The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [24]
Purported to be a sober compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopédie was in truth a paean to the nobility of labour. Diderot laid bare his motives in an entry on ‘Art’, lambasting those who were inclined to venerate only the ‘liberal’ arts (Aristotle’s music and philosophy) whilst ignoring their ‘mechanical’ equivalents (such as clock-making and silk-weaving): ‘The liberal arts have sung their own praise long enough; they should now raise their voice in praise of the mechanical arts. The liberal arts must free the mechanical arts from the degradation in which these have so long been held by prejudice’.
The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle’s formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.
Here, too, possibilities for happiness: ‘Forging an anchor’, from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie
Aspects of this evolution in attitudes towards work had intriguing parallels in ideas about love. In this sphere, too, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as there could be enjoyment within a paid job.
Initiating developments of which we are still the heirs, the European bourgeoisie took the momentous steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically – or perhaps realistically – confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.
2.
It was with this history in mind that I became interested in meeting a career counsellor, a professional dedicated to finding ways of ensuring that work will be synonymous with fulfilment.
An Internet search produced a company called Career Counselling International, whose website promised help for those facing ‘troubling life decisions and occupational choices’. This authoritative claim led me to expect large and well-appointed headquarters, but the company turned out to be run from the back of an unassuming and cramped Victorian home in a run-down residential street in South London. It featured a small administrative office and a consulting room with Paul Klee prints and views of a clotted carp pond and a washing line. The only full-time employee, Robert Symons, a fifty-five-year-old psychotherapist, had started the business twelve years before, and ran it along with his wife, June, who helped with the accounts and the marking of aptitude tests. The couple were admirably fond of some of the less popular vegetables in the English repertoire, for at most times of the day – even in the early morning – the place smelt powerfully of freshly boiled cabbage or swede. Symons had studied psychology at Bristol University, where he had come under the influence of the humanistic school of psychology which emphasised creativity and self-development. In his spare time, he had written a book entitled The Real Me: Career as an Act of Selfhood, which he had been trying to publish for several years.
Symons was a tall and bearded man who looked as if he could wrestle a wolf to the ground, but his physical might belied the patient manner of a priest. In another era, one imagined him as