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Two Philosophers Found Purpose in the World of Work
For Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, deep thought and physical labor belonged together
By Robert Zaretsky and George Alliger
In 1943, two of the century’s most original thinkers—Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil—found themselves in bomb-battered London, looking for medical work to help the war effort. Though they never met, they were remarkably similar. Both were foreigners by birth, and both struck others as foreigners by their behavior.
Crucially, both were also foreigners to the traditional way of doing philosophy, their profession of choice. The Austrian-born Wittgenstein and French-born Weil insisted that philosophy must be lived—or, as academics have it, “embodied”—and they shunned the academy to live and work in the real world. While many of us take a break from work on Labor Day, we might spare a moment to consider these abstract thinkers who gave nearly as much of themselves to labor as to contemplation.
For Wittgenstein, the draw of the physical world came first. He had intended to become a mechanical engineer. As a graduate student in aeronautics at Manchester, he built an engine that aided in the development of helicopters, and during a brief stint as an architect, he helped to design for his sister, down to its doorknobs, a house whose severe lines made Bauhaus look positively Baroque.
Upon discovering Bertrand Russell’s writings, however, Wittgenstein turned to philosophy. The book that served as his doctoral thesis at Cambridge, “The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” has both intimidated and inspired generations of philosophers (as well as artists and musicians). Written while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, it offers a series of terse propositions on the nature of the world and limits of language. These propositions, he announced confidently, were like rungs: Upon scaling them, the reader could “throw away the ladder.”
The metaphors for building in Wittgenstein’s work aren’t accidental. He brought a hammer to philosophy, not just to destroy assumptions but also to build an understanding of how we function in the world. That world was one that people made and came to understand through their work. And for Wittgenstein, work wasn’t only sitting in a cabin pondering big questions but also, as he did himself, collaborating with the laborers who constructed that cabin.
Having given away the great wealth he inherited from his father, Wittgenstein helped build crates to finance a vacation. Twice he labored as a gardener at monasteries, in one case living in the gardening shed, and he took great pride in repairing a colleague’s toilet. His workmanship was always meticulous, exemplified by his stint as a lab technician during the war, when he perfected a medicinal cream of extraordinarily high quality.
Wittgenstein’s posthumously published “Philosophical Investigations” includes notable examples culled from his experiences in the world of manual labor. The book presents a series of “language games” meant to jar the reader’s reflexive assumptions about language. In one, he presents builder A, who obtains desired actions from assistant B via single words. For example, in response to the command “Slab!” from A, B retrieves a slab from a pile of slabs.
It seems that “Slab!” is just shorthand for “Bring me a slab!” But why, asks Wittgenstein, “shouldn’t I conversely have called the sentence ‘Bring me a slab!’ a lengthening of the sentence ‘Slab!’?”
Wittgenstein called these exercises “games,” but they are more meaningful than playful. They reveal that words make sense only when we discover the ends they serve. At that moment, Wittgenstein assures us, our “philosophic puzzlement” evaporates.
Wittgenstein wanted to uphold against philosophers, writes his biographer Ray Monk, our “ordinary perception of the world.” In that sense his philosophical mind remained yoked to the world in which he and others labored, harnessing tools and materials, whether concrete or abstract, to constructive purpose.
Like Wittgenstein, Simone Weil thought long and hard about work. When not teaching philosophy to her lycée students during the week, she was teaching economics and literature during the weekends to miners and factory workers.
Simultaneously a worker activist and a true conservative, she claimed that workers, blue-collar no less than white-collar, must acquire the “heritage of human culture.” But culture is a two-way street. “The great human error,” Weil announced, “is to reason in place of finding out.”
Weil held an exacting view of the philosopher’s mandate. It is, she declared, “exclusively an affair of action and practice.” Moreover, while philosophy was a matter of action, it was action always attached to truth. And truth, Weil insisted, must “always be a truth about something”—something lived, something experienced.
When not teaching workers, Weil sought to be taught by them. In exchange for math lessons with a fisherman, she worked on his trawler. During a storm one evening, she refused his request to tie herself down for safety, insisting, “I’ve always done my duty.”
She also sought to do her duty on a farm, shoveling manure, digging for beets and piling hay. Between chores, she quizzed the family about their lives—so relentlessly that she soon discovered her help was no longer needed. Duty further drove Weil to descend a mine. Though myopic and maladroit, she insisted on using a miner’s pneumatic drill. The miner took it away when the drill began to pull Weil along the coal face.
Finally, she quit teaching for a year to work in factories around Paris. Inside the walls of these dim and deafening hangars, yoked to machines where she was condemned to repeat the same motions countless times, Weil discovered le malheur, or affliction. Both physical and psychological, this state reduces a human being to a machine-like existence by relentless and repetitive physical labor. Such work, Weil realized, made it nearly impossible to think. In fact, to bring an end to suffering, the worker had little choice but to bring an end to thinking—for her, the ultimate tragedy.
Neither Wittgenstein nor Weil concluded that a worker’s revolt would solve these problems. Weil warned that “revolution” is a word “for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content.” But both philosophers insisted on the importance of thought in imbuing human activity with purpose.
Weil told her students, “If you stop yourself from thinking of all this, you become an accomplice of what is happening.” For his part, Wittgenstein never dismissed phrases like “the meaning of life.” It is, he insisted, “a document of a tendency in the human mind which I cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” He would have agreed with Weil’s belief that not only “should man know what he is making, but, if possible, he should see how it is used—see how nature is changed by him. Every man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him.”
For both these thinkers, it is a duty to use our minds and hands together, so that our own powers mesh with the resisting gears of the world. Work conspires to reconnect us to that world and ourselves. Perhaps this, too, should be an object of contemplation come Labor Day.
– Mr. Zaretsky is a professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston and the author of “Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague” (University of Chicago Press). Mr. Alliger is a consulting work psychologist, a lecturer at Rice University and the author of “Anti-Work: Psychological Consideration of Its Problems, Truths, and Solutions” (Routledge).
