The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.
— Karl Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property
So let’s take a philosopher who works by thinking and feeling. And this by thinking, feeling and doing other things he’s increasing his labor potential. What am I missing?
…the actual labour? Philosophers aren’t paid to just sit around thinking, it’s only once they put the labour into publishing their thoughts that they get paid (possibly).
I mean you’re just arguing that thinking is labour for a philosopher. The statement remains correct. The philosopher is encouraged to think about publishable things instead of just for the freedom of thinking.
— Karl Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property
How is thinking, theorizing, loving, singing, painting, etc wastes my capital?
It’s time spent not working.
Not a waste of capital though?
Labour is a form of capital.
So let’s take a philosopher who works by thinking and feeling. And this by thinking, feeling and doing other things he’s increasing his labor potential. What am I missing?
…the actual labour? Philosophers aren’t paid to just sit around thinking, it’s only once they put the labour into publishing their thoughts that they get paid (possibly).
Right but the moment of publishing is the last stepin the long, tedious thinking and analysis process. Without it there will be nothing to publish.
Anyways, absolutist statements hold no water, other news at 11.
I mean you’re just arguing that thinking is labour for a philosopher. The statement remains correct. The philosopher is encouraged to think about publishable things instead of just for the freedom of thinking.