Homo Artifex
Discussion
(evolution of the medieval christian conceptions of human labor)
Benjamin Suriano:
"Building upon this anthropology, humanity came to be understood fundamentally as an artisan situated between opus Creatoris and opus naturae, thus giving birth to the new concept of “homo artifex” in the twelfth century. In his suggestive Theology of Work, Chenu characterizes homo artifex by a heightened consciousness of material reality within the meaning of the whole, “calculating the significance of matter not only in his body but in the fabric of the universe,” in order to discover the ways in which matter, in all of its physical processes, is necessary to “the truth of human nature.” While the meaning of nature was couched in personified images during this period, this did not lead to a subjugation of humanity to mythical animistic forces. Instead, this “new breed of medieval man,” was stirred by an enlightened consciousness of human productive power in pursuing truth as no longer simply an abstract conceptual unification in thought alone, but truth as a more comprehensive reconciliation of material contradictions in the totality of social and natural relations.
Because this new appreciation for the standpoint of labor recognized its constitutive value within a salvific economy that sought reconciliation precisely through new material productions of the good, beautiful and true, it is difficult to explain this valorization according to a proto-bourgeoisie attempt at dominating nature for an abstract will and its purely secular commercial interests around generating exchange values. As Chenu comments, for homo artifex, labor precisely as productive activity was revalued according to its transformative capacity to raise matter “into an economy which, at its final term of development in the ‘new heavens and new earth’ promised after the last judgment, would confer divinity upon the natural universe, this time for good.”136 Here the ideal or final cause of historically raising matter into a new economy is not in order to convert the materials of nature into abstracted values, as if to dissolve all things of their concreteness; rather the final cause is that of a new whole in which divinity is redistributed to and conferred upon the natural material movement of making whole. History was then increasingly conceived as the progressive perfection of nature in its creative capacities, as embodied in human labor—a productive act whose ideal approximation was to its own perfection as art rather than simply as procurement of bare subsistence or disposability to mechanical efficiency according to the external ends of acquiring abstract wealth. The notion of time, moreover, far from an indifferent quantitative mechanism of measurement, was conceived as qualitatively internal to this perfective activity, as “effectively the field and measure of its transformations, its efficacy, its purposes.”
Homo artifex was not only characterized by a raised consciousness of the productive power of labor to transform and perfect nature, but, moreover, of this transformative activity as essential to the constitution of the subject. As Jean Lacroix comments of this period of homo artifex: “To work is to make oneself while producing an achievement, to perfect oneself while perfecting the world. Consequently the aim of work is dual, said scholastic philosophers: perfectio operis and perfectio operantis, perfection of the work and perfection of the worker." Thus within this trajectory we even find Aquinas, that faithful Aristotelian scholastic, later admitting productive activity within the meaning of being. Commenting on Aristotle’s claim in Book 9 of the Ethics that craftsmen love their own productions because they love their own existence, Aquinas elaborates that “to exist is to live and consequently to operate … the producer actually producing is in some way the work produced.”139 As Kelvin Knight rightly points out, productive activity is presented here in Aquinas as essential to actualizing the subject’s participation in esse, of bringing forth the subject into being.140 Labor then is not an extraneously mechanical and local motion commanded by and for the purification of a detached inner spirit. Rather than identified with mortal or mortifying processes, labor is measured in metaphysical terms as a perfective act in itself, bringing into being and raising to life what was only in potential. This implies that participation in the transcendental perfection of pure act cannot be the exclusive domain of an abstracted intellectual activity leaving behind its laboring body for the contemplation of a pure stasis; rather, participation is better comprehended through the creative act of selfmediating production."