There were many other topics that I wanted to mention, but I try to keep this posts under 1,500 words to make sure that my thoughts don't dominate the discussion.
The early remarks on labor being forced by necessity, and the ancient Greek drive to free oneself of those necessities, is very interesting, and I think ties in well with our previous reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Labor was not valued but rather seen as a burden; today, we see labor as praiseworthy. That inversion leads to problems, as Arendt argues.
The two aspects of this chapter which I will need to revisit are the sense of impermanence of what labor gives us, as labor provides us with things we quickly exhaust, and (as noted in the post) the role of private property. This keeps coming up in The Human Condition, so we need to get a grasp on Arendt's view in order to make sense of the whole.
I struggled with this chapter. I kept thinking to myself "so what?" How is the distinction between labor and work important, is there something to be changed based on this?
I also think her concept of "biological processes" is too narrow. Where does a need for status within a group fall? I believe the need for status is universal across cultures. Much of what we "consume" is for status purposes, we want what others have. Probably no one wants to go back to a lifestyle of a hundred years ago - but our biological needs are the same now as then.
Also consumption vis a vis permanent object. Making a chair is supposedly work, because it is a permanent object not consumed. But once someone is sitting in it, the function of the chair is consumed, and if another person arrives, another chair needs to be produced. Work or labor? and why care?
Maybe the distinction between labor and work should always be related to the ancient Greek way of leaving, as well as public and private realm. Arendt wrote about the private realm as the things they did in their households out of necessity, labor that were for slaves to do so the greeks could have time to go to the public realm and work (make stuff that were not immediately consumed).
Thus, to try to define the concepts of labor and work with today's terms is a mistake, because part of the point of nameing the public and private realm, is to say that modern society moved that "necessary activities" of the private realm to the center of the city, in a way such that the public and private realm are mixed and we no longer distinguish between labor and work.
I think that explains all the examples in which we are laboring but producing work too. "Earning a living" wasn't something that made much sense in the Ancient Greek, because for the citizens of the polis you had everything you needed to sustain life in the private realm. Today, for the average citizen, the "work" is a by-product of labour. So you labor to eat and have a home, but that labor produces something durable.
I hope I could express it correctly, English is my second language!
Marx didn't want to free people from labour. He wanted to free labour from exploitation. This makes absolutely no sense, even the most surface level reading of Marx can't lead a person to make such conclusions.
This is what I came up against. She seemed very complimentary of his ideas also, perhaps informing hers heavily. In reading this, however, I did find a deepening of my perspective to Marx's work.
Like others, it feels like she is trying too hard to create distinguishing definitions that may get in the way of some very important points. As we have moved to a society where each individual is responsible for the necessities of their life, we have also built in a consumerism that ensures we consume the excesses produced from our labor. These goods can’t be long lasting or the need to labor beyond our needs is pointless.
We live this life now. Amazon makes billions from it.
Goods are cheap and plentiful. We constantly buy new goods to replace broken ones and need to work to have the funds for this constant cycle of replacement. Few of us have meaningful work beyond servicing the cycle of disposable goods. Shipping, legal, engineering, service, accounting, disposal, etc are all labor to service the cycle of things we exhaust.
I presume she's spending so much time trying to distinguish between labor and work to attempt to better explain how we got ourselves into this cycle. It seems her point is that a focus on labor (as opposed to work), combined with the the primary mode of relationship changing from action (which should be better explained later) to "behaving," partially as a result of the social realm overtaking the public and private realms, is what led us here. Perhaps she will also propose an alternative (or a way out?) by instead trying to reorient around work and/or placing more emphasis on action.
Arendt never performed labor herself, since she was teacher, writer all her life. She maybe gets trapped into describing something she only knows as an intellectual basis. I did keep relating this chapter to our current society. Most of us may not know labor in a personal sense. I don’t know what it feels to labor for a lifetime. An intellectual talking about labor may not be work much.
I do think many people living without labor have been set adrift. Their life has no meaning or purpose. They may not have the skills to produce work instead. Pretty sad if so.
I see a lot of people overdoing exercise. Is this an attempt to bring labor into their life as a substitute?
