Abstract
Work has not been an interesting topic for philosophical thought, at least not until modernity—domestic work even less so. This does not mean that philosophy has kept silent about it. On the contrary, philosophy, sociology, and gender studies, when referring to it, have often seen domestic work in two ways: as mundane task, related to bodily needs in everyday life, and mainly as manual labor, which since modernity, too, has progressively been substituted by machines or technology. As a consequence, philosophy has adopted quite a negative approach regarding domestic work. It has become the prototype of a nonhuman activity.
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Notes
See Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1988), 65 c. Some lines further on, Plato adds, “the soul of the philosopher utterly disdains the body and flees from it, seeking rather to come to be alone by itself” (see ibid., 65 c-d).
Aristotle, “Politics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. B. Jowett, 6th ed. rev. ed., vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1280b39–1281a4.
Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. W. Ogle, sixth ed. rev. ed., vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) 687a8–12.
See Cynthia Freeland, “Aristotle on the Sense of Touch,” in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, eds. Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 227–248.
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I (Taurini: Marietti, 1952) q. 75, a. 5.
“Et propter hoc homo inter omnia animalia melioris est tactus. Et inter ipsos homines, qui sunt melioris tactus, sunt melioris intellectus,” ibid. See also the observations made by Albert Zimmerman, Thomas lesen (Stuttgart-Bad-Cannstatt: Legenda 2, 2000), 194.
Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), 98.
Matthew Crawford, “Shopclass as Soulcraft,” in The New Atlantis, Summer (2006): 18.
Pierpalo Donati, “Il problema della umanizazione nell’era della globalizzazione tecnologica,” in Prendersi cura dell’uomo nella società tecnologica, ed. Università Campus Bio-Medico (Roma: Ediun della AsRui, 2000), 42–70.
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York, NY: Norton, 1998), 44.
Alasdair Maclntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), 43.
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986), 50.
Quoted by Rodrigo Muñoz, “Precisiones al concepto de trabajo. Correspondencia inédita. Y. R. Simon-H. Arendt,” Anuario Filosófico XXXV/3 (2002): 753–790.
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 1959.
See Richard Wrangham, “The Cooking Enigma,” in Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable, ed. Peter Ungar (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 308–323.
See Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (London: Profile Books, 2009), 40.
Cf. B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 133.
Richard Sennett, Together (London: Penguin, 2013), 8.
This is the central thesis of Alasdair Maclntyre’s book Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999). See also Alejandro Llano, Humanismo Cívico (Madrid: Arid, 1999), 131.
See ibid. For Martha Nussbaum’s concept of Aristotelian “fragility,” see The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK,; New York: Cambridge University Press, updated edition 2001), chapter 1 and part 2. In addition, Leon Kass has many interesting and positive approaches to human corporeality: see The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), chapters 1–2 and 4. See also Ajejandro Llano, El diablo es conservador (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2001), chapter 6.
See Thomas Aquinas, In Decem Libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum Expositio, ed. J. Pirot (Taurini: Marietti, 1934), 4.
Alvin Gouldner, “Sociology and the Everyday Life,” in The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton, ed. Lewis Coser (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 421–422.
See Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday life, vol. 3 (London; New York: Verso, 2005).
Riane Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008), 8.
See Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982);
Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999);
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
and Michael Slote, The Ethics of Care and Empathy (London; New York: Routledge, 2007).
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009).
Robin West, “The Right to Care,” in The Subject of Care. Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, eds. Eva Kittay and Ellen Feder (Oxford: Roman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002).
See, for example, Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Nira Yuval-Davis, “Nationalism, Belonging, Globalization and the ‘Ethics of Care’,” in Gender Identities in a Globalized World, eds. A. M. González and V. J. Seidler (New York: Prometheus Book, 2008) 275–290.
Alejandro Llano, El diablo es conservador (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2001), 124.
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 46.
See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, second ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 187–188.
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© 2014 Ana Marta González and Craig Iffland
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Chirinos, M.P. (2014). Domestic Work: Judgments and Biases regarding Mundane Tasks. In: González, A.M., Iffland, C. (eds) Care Professions and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376480_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376480_10
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