Born to philosophise, forced to work

Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens framed by two classical columns, with the words Born To Philosophise above and Forced To Work below. The joke is an old one dressed in brown, sun-faded lettering – you were made for the examined life in the company of Plato and Aristotle, and instead there is a nine-to-five. It is a lament every philosophy graduate recognises.

The School of Athens by Raphael, painted between 1509 and 1511 for the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, a room used as Pope Julius II’s library. It shows the great thinkers of antiquity gathered in an imagined classical hall and is probably the most famous image of philosophy ever made.

At the centre walk Plato, pointing upwards and holding his Timaeus, and Aristotle, gesturing towards the earth with his Ethics. Around them are, among others, Socrates arguing with young listeners, Pythagoras writing, Diogenes sprawled on the steps, Heraclitus brooding in front, and Euclid or Archimedes bending over a compass. Plato is often said to bear the features of Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael painted himself at the right edge.

Yes. English school goes back via Latin schola to Greek scholē, which first meant leisure or free time and then what free people did with it – discussion, study and lectures, and finally the place where this happened. For the Greeks, learning and philosophy were what you did when you were not forced to work.

In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book X, chapter 7) Aristotle writes that we are busy so that we may have leisure, just as we make war in order to live in peace. In the Politics he calls leisure the first principle of all action. For him leisure was not idleness but the time for contemplation, the activity he considered the highest and happiest human life.

The terms come from the long tradition, from Aristotle through Augustine and Aquinas, that contrasts the active life of work and politics with the contemplative life of thought. Hannah Arendt reworked the distinction in The Human Condition (1958), dividing the vita activa into labour, work and action and arguing that modern society reduces almost everything to labour and consumption.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx argues that under capitalism workers are alienated from the product of their labour, from the activity of working itself, from their human nature as creative beings and from each other. Work becomes a mere means to survive rather than an expression of who you are – the serious philosophy behind the joke on this design.

In this essay, first published in 1932 and the title piece of a 1935 collection, Russell argues that the belief in the virtue of work does great harm. Modern technology could let everyone work about four hours a day, and the free time would be used for science, art, conversation and simple happiness rather than exhaustion.

A satirical pamphlet by the French socialist Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, first published in 1880 and revised as a book in 1883. It mocks the bourgeois and even socialist worship of work, calls the love of work a strange madness of the working class and suggests that no one should work more than three hours a day.

For philosophy students and graduates, teachers, academics stuck in admin and anyone who would rather be in the School of Athens than in a meeting. It is available as a unisex classic T-shirt, women’s T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker – the mug is the natural choice for the office.