I’m struggling with the distinction between impermanent products of labor and permanent products of work, since it’s easy to come up with counter examples:
1) If I had to list what humans need to sustain life, shelter would most likely be among the top five. This necessity would make shelter a product of labor, but it’s far from being impermanent and it’s not really consumed.
2) Products of art can be permanent (painting, sculpture), which makes sense if art is considered work, but they can also be less permanent than food (concerts or other performances). Is the musician a worker in the recording studio and a laborer on the concert stage?
Shelter is an interesting example. I think she might classify this under work, but then 'labor' is defined in an incredibly restrictive way, which seems unsatisfying.
Yes, it seems like she's dismissed several other, arguably more useful, distinctions between types of work/labor such as skilled and unskilled work, because they are imperfect, only to produce her own imperfect distinction. Yes, all work requires skill but the point of the distinction is that some work requires much more specific training and can usually be performed by a smaller subset of humans than so-called "unskilled" work. It's not a perfect distinction but it is pragmatic for getting that point across.
Where I find her distinction most compelling is when she reviews the etymology of each word in different languages and finds that there is consistently a difference. I do think she is on to something by making the distinction but I'm not really understanding it, especially in the discussion of the impermanent products of labor and the permanent products of work. Earlier in the book, I had gotten the impression that if someone on an assembly line was making chairs that would be considered labor, but if they were a craftsman making a chair from start to finish it would be work. I thought the distinction was made based on the condition of the labor/work rather than the product. The way she is defining the distinction in this chapter however (and maybe the way she's always defined it, I can't remember) would make both of these work and not labor since, although the condition of a chair may deteriorate over time, a chair is not really consumed whether it's made by a craftsman or on an assembly line.
I am a bit puzzled by this distinction between labor and work. It did seem to make sense when people had to grow their own food, make their own clothes and maintain their own dwellings. Nowadays, at least in the "developed" world, most of us don't need to do this.
One could argue that you could still call "labor" any job including skilled jobs if it is meant to pay mostly for consumption, even if this consumption includes 10 bedroom houses and Lamborghinis. If I work on Wall street 100hrs per week to be able to afford all this and I am not leaving anything meaningful in the world as a product of my work, this is not "work" for Arendt but "labor". That being said, if as a financial advisor, if I manage to make a lot of money for my clients by investing them well, at least some of my clients might be able to focus on their "work" by producing art or focusing on their groundbreaking research while living off their investment income that I manage to secure for them. It seems that I am indirectly producing "work" by my "labor" in this case.
Yet another example: let's say I am a free thinking physician who constantly tries to help patients who could not get help anywhere else. Let's say, I managed to help a talented scientist with my unconventional treatments and she is now able to return to work and win a Nobel prize in physics 20 years later. Does my curing her not count as "work"? Without my help she would not be in good enough health to continue working and make a groundbreaking discovery that lead to Nobel prize. A good question.
On the societal level, I am not sure how much this distinction between "work" and "labor" makes sense. With the division of labor and specialization, there is no "work" without "labor". I guess, it might come down to my attitude about my "labor": if I see my labor beaning meaningful and essential to allow someone else to do "work" then my labor is the same as "work". If I work at a factory pushing buttons and not seeing this as meaningful, then I guess I am laboring rather than working.
Another issue similar to what you brought up is teamwork. These days, much is produced with a team of people, not individuals. Even art - a film - could require hundreds of people to create the finished product. Are they doing work? Is video editing work if it is done for an art movie, and labor if it is done for a commercial? Does the person doing the editing work see these differently? And, most importantly, why does this matter?
Such a great point! Perhaps in her chapter about work she will clarity some of this confusion as these points of tension in her definitions are not that difficult to come up, we shall see...
I think a lot of what Hannah says about property and the consumability of the outcome of work/labor defining which it is can hold valid in a pre digital world.
However, in a digital world where the production and consumption of output is unbalanced (production takes work but consumption does not deplete the output) I don’t know if it still holds true.
