Work Versus Labor
continued from page 15
“Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears.”25 This division, created first through a separation of man from his natural surroundings, is, as we said, both natural and unnatural.
This separation is natural insofar as man finds placed before him “nature,” the “sensuous external world” which would include Nature, but also so much more. It is the “material in which his labour is realized, in which it is active, out of which and through which it produces things.”26 It is the medium and means of existence. Yet, it is also a medium of shape and color and sound that requires men to conceptualize things from the morass, to provide a framework of words and names that signify and identify difference. This requires mental labor acting upon a physical foundation, causing man to feel and act, if you will, both mentally and physically. And it only grows as men move from simply seeing shape and color and sound and hearing things to identifying and differentiating things such as apples or trees, or red balls, or cars, or pots or music.
This is because man uses his mental capabilities to lay meaning upon the world. He gives over himself and his conceptual and cognitive abilities to the sensuous external world; but he also takes that “sensuous external world” into himself, as it now becomes a world of meaning for him. “Thus, the more the worker appropriates the world of sensuous nature by his labour the more he deprives himself of the means of existence.”27
The simple and natural relationship man had as a thing amongst things, existing symbiotically with the means of existence (shape and color and sound), has now been changed through a conscious division created unconsciously into an unnatural relationship, where man exists here in this realm applying his cognitive capacities to a world out there in that realm. We experience man not working with nature, in body and mind as one, but alienated from nature through the very process, now termed labor, which has occurred because man regards his thinking as distinct from his acting. Just as he posited distinction amidst the morass, so, too, he now finds the first inclination towards developing a personal identity: differentiating things, he has differentiated himself. He is now an object, with a conceptual framework and name. He exists, but he exists differentiated and alienated from the sensuous external world of nature.
This is again accomplished when man sees himself from the perspective of the object that exists outside himself; turning his mind’s eye back upon himself from the perspective of the other, which has now become for all sense and purpose a subject unto itself, he looks back upon himself as though he were an object. In this way, what was once the subject (he/himself) has now been turned into something different from the subject (an object) making the object itself a subject and he an object. It is the first move towards being “objectified,” a perspective used by the capitalist for exploitative purposes and justified as natural because man – the individual him/herself – did/does it ‘naturally.’
A person can thus see how the argument develops: the more the worker appropriates the world of sensuous nature through his labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of existence in two respects: “first, that the sensuous external world becomes progressively
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