Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition

A History of Labor and Human Flourishing

Jeffrey Hanson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350299467
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350150966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards.

Beginning with Plato's extensive thinking about work's relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world's only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe.

This original study of Plato and his inheritors' ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality.

Part One Ancient Greece

Our study begins with the origins of Western philosophy itself, in the cultural milieu of fourth-century bc Athens. In the first section of this chapter, general attitudes about different kinds of work will be examined, with particular attention to the pre-Socratic world of Hesiod and Homer, the two poets rightly called the educators of ancient Greece.

The second section traces Plato’s complex response to different sorts of work and his effort to define the life of philosophical contemplation as a sort of work worthy of its own, indeed paramount, respect. It will be shown that this project was carried forward by Plato at the price of denigrating other forms of work that the Greeks called “banausic,” denoting labor requiring the application of fire by forging or furnace work. The prejudice against banausic labor runs deep in Greek culture, mythically associated as it was with the god Hephaestus, the only member of the divine pantheon who undertook productive labor and with it was cursed by ugliness and deformity (again uniquely among the Olympian divinities). At the same time, we will discover that Plato had a lively interest in crafts though he consistently marked out their limits.

A comprehensive survey of the ancient Greeks’ attitudes to work obviously cannot be provided here. A number of social and historical studies are already available.¹ My aim here is simply to furnish the requisite background for appreciating the philosophical world’s response to the question of work and point up those features of Greek society’s deployment of and writing about work that are necessary to understand what Plato says about work in the context of his culture’s general attitudes and foundational writings. This section is organized around major types of work as the Greeks understood them and will provide the basis upon which later sections will engage with the expressly philosophical writings of Plato as he touches upon questions of work.

1 Work among the Ancient Greeks

As Jean-Pierre Vernant pointed out, “In Greek there is no term that corresponds to ‘work.’ ”¹ Instead there is a complex of terms that orbit around what we would call work in a contemporary vernacular. The term ponos could be applied to any activity involving effort or labor; it applies equally to pedestrian effort as to the choice Hercules makes to embrace a life of effort rather than ease,² though the storied labors of Hercules are obviously mythic in scope and grandeur and thus not the sort of exploit we would ordinarily call “work.” Similarly ergon can refer to farming or commercial activity (though it is etymologically related to the former) and even more broadly to any thing’s characteristic activity. For the Greeks everything has its own telos, and this telos is achieved by ergon, and whenever that ergon is done well, arête—virtue or excellence—is the result. Apart from these categories there is the class of activities belonging to technai, which require specialized knowledge and aim at the production of a thing separate from the practice of the techne itself, and prattein, which produce nothing apart from their own activity.³ Yet another distinction must be drawn between the demiourgoi, who work for the benefit of the community as a whole, and those whose work is undertaken within the oichos, the extended household that formed the bedrock of ancient Greek societies, and for its direct benefit only.⁴

This distinction is also commented upon by Moses Finley, who concentrates his explanation on the Homeric era. Only twice do the Homeric poems use this term, once by Eumaeus, who calls demiourgoi those elites among specialist workers who “supplied essential needs in a way that neither the lords nor the non-specialists among their followers” were able. Finley asserts that this class “floated in mid-air in the social hierarchy.”⁵ Not necessarily on retainer but possibly paid piecemeal, the demiourgoi had the name and status they did, not on the basis of payment but because of their availability to the whole demos or general population.⁶ More secure in their roles are those workers attached to the oichos. Finley reminds his reader,

The authoritarian household, the oikos, was the centre around which life was organized, from which flowed not only the satisfaction of material needs, including security, but ethical norms and values, duties, obligations and responsibilities, social relationships, and relations with the gods. The oikos was not merely the family, it was all the people of the household together with its land and its goods,

hence the term “economics,” which denotes the management of the estate.⁷ The oichos was supported by workers who were attached to the household and traded mobility for an acknowledged place of security and belonging, which the demiourgoi did not have, though the range of their itineracy is unknown.⁸ Worst of all was to be a thes, a hireling who had no permanent position in any oichos and could be contracted and dismissed at will.⁹

These variations do not necessarily suggest that the Greeks had no concept of work at all but that they acknowledged a wide variety of practical efforts that had distinct characteristics.¹⁰ While all cultures, it would seem, share the intuition that work at least can be a burden, we will see in what follows that the blanket assertion that “to the Greeks work was a curse and nothing else” cannot be sustained.¹¹

Farming

Agriculture was the fundamental and most widespread form of work practiced in ancient Greece. Our catalog of different sorts of occupation begins here because farming was widely regarded in ancient Greece as not only the most prevalent and essential form of work but also the one requiring the least amount of technical (in the etymological sense of the word) expertise. Noting the etymological connection between ergon, the already mentioned word we can translate as “work,” and the word for “field,” Vernant expands upon the primordial nature of cultivation of grain according to Hesiod. By contrast to the maintenance of fruit trees, which yield their bounty as part of the rhythm of seasons marked by festivals and feast days that mark the human relationship to the gods,¹² cultivation of grains requires effort overseen by the goddess Demeter, who does not so much distribute her gifts with the profligacy of a fruit tree as regulate equitably the reward of the harvest in proportion to the work invested.¹³ The farmer, correspondingly, “does not feel that he is applying a cultivation technique to the soil or that he is practising a trade.”¹⁴ Again by contrast to the growth of fruit trees, grains are cultivated not under the seasonal calendar of festival exuberance but the steady application of daily tasks.