I think it would also be useful to think about using the Covid pandemic as a case study - where those who did ‘unskilled work’ suddenly became essential workers. Is this the private becoming public, work becoming labour?
I also reading this couldn’t help thinking I would also quite like to hear her take on the famous Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber.
I feel that I could still do "work" but then spend all money earned from work on meaningless consumption and having to do "work" again that could turn it into "labor". Let's say I am a talented sculptor but only in it for the money and not for the artistic value of it. I am creating beautiful sculptures for rich people to put in their mansions so that I can make a ton of money and spend it all to afford my lavish lifestyle. My sculptures do not reflect my emotional state. I create whatever is ordered by my client. Would these sculptures I create count as art? They would in some sense but at the same time them being completely empty of any emotional foundation make me doubt this is art. Would my occupation be work or labor in this case? I think this would be labor despite the fact that I am creating something that will persist in time and might be enjoyed for at least decades at least by some people.
It sounds like labor and work at the same time. Many important "works" of art history, and classical music, were created because of patronage by nobles. The artists needed to complete those commissions to earn a living (labor), but we still consider them to be enduring works of art. It seems that there are exceptions to these hard categories.
Of course, most artists in the antiquity (or now) would have a hard time making a living by creating art full time without financial support from a patron. To me, what defines true art is it's emotional and intellectual charge that the artist instills in it. There is big difference between the financial support by a patron to allow the artist to "work" rather than to "labor" and create something that artist's soul craves to create vs someone commissioning a statue of himself as Napoleon to indulge his vanity. The former artist does "work" despite the financial support provided by someone else vs the latter artist, at least in my mind, labors. It is quite possible for the same artist to do both: to labor by taking commissions in order to fund true work which would be uncomissioned. Same thing could apply to many old bands or singers who combine labor and work on their tours by playing old hits ("labor" as songs written at the age of 18 might no longer reflect the state of mind of the same person at the age of 50 but audience largely wants to hear oldies to remind them of their youth, so this pays bills) and an occasional new, weird and largely unpopular song that reflects current state of their more mature soul ("work"). Perhaps, I am taking this way too far...
I apologize for this being late by a day.
There were many other topics that I wanted to mention, but I try to keep this posts under 1,500 words to make sure that my thoughts don't dominate the discussion.
The early remarks on labor being forced by necessity, and the ancient Greek drive to free oneself of those necessities, is very interesting, and I think ties in well with our previous reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Labor was not valued but rather seen as a burden; today, we see labor as praiseworthy. That inversion leads to problems, as Arendt argues.
The two aspects of this chapter which I will need to revisit are the sense of impermanence of what labor gives us, as labor provides us with things we quickly exhaust, and (as noted in the post) the role of private property. This keeps coming up in The Human Condition, so we need to get a grasp on Arendt's view in order to make sense of the whole.
I struggled with this chapter. I kept thinking to myself "so what?" How is the distinction between labor and work important, is there something to be changed based on this?
I also think her concept of "biological processes" is too narrow. Where does a need for status within a group fall? I believe the need for status is universal across cultures. Much of what we "consume" is for status purposes, we want what others have. Probably no one wants to go back to a lifestyle of a hundred years ago - but our biological needs are the same now as then.
Also consumption vis a vis permanent object. Making a chair is supposedly work, because it is a permanent object not consumed. But once someone is sitting in it, the function of the chair is consumed, and if another person arrives, another chair needs to be produced. Work or labor? and why care?
Maybe the distinction between labor and work should always be related to the ancient Greek way of leaving, as well as public and private realm. Arendt wrote about the private realm as the things they did in their households out of necessity, labor that were for slaves to do so the greeks could have time to go to the public realm and work (make stuff that were not immediately consumed).
Thus, to try to define the concepts of labor and work with today's terms is a mistake, because part of the point of nameing the public and private realm, is to say that modern society moved that "necessary activities" of the private realm to the center of the city, in a way such that the public and private realm are mixed and we no longer distinguish between labor and work.
I think that explains all the examples in which we are laboring but producing work too. "Earning a living" wasn't something that made much sense in the Ancient Greek, because for the citizens of the polis you had everything you needed to sustain life in the private realm. Today, for the average citizen, the "work" is a by-product of labour. So you labor to eat and have a home, but that labor produces something durable.
