The Past and Present Society

The Greek Attitude to Manual LabourAuthor(s): Rodolfo Mondolfo and D. S. DuncanSource: Past & Present, No. 6 (Nov., 1954), pp. 1-5Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649811 .Accessed: 06/05/2011 16:53

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The Greek Attitude to Manual Labour1

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN SOME MODIFICATION OF THE traditional view that classical antiquity in general despised manual labourers (bdnausoi) and productive work (banausia). A good example of this process of revision is W. Jaeger's judgment (Paideia I): " Greece was the cradle of that humanity which holds work in the highest esteem." Glotz, Schuhl, Farrington and others have helped to show that in Ancient Greece there was a positive and a negative attitude to labour, and that the latter eventually triumphed only as a result of a complex of social factors: economic (the increasing use of slaves and the consequent lowering of the conditions of the working classes); political (the reaction of militaristic and aristocratic circles); and spiritual (particularly the influence of certain writers and thinkers, some of whom, as P. M. Schuhl has said of Plato, reveal a genuine blocage mental where labour and technical skill is concerned).

It must be pointed out, however, that during the early period from Hesiod to Socrates, the Greek public conscience was favourably disposed towards manual labour, and that this positive attitude continued to exercise such force that even its opponents, such as Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, were unable to free themselves completely from its influence.

It is above all the economic value of labour that is traditionally emphasized. Only by work can man provide himself with the necessities - and the luxuries - of daily life. Hesiod says that the gods bestow worldly goods only on those who work to earn them, an opinion shared by many others: Pindar, Epicharmus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; minor tragedians such as Agathon, Theodectes, Philiscus, etc.; the comic poets Alexis, Antiphanes, Philemon, Menander, Dyscolus; the philosophers Prodicus, Antiphon, Hippias, Critias, Democritus, Socrates, etc. At the same time these writers show a growing awareness of the moral value of labour: work is a duty which man must fulfil if his life is to have justification and dignity. And it is Hesiod again who first emphasizes this aspect of labour, when he insists that not work, but idleness, is shameful, and that the idler is a parasite, like the drone which devours the honey the

1 This article is a summary of conclusions arrived at in other studies of mine, and presented more fully in one chapter of the book I have in preparation: La comprenione del soggetto umano nella cultura an.tica.

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bees have toiled to produce. This view of work as a moral obligation was later taken up by the Seven Sages, some of whom, like Thales and Anacharsis, mentioned by Plato, devoted themselves to acquiring manual skills, while others, like Solon, were the authors of laws which insisted on the necessity of work. It is a view which reappears in philosophers like Antiphon, Prodicus, Democritus and Socrates.

According to Prodicus, the concept of work as a noble duty is personified in Heracles, and that is why Heracles becomes the ideal hero of the Cynics, whose influence is later merged into the Stoic conception of life and work. But the attitude of the Cynics, those " philosophers of the Greek proletariat," along with that of Socrates, seems to have influenced even Xenophon, in spite of his aristocratic and pro-Spartan leanings. Thus in his Memorabilia he too, like Socrates, shows awareness of the value and moral obligation of work, just as much for free men as for slaves; and he echoes Hesiod - and anticipates St. Paul (Thess. II 3) - in condemning idle parasites. Plato himself, in Republic III 405-8, is critical of the privileged leisured classes who boast of their liberal education, and suggests they take as their model the carpenter, for whom life is not worth living if he is not allowed to get on with his work. Elsewhere (Rep. 535 d) he insists that even students of philosophy should love all forms of work (philoponia), whether of the hand or of the brain.

Various historians of ancient thought have drawn attention, at least in part, to these vindications of labour, but they have usually ignored a third aspect which classical antiquity recognized: the value of labour for the formation of the intellect and for the gaining of knowledge. This aspect, not yet apparent in Hesiod, is first seen in the Seven Sages, the inventors of mechanical instruments and techniques, in whom the activities of hand and brain, of homo sapiens and homo faber, are fused and made one. At a later date, as Farrington has shown, we find a typical representative of this tradition in Hippias, who considers his skill as a spinner, weaver, tailor, tanner, shoemaker, smith, etc., an essential part of his encyclopaxdic knowledge, and who already in the fifth century B.C., as Schuhl has mentioned, devotes himself to the writing of treatises on all the arts, from music to sculpture, from medicine to cookery. Here one senses an aware- ness of how the practice of a craft can help towards the discovery of nature's secrets.

I have studied on another occasion the influence of technical skills on the formation of the outlook of the pre-Socratic naturalists, and on their interpretations of the processes and phenomena of the physical world; while Farrington has drawn attention to the

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Hippocratic treatise De Victu, which declares that the processes of human arts hold the key to the understanding of the processes of nature. It should be added, however, that the same writer basing himself on the idea that man, being a creature of nature, all unwittingly follows in his actions the identical processes and laws that are universally operative in nature) goes on to affirm that man, by understanding his own known actions - known to him precisely because he performs them - can then arrive at an understanding of the unknown processes of nature. And so, anticipating Vico's verum ipsum factum, he says that man "by understanding what he does " can come to understand what he unconsciously imitates, i.e. the laws and phenomena of nature. Labour is thus a way to, and an instrument of, knowledge; and its intellectual value is thus powerfully affirmed.

