THE METAPHYSICS OF PROFESSIONAL LIFE
- THE PROFESSIONS ON OLYMPUS
DR ROGER SWORDER *
From the titles of the papers to be delivered at this conference, it is clear that they are mostly concerned with ethics and jurisprudence. Many deal with how to be ethical or how to be just in certain difficult, in some cases quite novel, dilemmas. But we who come from Australia know that even the satisfactory resolution of all these dilemmas could never be the end of the matter. In Australia we have been taught for the best part of a century that all the ethics and jurisprudence in the world are quite useless unless there is a satisfactory resolution to this one dilemma first: why be ethical or just anyway?
With this almost indecent question Professor Anderson of Sydney University made a long habit of dropping moralists in their tracks from the 1920s through to the 1960s. Quite rightly, Anderson saw his question 'Why be ethical?' as a defining question of philosophy as a discipline. He adduced Socrates as another like himself who saw his professional life as the asking of such impossible questions of everyone at all times. Like Socrates, Anderson insisted on an answer, and when it was not forthcoming or was demonstrably inadequate, he took this as proof that the moral claims of his target had no basis whatsoever. Like Socrates, this made Anderson a deeply unpopular man in many circles.
But neither Anderson nor Socrates ever exerted quite the pressure on their victims which Plato describes in the Republic. Here Socrates himself is put under interrogation by two of his students, Adeimantus and Glaucon. Socrates himself is forced to answer the question 'why be just?'. His interrogators make quite clear what they want from him: proof that being just, in itself, is more in ones interests than being unjust. And then they add the dreadful rider: 'under any circumstances'. Let the unjust man in our comparison, they tell Socrates, be a master criminal, never caught and universally respected as a model citizen. Let the just man be universally reviled as a moral monster, though completely innocent. Let him be whipped and racked, let his eyes be burnt out with branding irons and let him finally be crucified to death. Prove to us that this just man, simply because he is just, is nonetheless better off than our universally honoured criminal.
Today, Ladies and Gentlemen. I will give you the proof which Adeimantus and Glaucon demanded of Socrates that day in the Peiraeus. I undertake to meet this greatest philosophical challenge and to meet it triumphantly. I will not meet it in quite the ways which Socrates did, either in the Republic or in his life. I will not be proving to you that the just man is exactly 729 times better off than the unjust man, as Socrates proves to the satisfaction of Adeimantus and Glaucon by the end of the Republic. Nor will I be offering that greatest proof of all which Socrates offered by cheerfully allowing himself to be executed for the sake of his vocation. My proof will be rather more poetic than Socrates in the Republic, but it will meet the challenge posed by Adeimantus and Glaucon squarely, in all its horror.
The title of this whole conference is concerned with professional responsibilities, so I will consider the question 'why be ethical?' in the context of the professions. In doing this I will in any case be following Socrates' procedure in the Republic and Aristotle's at the beginning of his Ethics. There Aristotle begins by distinguishing between a flute player and a good flute player. More authoritatively still, I will be following Homer who is the supremely wise teacher in the Greek tradition. Homer has much to say about professions and crafts of every kind, but his great contribution to the topic is his presentation of the professions and crafts as divine. For Homer, what we now think of as the forms of human work are what the Gods do on Olympus. By this simple transfer, Homer establishes the fundamental character of these forms of work: they are the activities of the spirit in eternity. Now, of course, we rush to say here that Homer's Gods behaved this way because they are simply human projections of human traits. But Homer saw it the other way round.
Homer's peculiar view of divine and human work has an upside and a downside. The upside is that if we believe it, then we discover that we are, in our workaday worlds, already very much closer to heaven than we had realised. When we work we are cooperating in the various forms taken by the divine energy in all eternity. This raises our human experiences at work far above the sense of the human we derive from Christian teaching, say. The downside is that this view demeans the divine in our eyes. For it is part of the definition of the divine that it be utterly self-sufficient. But the function of the crafts and professions is to supply what we lack. If then the Gods on Olympus need doctors and weavers and metallurgists, they are obviously inferior in this respect to the Judaeo Christian God who has no such needs.
Homer's Gods have a house doctor on Olympus. His name is Paieon. He cures Hades the God of the dead, when Hades comes to Olympus in agony, with an arrow in his shoulder from Hercules. Paieon treats him with anaesthetic herbs on the wound. Paieon does the same for Ares, God of War, when Diomedes wounds him in the lower abdomen with a spear. Ares bellowed as loud as ten thousand warriors with the shock and pain, but Paieon heals him quickly because Ares is after all a God. He heals him as quickly as it takes fig juice to curdle white milk, a striking image of how firm flesh is made from wet wounds. In fact the Gods hardly seem to need Paieon for they are generally expert enough at healing each other. But they certainly need Hephaestus to build their palaces for them, Apollo and the Muses to make their music.