The most ancient record of how these tasks are to be pursued rightly is that of Hesiod, who in his Works and Days advocates for the value of effort to his benighted brother, Perses. Vernant sees in the agricultural sphere a strong connection to the cultural in general and to the cult in specific. In his interpretation, what ties the theological and the moral to the agricultural is “punctilious ritualism.”¹⁵ It is this attentiveness to duty that makes Hesiod’s farming life one of both work and devotion, where both elements are required for success with men and gods. For this reason, to the Greek mind farming is not a matter of producing any useful or valued commodity but an activity closer to religious behavior.¹⁶

Finley too sees that farming was one area of work that required no special skill, though he does not stress, like Vernant, an overly strong connection to religiosity. “For the basic work of pasturage and tillage in the fields, of stewardship and service in the house, there was no need of specialists: every man in Ithaca could herd and plough, saw and carve, and those commoners who had their own holdings worked them themselves.”¹⁷ The wide-ranging ability to work the fields means in Finley’s account that the contribution of the demiourgoi to the regular running of the oichos was relatively small.¹⁸ The goal of the oichos was no more ambitious than self-sufficiency. David Tandy and Walter Neale notice that Hesiod seems primarily invested in the goal of keeping hunger (which he mentions seven times in Works and Days) and debt at bay, devoting little discussion to the possibility of exporting excess production and whatever profit might be made from it.¹⁹

Farming, as both Xenophon and Hesiod maintain, requires only attentiveness to what nature and the gods that oversee nature teach to the mindful and diligent observer. Xenophon’s Socrates asserts to Critobulus, “because the earth is divine, she teaches justice to those who have the ability to learn from her. She gives the greatest benefits in return to those who cultivate her best.”²⁰ There is in the ancient Greek world a widespread conviction that the act of farming has its own fundamental justice, where effort correlates neatly to benefit. Nature has no secrets when it comes to cultivation but is open to anyone ready to learn her lessons. As Hesiod counsels his brother Perses,

work the works that the gods have assigned to people, lest at some time with your children and wife and with an ache in your spirit you may seek sustenance among your neighbors, and they do not care. For twice, perhaps three times, you will get results. But if you vex them further, you will not achieve a thing; you will make many vain arguments, and your repertoire of words will be of no use. I command you to consider discharge of chrea [debt] and avoidance of hunger.²¹

A number of key points are touched on in this passage. First, Hesiod encourages above all the avoidance of want and debt, which Tandy and Neale explain at length in their introduction.²² They conclude that while a compelling case can be made that the most deleterious consequence of debt in Hesiod’s day was not so much loss of land itself (which was not an alienable property in the economy of the time)²³ but loss of control of the land’s production, it nevertheless seems that Perses has lost control of his lot of land (kleros) altogether. Second, Hesiod regards neighbors, who all struggled for at best relative autarchy and were unable to depend on a centralized authority or dispenser of emergency resources,²⁴ as an insufficient bulwark against hunger and debt. Third and finally, Hesiod does indicate here that the tasks assigned to the would-be farmer and requiring his attention are assigned by the gods. Because of this, farming can yield results in a way that neighbors cannot deliver.

Those results only come by exertion and fidelity to the tasks, but nature’s demands are clear and not a matter of esoteric knowledge. For instance, Hesiod counsels Perses to cut wood when it is “least worm-eaten when cut with the iron: it drops its leaves to the ground and ceases from sprouting. Precisely then, remember to cut wood, the work of that season.”²⁵ So here the clue to the time to hew perhaps is that wood drops its leaves and stops sprouting. Hesiod’s advice along these lines to Perses is sound but in a way not needful (unless you are a “fool,” as Hesiod repeatedly calls his brother).²⁶ There is a kind of equity to farming, according to which effort is reliably rewarded. As Hesiod says, “Turn up [the soil] in the spring; in the summer a once-plowed [fallow] field will not deceive you.”²⁷

Xenophon too argues that nature teaches its ways without special instruction. In Vernant’s words,

Xenophon’s descriptions of the sowing, weeding, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and of the cultivation of fruit trees, are all aimed at showing us not human skills, but “nature” at work in these operations. For instance, where do we get viticulture from if not from the vine itself? By climbing up the trees, the vine itself teaches us to give it a support; by spreading its leafy shoots when the grapes are still young, it teaches us to shade the exposed parts; by shedding its leaves, it teaches us to pick them off so that the fruit can ripen when the sun has become temperate.²⁸

As in Hesiod’s instructions about when to cut wood, it is the natural process itself that provides the hint as to what the farmer should do at every season. Because special skills are not required, Xenophon’s gentleman farmer Ischomachus (whose instruction Socrates recounts in the center of the dialogue) claims that cultivation provides an entirely equitable measure of a man’s worth:

For she [nature] doesn’t make a display in order to deceive, but speaks the truth and reveals clearly what she can do and what she can’t. By providing all that she has in a form that is easy to learn and understand, I think the earth constitutes the best test o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Ancient Greece
• Part Two The Middle Ages
• Part Three The Modern Era
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical Citations
• General Index
• Copyright Page