Anaxagoras, writing at the saine period, and attributing man's superiority over the animal to his possession of hands, seems to understand that by the art of manual labour man uplifts himself, and that in creating new and better conditions of existence, man makes himself, i.e. fashions his own progress and mental development. Even Plato, who did so much to emphasize the opposition between the contemplative and the active creative life of progress, shows in Republic 424-5, Politicus 298-9, Laws 656-7, 797-9, that he is well aware of the interdependence and reciprocal relations of all activities and aspects of human life. Thus, change or stasis in one part has repercussions on all the others, and produces in them identical conditions of change or stasis. Every aspect of man's social life - from children's games to fashions in dress, from modes of music to labour agreements and trade and harbour regulations, from the plastic arts to dietary regime, from the craft of the smith, cabinet maker and farmer to the science of arithmetic and geometry - is inextricably linked to every other. Thus on the one hand, in the Republic and the Laws, Plato urges that change in every sphere should be forbidden, in order to ensure the stability of the laws and of the state: and in the Politicus on the other hand, vindicates freedom of progress and change in the arts and techniques, in order to avoid that ossification and stagnation which would mean the death of man's spiritual life, and render human existence intolerable.

While acknowledging this connection between the modes and forms of the active life of labour and the contemplative life of science and philosophy (both linked in their turn with the ethico-juridical life of the citizen) he shows no clear awareness of the direct effect of labour in the formation and development of human knowledge.

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Such an idea, however, implicit in the Platonic insistence on the dual nature of philoponia which he demands of students of science and philosophy (Rep. 535 d), is explicitly developed by Aristotle.

Already hinted at in the Protrepticus of his Platonic phase, it emerges clearly in the De Philosophia of his transitional phase, where he gives the name of wisdom (sophia) to each of the five stages he distinguishes in the growth of civilization: first, the introduction of work and of the techniques required to satisfy the most pressing needs of ordinary life; second, the introduction of the arts of refinement and elegance; then, the creation of laws, the study of nature, and finally, the contemplation of the first cause. Labour and technical skills, then, are already held to be sophia. Later, in the first chapter of the Metaphysics, Aristotle expresses this concept more clearly, distinguishing two elements in labour: the invention and supervision of the technique; and its actual execution. He considers those who direct the work to be more gifted than those who merely carry it out mechanically, never stopping to think of the reason for what they do.

Here it is evident that Aristotle condemns the divorce of hand and brain, both essential to the functioning of the arts, and insists that they are inseparable. Thus for example in his polemic with Anaxagoras, who had attributed man's superiority to his possession of hands, he says (Depart. anim. 686 b et seq.) that nature has endowed man with this tool, the hand, precisely because man possesses intelligence. Here, then, Aristotle associates intelligence with labour as its guide and director, as he had already done in the Protrepticus (Arist. dialog. fragm. ed. Walzer, fragm, I3). In the Metaphysics, however, he goes on to show that the art of manual labour is in itself a necessary first step towards the gaining of knowledge; that it has an active intellectual content of its own, which it itself creates and develops in the very process of being performed, and which in its turn becomes a stepping-stone to yet higher levels of understanding.

According to Aristotle, man raises himself from the state of sensation he shares with the animal to the creation of art, using the data provided by experience in order to form general views. Art or technical skill is directed towards clearly determined ends, to obtain which it adapts its means. It must therefore have a clear idea of ends and means, and of their relationship; it must grasp the concept of classes of objects or models, and of processes adapted to them; it must in short reach an understanding of cause, of law, of universals. " We judge the artist to be wiser than the man of experience, inasmuch as he understands the reason for things," says Aristotle;

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THE GREEK ATTITUDE TO MANUAL LABOUR

and therefore he gives to art the name of science - which is to say that he recognizes and affirms the intellectual value of labour. And believing that only after man has mastered the arts or technical skills can he create pure disinterested science. Aristotle sees in labour a stage in human development which prepares the way for, and conditions, the higher stage of pure theory.

Thus, together with its economic and moral value, there is the acknowledgment of the intellectual value of labour: an acknowledg- ment already indicated by the pre-Socratic and Hippocratic writers, and to some extent by Plato, but made explicit by that same Aristotle who was responsible for strengthening the hostile attitude to labour, which had become dissociated from the activity of the mind, and converted into mere brutish toil for slaves. Xenophon and Plato share this responsibility with Aristotle. By their expressions of contempt for manual labour and labourers they encouraged the social changes leading to the increasing use of slaves, and to the consequent lowering of the conditions of the working classes. Gradually the negative attitude to labour gains the upper hand. Thus we have Xenophon's scorn for the worker employed on mechanical tasks (Oecon. IV 203), Plato's for the engineer (Gorgias 512), and finally Plutarch's extremist opinion that no young man of good family would wish to become a Phidias or a Polycletus, because, in spite of their genius they must, as manual workers, be considered vile and contemptible. We can see contempt for manual labour and technical skills causing the halt and decadence of Greek physical and medical science, and frustrating Archimedes' attempts to open new paths in mathematics by introducing mechanics.

None the less, these facts give no authority for the traditional view that hostility to labour was general throughout the whole period of Classical Antiquity. Instead, as we have shown, classical antiquity was also fully aware of the positive attitude which recognised the threefold value of labour: economic, moral, and intellectual.

Buenos Aires. Rodolfo Mondolfo. (trans. D. S. Duncan).

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Article Contentsp. [1]p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5

Issue Table of ContentsPast & Present, No. 6 (Nov., 1954), pp. 1-92Front MatterThe Greek Attitude to Manual Labour [pp. 1-5]An Introduction to the First Crusade [pp. 6-30]The Thirty Years' War [pp. 31-43]The Crisis of the 17th Century--II [pp. 44-65]A Comment on Professor Rostow's British Economy of the 19th Century [pp. 66-84]CommunicationsThe Long Parliament [pp. 85-91]

Correction: Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4 [p. 91]Back Matter