Is there Law on Olympus? Certainly not in any written form. As for an oral law, it appears that force alone determines how power is shared among the Gods. When Aphrodite commits adultery with Ares in her husband Hephaestus' bed, Hephaestus traps them both under a golden net. He then calls the other Gods to witness the trapped lovers and refuses to release them from their public humiliation. He demands compensation for his wooing gifts for Aphrodite, not only from Ares, whom he fears will welsh on any agreement once he is freed, but from Poseidon himself. To spare Aphrodite and Ares any further shame, Poseidon promises to pay whatever is right if Ares defaults. So there is clearly a sense of what is right among the Gods, but Hephaestus knows that he can only ensure just treatment for himself for as long as he keeps the lovers in his net. If he is to let them go, he must have a publicly spoken promise from Poseidon to pay the compensation if necessary.
In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Demeter caused a dreadful famine which nearly destroyed humankind. She was furious at Hades' abduction of her daughter. Zeus is in a dilemma. He himself has permitted Hades to take the girl and he cannot go back on his word. But he must either break that word or lose the human race. He arbitrates cunningly by giving the girl back to her mother for two-thirds of the year and to Hades for one-third. Her sojourn with Hades is winter, her return to her mother is spring. The compromise which he adjudicates is the cause of the seasons.
Zeus cannot go back on his word. In Homer's poetry it appears that this one limitation constrains him. But Zeus is also said to be bound by fate which he may bend a little but which he cannot override. The question is whether this fate is anything more than his own previously ratified decisions. If fate is no more than what Zeus himself has already decided, then clearly there is, in a sense, a body of Law on Olympus and the other Gods seem to know of this Law and they argue with Zeus and each other as to exactly what it entails. We might go further and suggest that Homer's verses as we have them are the written version of this Law as it applied to a particular place and time long before Homer composed his verses.
So the Gods practise medicine and argue law, in this limited sense, among themselves. Athene weaves, Hephaestus builds and works at his forge, the Muses compose verses, the Graces dance. As for the hard sciences, we need only remember the problem posed by Apollo through his oracle at Delphi, when he demanded that the Greeks exactly double the size of his cubic altar on Delos. There is no way of doubling the size of a cube by means of ratios, which is how the Greeks practised mathematics. Even wheat farming which was not needed by the Gods who do not eat, the Gods nonetheless sponsored in the figure of Demeter, Ceres. She it was who first taught the people of Eleusis to till the earth. Why did the Greek think that the Gods too practised the crafts and professions?
To answers this question most easily, we may turn from Homer's account of his Gods to Socrates' account of the crafts, as presented by Plato. From the crafts we can work up to the professions. Plato argued that just as a painter looks at the object which he is painting in order to capture its appearance in his work, so the craftsman constantly refers to the idea of the thing which he is making in order to make it. The carpenter must have in his mind's eye the idea of the bed or table which he is working on. Likewise the smith contemplates as he works the idea of the axe or cauldron which is being made. Of course he might just copy some other smith's axe or cauldron but in that case he is not fully a smith. It is precisely this capacity to entertain the idea of the thing to be made which confers upon him his expertise. This idea is not, according to Plato, different for each thing which the smith makes. All axes are copies of the one idea of the axe, and all cauldrons of the one idea of the cauldron. The one idea of each artifact inspires many different versions of itself just as the one landscape can inspire many different pictures.
For Plato the idea of the axe is not something we learn from the axes we come across. It is not a concept derived from our physical experience. On the contrary, it is by looking at the invisible idea of the axe that smiths bring the axes we know into existence. In this way the idea of the axe comes first and the axes in the world come from it. Where then does the idea of the axe come from? According to Plato the idea of the axe is not in this world at all. It belongs to another order of reality, a world of invisible ideas which do not change like the things in this world but which are the originals of all the things we know here. This world of ideas includes not only the originals of all the artifacts in this world but the originals of all the natural kinds and species as well.
Imperceptible except to the eye of the mind, these ideas of natural things and artifacts do not exist in the world of time and space. But they are, according to Plato, the real causes of everything in time and space. He compares them to objects carried between a fire and the back wall of a cave; the shadows that these objects cast upon the wall are images of the objects just as the things in this world are images of the ideas. Like the objects which cast the shadows, the ideas are really much more substantial than things in the world, though to the untrained and underdeveloped mind they appear somewhat vague at first and difficult to grasp. In the same way what the visionary artist conceives in his imagination is much stronger than any version he can make of it. Often he must create many such versions in order to capture even a part of its magnificence.
