The philosophizing factory worker

Or, who gets to philosophize?

Romare Bearden, Factory Workers, 1942, gouache and casein on brown Kraft paper mounted on board, 94.93 × 73.03 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art))

A Chinese student recently told me about the story of factory worker Chen Zhi, whose tale of woe gripped China and instigated a lively debate on who can be a philosopher.

The full story is linked above (here is also an account in Chinese and a summary on Reddit), so my summary will be brief. Chen is a 31-year-old immigrant factory worker who came from a small rural village to work in Xiamen, Fujian Province. For twelve hours daily (8:30 AM - 8:30 PM), he performs soulless work at an assembly line. It's about 5000 yuan a month, barely enough to eat and rent. It is described as follows:

he was in charge of repairing machines in a camera factory, wearing a blue dust-free suit on duty. The whole person is covered, with only two eyes showing. Without a stool, he stands for a whole day. There are no windows. Time is displayed on the computer. Using mobile phones is impossible. Nothing can be brought in, only people can go in. If there is one characteristic of this life, it is repetition and emptiness. Life in the workshop is strict, precise, and meticulous. The machines never rest, people can not rest.

At the end of the day, he sits down to dinner with his wife in their tiny apartment (pictured below). She has also done soulless work checking phone cameras for dust, staring into a microscope for 12 hours a day.

After dinner, when his wife unwinds watching shows on her phone, Chen Zhi reads philosophy. He becomes entirely engrossed by western classics such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Nietzsche. His wife, at first unhappy that her husband spends all their joint time together in solitary philosophical contemplation, has resigned herself to the situation. He does not even make the time to go see their son, who is raised by grandparents in the countryside. But to Chen, philosophy is his soul-food and he was (at the time of press attention for his situation) working on a translation of Richard Polt's “Heidegger: An Introduction” into Chinese.

The question of whether Chen Zhi is entitled to spend all his free time on philosophy is entangled with issues of gender, the treatment of immigrant workers, the rights of factory workers. It elicited a huge discussion on Chinese social media, and a bit outside too.

According to my Chinese student, what was at the heart of discussions in China was whether philosophy is only for those who can afford to do it, such as people with leisure and middle-class jobs and professional philosophers, or whether it is for everyone.

Several philosophers, ranging from WEB Du Bois, Jane Addams, Mary Glover, have argued for this latter position. Mental self-improvement is, and should be, for everyone. We should not only seek to better the material living conditions of factory workers and other working class people, but to also give them the opportunity to feed the soul, to improve themselves. Indeed, the former is a necessary condition for the latter, but the latter requires more, such as education and access to libraries. As Du Bois argued in Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black people should also be allowed that “loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development.” He remarks that soulless, stultifying labor is racialized (and indeed, it still is), a sentiment we also see in the painting by Romero Bearden at the top of this post.

Pragmatist philosopher and social reformer Jane Addams started classes for adults in philosophy, art and other topics for poor, European immigrant workers in Chicago. Philosopher Mary Glover (writing under the pseudonym Constance Reaveley), who worked in a factory during World War II when factories were used to manufacture goods to aid the war effort, advocated for more leisure for factory workers, “When they have earned enough for their modest standard of living they tend to want a respite, and to value leisure more than cash.”

When I was sixteen years old, I used to babysit a boy who was the son of two factory workers of a textile factory that was close to where I lived. They lived in a small, rented house about a mile away from the factory, and they often would have to start work at 4:30 AM.

So I went to wake up the boy (who was eight years old at the time), give him breakfast, help him to check his book bag and bring him to school to the pre-school daycare that began around 7:30 AM. From there, I'd rush to my own school by bike or bus. They paid me a small stipend for this, from factory workers to the daughter of a bricklayer.

But their house, unlike that of Chen Zhi and his wife, was a small well-furnished rental house. Their child could live with them, and they even had a small dog.

The most eye-catching thing to me was a library full of small, rather thin books. One morning, as the boy was eating his breakfast cereal, I began to read one of them and noticed it was an erotic novel. It began innocently enough with a doctor and a nurse in his office, talking about a patient's diagnosis, but then went into increasingly explicit sex scenes. Sixteen-year-old me began to read these novels with fascination. I soon realized how this couple had a very sex-positive attitude, much at odds with how my own Catholic parents approached talking about sex and sex education. When the boy's father came in one morning and saw me reading he laughed and said “These are not the kind of books you're used to. Not all of them have a very good plot.”

The couple were naturists. Naturism is an explicit philosophy of healthy and uncomplicated, free living. On the weekends, they would go to some sort of club or resort where everyone (adults and kids) went nude. Though, their life was sometimes complicated, with injuries sustained through repeat movements in the factory. They got to philosophize on the weekend, in their spare time. I don't mean to romanticize this life or declare it good or sufficient on behalf of others. But I mean that in any case it seemed vastly better than the conditions under which people like Chen Zhi make inexpensive cell phones for the global market.

The question of who gets to philosophize is tied up to the question of leisure and enjoying “useless” pursuits. They are useless in the sense that they don't make you produce anything, but they are good for your soul. Anyone, no matter their position in life, should have the space to engage in these pursuits. Or, as Chen Zhi put it,

I study philosophy without any so-called realistic purpose, absolutely not, if any, it would be a kind of woe. But I don't think philosophy is useless. Philosophy can change the existence of man, or at least his understanding of the world. It's not a generic change, it's a fundamental change.

If the fundamental human impulse is to philosophize (as Aristotle remarks at the start of the Metaphysics) we must have the material conditions, security, wellbeing, a decent standard of living, and enough leisure time, to make it happen for everyone.