The Arcades Project - Operi

m
[Idleness]
Noteworthy conjunction: in ancient Greece, practical labor is branded and proscribed.
Although essentially left in the hands of slaves, it is condemned not least
because it betrays a base aspiration for earthly goods (riches). This view afterward
plays a part in the denigration of the tradesman as the servant ofMannnon:
"Plato, in the Laws (VIII, 846), decrees that no citizen shall engage in a mechanical
trade; the word banausoJ) signifying 'artisan; becomes synonymous with 'contemptible'
... ; everything relating to tradespeople or to handwork carries a
stigma, and deforms the soul together with the body. In general, those who
practice these professions . .. are busy satisfying . .. this 'passion for wealth . ..
which leaves none of us an hour's leisure:' Aristotle, for his part, opposes the
excess of the chrematistic to ... the prudence of domestic economy . ... In this
way, the scorn felt for the artisan is extended to the merchant: in comparison to
the liberal life, as absorbed in studious leisure (schole, olium), the affairs of trade
(neg-ot£um, ascholia}) 'business affairs; have mostly a negative value." Pierre­
Maxime Schulll, Machinisme el philosophie (Paris, 1938), pp. 11-12. [m1,1]
Whoever enjoys leisure escapes Fortuna; whoever embraces idleness falls under
her power. The Fortuna awaiting a person in idleness, however, is a lesser goddess
than the one that the person of leisure has fled. TI,is Fortuna is no longer at
home in the vila activa; her headquarters is the world at large.' "The artists of the
Middle Ages depict those men who pursue an active life as bound to the wheel of
fortune, ascending or descending according to the direction in which it turns,
while the contemplative man remains inunobile at the center." P.-M. Schuhl,
Machinisme et philosophie (paris, 1938), p. 30. [m1,2]
He the characterization of leisure. Sainte-Beuve, in his essay on Joubert: '''To
converse and to seek to know-it was in this above all that, according to Plato, the
happiness of private life consisted.' This class of connoisseurs and amateurS ...
has praetically disappeared in France now that everyone here has a trade." Cor­
,.espondance de Joubert (Paris, 1924), p. xcix. [ml,3J
In bourgeois society, indolence-to take up Marx's word-has ceased to be
"heroic." (Marx speaks of the "victory . .. of industry over a heroic indolence."