I hope I could express it correctly, English is my second language!
Marx didn't want to free people from labour. He wanted to free labour from exploitation. This makes absolutely no sense, even the most surface level reading of Marx can't lead a person to make such conclusions.
This is what I came up against. She seemed very complimentary of his ideas also, perhaps informing hers heavily. In reading this, however, I did find a deepening of my perspective to Marx's work.
Like others, it feels like she is trying too hard to create distinguishing definitions that may get in the way of some very important points. As we have moved to a society where each individual is responsible for the necessities of their life, we have also built in a consumerism that ensures we consume the excesses produced from our labor. These goods can’t be long lasting or the need to labor beyond our needs is pointless.
We live this life now. Amazon makes billions from it.
Goods are cheap and plentiful. We constantly buy new goods to replace broken ones and need to work to have the funds for this constant cycle of replacement. Few of us have meaningful work beyond servicing the cycle of disposable goods. Shipping, legal, engineering, service, accounting, disposal, etc are all labor to service the cycle of things we exhaust.
I presume she's spending so much time trying to distinguish between labor and work to attempt to better explain how we got ourselves into this cycle. It seems her point is that a focus on labor (as opposed to work), combined with the the primary mode of relationship changing from action (which should be better explained later) to "behaving," partially as a result of the social realm overtaking the public and private realms, is what led us here. Perhaps she will also propose an alternative (or a way out?) by instead trying to reorient around work and/or placing more emphasis on action.
Arendt never performed labor herself, since she was teacher, writer all her life. She maybe gets trapped into describing something she only knows as an intellectual basis. I did keep relating this chapter to our current society. Most of us may not know labor in a personal sense. I don’t know what it feels to labor for a lifetime. An intellectual talking about labor may not be work much.
I do think many people living without labor have been set adrift. Their life has no meaning or purpose. They may not have the skills to produce work instead. Pretty sad if so.
I see a lot of people overdoing exercise. Is this an attempt to bring labor into their life as a substitute?
I’m struggling with the distinction between impermanent products of labor and permanent products of work, since it’s easy to come up with counter examples:
1) If I had to list what humans need to sustain life, shelter would most likely be among the top five. This necessity would make shelter a product of labor, but it’s far from being impermanent and it’s not really consumed.
2) Products of art can be permanent (painting, sculpture), which makes sense if art is considered work, but they can also be less permanent than food (concerts or other performances). Is the musician a worker in the recording studio and a laborer on the concert stage?
Shelter is an interesting example. I think she might classify this under work, but then 'labor' is defined in an incredibly restrictive way, which seems unsatisfying.
Yes, it seems like she's dismissed several other, arguably more useful, distinctions between types of work/labor such as skilled and unskilled work, because they are imperfect, only to produce her own imperfect distinction. Yes, all work requires skill but the point of the distinction is that some work requires much more specific training and can usually be performed by a smaller subset of humans than so-called "unskilled" work. It's not a perfect distinction but it is pragmatic for getting that point across.
Where I find her distinction most compelling is when she reviews the etymology of each word in different languages and finds that there is consistently a difference. I do think she is on to something by making the distinction but I'm not really understanding it, especially in the discussion of the impermanent products of labor and the permanent products of work. Earlier in the book, I had gotten the impression that if someone on an assembly line was making chairs that would be considered labor, but if they were a craftsman making a chair from start to finish it would be work. I thought the distinction was made based on the condition of the labor/work rather than the product. The way she is defining the distinction in this chapter however (and maybe the way she's always defined it, I can't remember) would make both of these work and not labor since, although the condition of a chair may deteriorate over time, a chair is not really consumed whether it's made by a craftsman or on an assembly line.
I am a bit puzzled by this distinction between labor and work. It did seem to make sense when people had to grow their own food, make their own clothes and maintain their own dwellings. Nowadays, at least in the "developed" world, most of us don't need to do this.
