Text A
Work , Labor and Play
So far as I know, Miss Hannah Arendt was the first person to define the essential difference between work and labor.To be happy, a man must feel,firstly, free and, secondly, important.He cannot be really happy if he is compelled by society to do what he does not enjoy doing, or if what he enjoys doing is ignored by society as of no value or importance.In a society where slavery in the strict sense has been abolished, the sign that what a man does is of social value is that he is paid money to do it, but a laborer today can rightly be called a wage slave.A man is a laborer if the job society offers him is of no interest to himself but he is compelled to take it by the necessity of earning a living and supporting his family .
The antithesis to labor is play.When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it , but it is a purely private activity;society could not care less whether we play it or not .
Between labor and play stands work .
A man is a worker if he ispersonally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play .
Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends,not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it.The difference does not , for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer .
Which a man is can be seen from his attitude toward leisure .
To a worker, leisure means simply the hours he needs to relax and rest in order to work efficiently.He is therefore more likely to take too little leisure than too much ; workers die of coronaries and forget their wives birthdays.To the laborer, on the other hand, leisure means freedom from compulsion, so that it is natural for him to imagine that the fewer hours he has to spend laboring, and the more hours he is free to play, the better .
What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers ?At a guess I would say sixteen per cent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future .
Technology and the division of labor have done two things: by eliminating in many fields the need for special strength or skill, they have made a very large number of paid occupations which formerly were enjoyable work into boring labor, and by increasing productivity they have reduced the number of necessary laboring hours .It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy.When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.Indeed,the problem of dealing with boredom may be even more difficult for such a future mass society than it was for aristocracies.The latter, for example,ritualized their time; there was a season to shoot grouse, a season to spend in town, etc.The masses are more likely to replace an unchanging ritual by fashion which it will be in the economic interest of certain people to change as often as possible .
Again, the masses cannot go in for hunting, for very soon there would be no animals left to hunt .
For other aristocratic amusements like gambling, dueling, and warfare, it may be only too easy to find equivalents in dangerous driving, drug-taking, and senseless acts of violence.Workers seldom commit acts of violence, because they can put their aggression into their work,be it physical like the work of a smith , or mental like the work of a scientist or an artist.The role of aggression in mental work is aptly expressed by the phrase“getting one s teeth into a problem”.
Ⅰ.About the Author (optional)
A political theorist with a flair for grand historical generalization, Hannah Arendt exhibited the conceptual brio of a cultivated intellectual, the conscientious learning of a German-trained scholar , and the undaunted spirit of an exile who had confronted some of the worst horrors of European tyranny.Her life was enriched by innovative thought and ennobled by friendship and love.Although her books addressed a general audience from the standpoint of disinterested universalism , Jewishness was an irrepressible feature of her experience as well as a condition that she never sought to repudiate .
Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, in Wilhelmine Germany.Raised in Konigsberg, she was the only child of Paul and Martha (Cohn ) Arendt , both of whom had grown up in Russian-Jewish homes headed by entrepreneurs.Arendt s childhood was punctuated with grief and terror.Her father, an engineer, died of paresis ( syphilitic insanity ) when Hannah was seven , and episodic battles between Russian and German armies were fought near their home soon thereafter.Her mother married Martin Beerwald in 1920,providing Hannah with two older stepsisters, Eva and Clara Beerwald .
After graduating from high school in Koenigsberg in 1924, Arendt began to study theology that fall with Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg .
Also on the faculty was the young philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose lectures, which would form the basis of Sein und Zeit [Being and time] (1927) ,were already inspiring allegiance to and interest in the emerging Existenzphilosophie.Her brief but passionate affair with Heidegger, a married man and a father, began in 1925 but ended when she went on to study at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers.A psychiatrist who had converted to philosophy, he became her mentor .
No book was more resonant or impressive in tracing the steps toward the distinctive twentieth-century tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, or in measuring how grievously wounded Western civilization and the human status itself had become .