In traditional societies these ideas of the artifacts and the ideas of nature are regarded as belonging to exactly the same order of reality. The idea of the axe is as much part of the 'natural' order as the idea of the oak. In these societies there is no sense that the world of human artifacts stands outside or threatens the natural world. Similarly those arts and crafts that foster or develop natural resources are regarded as contemplative in exactly the same way as the crafts which produce distinctively human artifacts. Just as the smith must fix his mind's eye on the idea of the axe or cauldron, so the shepherd or sheep breeder must contemplate the idea of the sheep if he is to preserve and improve the creatures in his care. In the same way the eye doctor must contemplate the idea of the eye and the obstetrician that of the womb. The miner must know the idea of the metal he seeks if he is to find and free it from the earth, no less than the metalworker must know the idea of whatever it is he will make from that metal.
This concentration upon the invisible idea is the contemplative and superior part of any work, while the embodying or realising of the idea in the physical world is the active and inferior. It follows from this that the proper beginning to any work is contemplation of the idea which the work is to realise, a contemplation which should then be carried into the actual labour. In many cultures this preliminary contemplation is ritualised, as in the fasting of the icon painter or the meditation upon 'the dreamtime' of the Aboriginal bark painter. The making of something, the bringing of something into the world, is the bringing of what is invisible into the realm of the visible. It is a bridging of the two worlds, a uniting of the ideal and the temporal, in which the maker acts as a channel between the world of the spirit and this world.
This contemplation of the idea is called in some cultures the free act of contemplation. It is contrasted with what is called the servile act of manufacture. The mere physical labour of doing what has to be done to realise the idea in the world stands to the contemplation of the idea as the slave to the free. It is, comparatively, a constraint upon the spirit of the worker to have to use voice or hands, while in contemplation the spirit is free of the limitations of time and space as it is absorbed into what is beyond them. It is also for this reason, perhaps, that Hephaestus is both divine and lame, powerful in the spirit but at the same time limited in body. Another way of making the same point is to say that the art is far stronger in the artist than in his works, since the idea which the artist contemplates in the spirit is far greater than any embodiment of it. In this way the practice of traditional work was regarded as a means of building up the spiritual powers of the worker by demanding an ever greater capacity for the contemplation of the invisible. The traditional crafts were at least as much concerned with the spiritual development of those who practised them as with the material products of their work. The first reason Plato gives for the division of labour in his Republic is that it develops the natural propensities of his citizens, each of whom has a talent for a particular kind of work. The second reason he gives is that it is a more efficient way of producing better goods if labour is divided.
I have said that in the mode of contemplation the doctor is like the shepherd, who looks to the idea of something in nature in order to tend it. For the specialist doctor the idea contemplated is not the idea of a species, such as a sheep, but the idea of an organ of our species, the eye or the womb. But doctors in general must contemplate the idea of the human in order to practise their profession. This is a most noble object of contemplation. No less noble is the object of the lawyers' inner gaze. That gaze is fixed on the constitution of the state, not this constitution or that one but the very idea of the human polity itself. This is the object of Socrates' own gaze in the Republic, the ideal state, and it is worth asking just how far Plato's philosophical kingdom echoes the Homeric order on Olympus. So far as it does, the lawyer's gaze reaches beyond all human constitutions, beyond even the ideal human kingdom, to realise how our earthly legislatures may reflect the ultimate laws of heaven.
Contemplating the idea of what is to be done or made was for the Greeks a superhuman act and every proper form of work required it of the human worker. So we have an answer to our question: why did the Greeks think that the Gods practised the crafts and professions? They thought so because they thought that the crafts and professions had this superhuman component of contemplation or meditation on an eternal idea. This is a way of thinking about God which we have lost almost entirely. The theological argument from design for the existence of God was a last remnant of the insight, to be destroyed by Darwin and Dawkins. And we have lost, too, the ancient sense of how these same superhuman activities shape us.
