A Wage or an Honorarium?

Can truth, goodness, and beauty be sold?

Josef Pieper writes in Leisure: The Basis of Culture that there is no such thing as intellectual work in the proper sense. True intellect, which differs from reasoning (or reckoning and deducing), is an act of contemplation and not quite ‘work’:

To contemplate, on the other hand, to ‘look’ in this sense, means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision, and the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for any effort or strain on our part to possess them.

Such intellection has the character of a gift.

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Not Content Creation

If you are a “content creator,” you are expected to produce words, like hay through a cow or excrement through a goose. If you do this well enough, you hope to earn money. Should you receive a wage? Far be it from me to say that the laborer is not worthy of their hire, but is this even labor? The AI can generate text faster and easier. What you should be doing is contemplating and sharing the fruits of your contemplation.

You cannot make a tree bear fruit; it will either produce fruit or not, depending on whether the sun and rain have been kind. All you can do is be thankful for the fruit.

Not everything is work

Pieper writes that work has become the only measure of value. Mere leisure, especially contemplation, isn’t work, and shouldn’t be honored. He traces this attitude to Immanuel Kant, who in both his critical philosophy and ethics honors effort more than leisure. Kant thinks the most praiseworthy good acts are those done without any reward. He denigrates any morality that aims at happiness.

If this is applied to contemplation, there’s no place for it. But Kant is incorrect. The good of an activity doesn’t depend on the effort, but on the object of the activity. We praise the effort, but far better is the good. Contemplation may be easy or may be difficult, but its goodness is related to the object of contemplation, which is the true and the good and the beautiful. Work is good because of the effort, but contemplation is good because of the object contemplated.

Wages and the honorarium

Properly speaking, the liberal arts receive an honorarium, while servile work receives a wage.

The concept of honorarium implies that there exists an incommensurability between performance and recompense, and that the performance cannot be truly recompensed.

To pay people to work makes sense as recompense for their effort, but to pay them an hourly wage for contemplation is inappropriate. It’s like paying a tree for the fruit it produces.

“I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole,” Goethe said. “I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true.” It would be wrong to pay for the good and the true, which are gifts to all of us.

Nevertheless, people must be paid – you have to eat, after all! But it seems wrong to pay people for art. Anyone who has worked as a church musician knows this: people are uncomfortable giving money for music because music is a transcendent good, and you should, they say, just be doing it out of joy!

Pieper proposes that honoraria be given instead. The money isn’t a wage for your effort; it’s an honor for the gift you’ve received.

I’m blessed to have some paid subscribers on Substack – thank you! I don’t consider it a wage, although I certainly need the money. I share the fruits of my contemplation because it is good for me to do so. