatly reduced the work needed to keep everyone alive, and that gain has gone not into freeing time but into producing more, sustaining the unemployment of some while the others wear themselves out. proposes converting it into hours — four a day would do — and defends leisure as the condition of everything good that has ever been done: science, art, affection, conversation. What he attacks is a morality, the duty to work, which he analyses as a legacy of societies where the leisure of a minority rested on the forced labour of the majority.
In Praise of Idleness (1932) · Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)
Show inferred positions (4)
Aristotleinferable
Manual and wage labour is banausic: necessary to life but degrading for the soul, it occupies the slave and the artisan so as to free the citizen for leisure (scholè), politics and contemplation. Work belongs to necessity, not to fulfilment.
Politics, I.5-7; VIII.2
Platoinferable
The city arises because no one is self-sufficient: the division of labour answers the necessity of providing for needs, each producing best what nature fits him for. Manual work counts as a function in the service of the whole rather than as self-fulfilment, the highest flourishing being reserved for the philosopher's contemplative life.
Republic, II, 369b-371e · Republic, IV, 421e-423d
Diogenes of Sinopeinferable
The only labour worth anything, for Diogenes, is the effort on oneself (ponos), the training in virtue; paid work, the amassing of wealth and the race for useful occupations belong to a conventional servitude that chains one to factitious needs. An avowed beggar, he holds the sage's studious leisure to be the end, and busy activity a means at best tolerated: one works only so as to be able to stop depending. Worth lies not in production but in the freedom won by doing without it.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 49 and 56
Thomas Aquinasinferable
Work belongs first to the necessity of providing for life, but Thomas, heir to the monastic rule, recognizes in it a dignity that Greek antiquity denied it: it disciplines the body, wards off idleness and makes almsgiving possible. It remains nonetheless ordered to a higher end, the contemplative leisure (otium) in which the mind turns toward God, which stays superior to the active life. Hence a weight shared between necessity and a form of fulfilment.
Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 187, a. 3; q. 182 (active and contemplative life)