According to Plato everyone born into this world has an innate predisposition for a particular kind of work. Only by the finding and doing of this work can a person become who he or she truly is. This predisposition is the single determining factor of the human personality, in comparison to which all other traits of character, accidents of birth, environmental conditionings are negligible. Each of us is born to carry out a particular task and only when that task is completed have we done what we came for. In some people this predisposition is very clear, as in the case of child prodigies who evince at an early age a degree of competence in a particular art or science which is inexplicable in the light of their actual experience. According to the Hindus this is one of the strongest reasons for a belief in some form of metempsychosis or transmigration of souls from one body to another. So natural and unforced is the facility which a predisposition confers that the person so gifted is hardly aware of it. It is only with difficulty that a child who can draw can be made to understand that others cannot. There is some evidence to suggest that these predispositions run in families, but both Plato and the Indian philosophers are careful to point out that there is no guarantee of this, and that in a well organised society people are free to pursue other vocations than those of their parents. Nonetheless there is an expectation in traditional societies that children will follow their parents in this regard, and this expectation, taken together with the central importance of these predispositions to the personality, explains why families are often named after vocations. In north western Europe the names of Bergman and Smith are particularly common and derive from the professions of mining and metallurgy. Sworder is another such name but much less common.
To a society like ours which has largely done away with the traditional arts and crafts, it may appear that they are the products of convention rather than of nature, and that they can be dispensed with when cheaper and more efficient means of production are discovered. The assumption is debatable. One of the most remarkable developments of the two centuries since the industrial revolution is the hobby. After working in the factory or the office people return home to practise in their periods of leisure what previously they would have done as work. This is the significance of gardening in a society which has mostly dispensed with agricultural labour, and of the millions of workshops in the backyards of suburban houses. Nothing could show more clearly than this that the old predispositions continue to exercise their sway over the personality, and they do so regardless of the fact that the work for which they fit us is no longer paid, nor otherwise rewarded than by the intrinsic satisfaction which it provides. When Plato starts to talk about work in the Republic this is the very first point he makes. He asks whether people would be better off if each did or made everything, or whether each should do or make one kind of thing only and then share the fruits of this labour with everyone else. In deciding that it is better to divide labour than have each person do everything, Plato argues that each person is naturally fitted for one kind of work only and is better served by doing just that. For Plato the prime reason for dividing labour is not that it is more efficient, but that it conforms to our innate predispositions. Acting in accordance with one's innate predisposition is the basis of Plato's theory of justice.
In the Indian philosophy this same theory or law of justice is called the Dharma and it is one of the major themes in the best known of all Indian scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita. As the Indians understand it, we are impelled into action by the mere fact of our bodies. We cannot do other than act, given our equipment of arms and legs. Actions are constantly flowing from us, and what is required if we are to be happy is a way of organising and directing this ceaseless flow of actions to some worthy end. This will finally enable us to free ourselves from the otherwise unending chain of causes and effects by which our actions bind us. This release is achieved by the selfless performance of our proper work, without any regard for the fruits of it, until we become capable at last of a kind of desireless, actionless action which is liberation. This way of thinking has something in common with the story of the fall from the garden of Eden. Before the fall Adam tended the garden, cooperating in the work of God. But after eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the garden and forced to provide for himself by the sweat of his brow. This concern with good and evil is precisely what transforms the selfless work of the one who is liberated into the anxious toil of the fallen. As the Bhagavad Gita puts it:
Without hope, with the mind and self controlled, having abandoned
all possessions, doing mere bodily action, he incurs no sin.
Content with what comes to him without effort, free from the pairs
of opposites and envy, even minded in success and failure, though acting he is not bound.
This is how the Bhagavad Gita describes the man liberated through work. This selflessness in action is characteristic of the work ethic in traditional societies. The work is done anonymously and workers do not seek to arrogate to themselves the credit for having done it. This is why much of the greatest work done in the middle ages, or in the archaic period of ancient Greece, is unsigned and unattributed. The practice of claiming work as one's own is an index of the extent to which the traditional work ethic is in decline, and on this score both the classical period of Greek art and the Renaissance are in the process of falling away from the selfless ideal of the periods which immediately preceded them. In the ancient world this falling away was merely a matter of degree, since in the Greek and Roman traditions credit for the work had always finally to be given to the patron god or goddess. It was always believed that a divine power was responsible for the miracle of skilful action or creation.
These ways of thinking about work made it clear that workers were not to use their work to aggrandise themselves, at whatever level in the society they might be. Nor was work, even of the most artistic kind, a medium of self expression, in which the personality of the artist as an individual was exposed. The personalities of artists were of no more interest to those who made use of their work than the personalities of their tailors or cobblers. At best they had nothing at all to do with the work. In such a society each kind of work was done by people who sought, through the doing, to escape the limitations of the egoic self. Instead of thinking of themselves as individuals who were as far as possible separate and independent of each other, they thought of themselves as belonging to parts of a single organism. These parts were the classes and professions, each of which was different from the others, but necessary to the survival and success of the whole. Just as the same food produces and maintains the different organs of the human body, all of which are necessary to its fulfilment, so in the one society all those innate predispositions were to be found which were needed to complete it. Acting in accordance with one's innate predisposition was justice, that was at once the source of the deepest satisfaction to oneself and the means of maintaining the society.