One could argue that you could still call "labor" any job including skilled jobs if it is meant to pay mostly for consumption, even if this consumption includes 10 bedroom houses and Lamborghinis. If I work on Wall street 100hrs per week to be able to afford all this and I am not leaving anything meaningful in the world as a product of my work, this is not "work" for Arendt but "labor". That being said, if as a financial advisor, if I manage to make a lot of money for my clients by investing them well, at least some of my clients might be able to focus on their "work" by producing art or focusing on their groundbreaking research while living off their investment income that I manage to secure for them. It seems that I am indirectly producing "work" by my "labor" in this case.
Yet another example: let's say I am a free thinking physician who constantly tries to help patients who could not get help anywhere else. Let's say, I managed to help a talented scientist with my unconventional treatments and she is now able to return to work and win a Nobel prize in physics 20 years later. Does my curing her not count as "work"? Without my help she would not be in good enough health to continue working and make a groundbreaking discovery that lead to Nobel prize. A good question.
On the societal level, I am not sure how much this distinction between "work" and "labor" makes sense. With the division of labor and specialization, there is no "work" without "labor". I guess, it might come down to my attitude about my "labor": if I see my labor beaning meaningful and essential to allow someone else to do "work" then my labor is the same as "work". If I work at a factory pushing buttons and not seeing this as meaningful, then I guess I am laboring rather than working.
Another issue similar to what you brought up is teamwork. These days, much is produced with a team of people, not individuals. Even art - a film - could require hundreds of people to create the finished product. Are they doing work? Is video editing work if it is done for an art movie, and labor if it is done for a commercial? Does the person doing the editing work see these differently? And, most importantly, why does this matter?
Such a great point! Perhaps in her chapter about work she will clarity some of this confusion as these points of tension in her definitions are not that difficult to come up, we shall see...
I think a lot of what Hannah says about property and the consumability of the outcome of work/labor defining which it is can hold valid in a pre digital world.
However, in a digital world where the production and consumption of output is unbalanced (production takes work but consumption does not deplete the output) I don’t know if it still holds true.
I think it would also be useful to think about using the Covid pandemic as a case study - where those who did ‘unskilled work’ suddenly became essential workers. Is this the private becoming public, work becoming labour?
I also reading this couldn’t help thinking I would also quite like to hear her take on the famous Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber.
I feel that I could still do "work" but then spend all money earned from work on meaningless consumption and having to do "work" again that could turn it into "labor". Let's say I am a talented sculptor but only in it for the money and not for the artistic value of it. I am creating beautiful sculptures for rich people to put in their mansions so that I can make a ton of money and spend it all to afford my lavish lifestyle. My sculptures do not reflect my emotional state. I create whatever is ordered by my client. Would these sculptures I create count as art? They would in some sense but at the same time them being completely empty of any emotional foundation make me doubt this is art. Would my occupation be work or labor in this case? I think this would be labor despite the fact that I am creating something that will persist in time and might be enjoyed for at least decades at least by some people.
It sounds like labor and work at the same time. Many important "works" of art history, and classical music, were created because of patronage by nobles. The artists needed to complete those commissions to earn a living (labor), but we still consider them to be enduring works of art. It seems that there are exceptions to these hard categories.
Of course, most artists in the antiquity (or now) would have a hard time making a living by creating art full time without financial support from a patron. To me, what defines true art is it's emotional and intellectual charge that the artist instills in it. There is big difference between the financial support by a patron to allow the artist to "work" rather than to "labor" and create something that artist's soul craves to create vs someone commissioning a statue of himself as Napoleon to indulge his vanity. The former artist does "work" despite the financial support provided by someone else vs the latter artist, at least in my mind, labors. It is quite possible for the same artist to do both: to labor by taking commissions in order to fund true work which would be uncomissioned. Same thing could apply to many old bands or singers who combine labor and work on their tours by playing old hits ("labor" as songs written at the age of 18 might no longer reflect the state of mind of the same person at the age of 50 but audience largely wants to hear oldies to remind them of their youth, so this pays bills) and an occasional new, weird and largely unpopular song that reflects current state of their more mature soul ("work"). Perhaps, I am taking this way too far...