In many different ways the social order was continuous with the natural order. The innate predispositions that equipped people for particular kinds of work were in nature in much the same way that we now consider, say, the home building instincts of animals to be. The idea of whatever was to be done or made stood in the divine mind in exactly the same way as did the ideas of the natural species or those of the elements. The contemplation of the idea was the superior part of the different kinds of work, while the material realisation of the idea in the world of time and space was regarded as derivative and secondary. Since every such idea came from God, it could hardly be regarded as the creation of an individual professional or artist, and therefore the notion of originality counted for very little. This is not to say that research, experiment and innovation were suppressed. Plato was emphatic that enquiry is essential to the proper development and maintenance of any art or science. Instead there was a tendency to attribute the latest finding to some earlier, often legendary exponent of the art, as a token of veneration and as a way of ensuring the continuity of the tradition. In some places the same way of doing or making things persisted for many centuries, as was the case, for example, with Gregorian chant. But it would be wrong to suppose that the artists at the end of one of these periods were less capable than those at its beginning. For traditional workers, originality consisted in the recreation within themselves of that understanding which the centuries had inherited from the founder of their art, who had received it from God.
Another respect in which human work was continuous with the natural order was in the relation between the worker and the material on which the work was done. Of almost all kinds of work there was an assumption that between the worker and the material a bond existed, a deep affinity. The carpenter had a feel for the wood, the scholar for his subject, the gardener had green fingers, the doctor had an intuitive sense of the human body. This affinity, which underlay the activity of most working lives, established a connection between the deepest element in the personality of the worker and the universe beyond, between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This was no abstract speculation but an immediate recognition that by working through the creations of the outer world of nature, a vocation could be answered and a life fulfilled. This connection between the innermost and the outermost dimensions of experience has much more to do with human happiness than is now realised. It is the only means to the thorough integration of the human being in life, and the loss of it produces an alienation far more pervasive and acute than that described by Marx. Between the idea which is known through contemplation, and the material through which that idea is realised in the world of time and space, there may be a union which is the marriage of heaven and earth.
To cap Plato's theory of work we need add just one more proposition, a proposition which does not quite follow from what has already been said, though it is entirely consistent with it. That proposition is: each of us is really the God who sponsors the work to which you or I are predisposed. The scientist is an incarnation of Apollo, the doctor of Paieon, the lawyer of Zeus, the soldier of Ares, the general of Athene, the smith of Hephaestus. This is who each of us really is. Like us the Greeks struggled philosophically to explain the nature of the human mind. But they did not see this as a question of how the mind related to the brain, to the physical. They saw the problem of the human mind as its relation to the absolute. They took for granted the reality of absolute intelligence, absolute wisdom, and then asked themselves how the human mind devolved from that. When Plato described his pantheon of Gods he explained how each of us belongs to the retinue of one or another God, and our problem is simply how to keep up on our feeble wings with the divine chariot we follow. The food by which those spiritual wings are nourished is just such speculation as we are engaged in here.
Now at last we may answer the challenge to Socrates made by Adeimantus and Glaucon: why be ethical even unto a terrible death? When the senior law officers of a Nazi occupied country suffered ignominy, torture and death rather than walk away or deliver evil law; when a nurse works to help the victims of a plague against which there is no protection; when a priest or preacher endures prison and execution rather than abuse or forsake the faith; when soldiers die for their country from agonising wounds: this is nothing extraordinary. It is what they have been striving to achieve all their working lives. Properly to follow a profession is precisely this making over the egoic self and the physical life to the ideals of the work, the gaining of selflessness through dedication. What, then if the occasion demands the actual sacrifice? In some professions, exactly how this ultimate sacrifice is realised in eternity has been made very clear. The martyred teacher joins the communion of saints, the fallen Greek warrior is worshipped like a God in the rituals of the hero. It is not the dying which we need fear, however horrible. What we must fear is that we fail the ideal of our profession in that crisis, and choose what we are not at the price of who we are.
* La Trobe University, Victoria, Head of the Department of Arts, Bendigo Campus
Copyright 2004. Greek Legal and Medical Conference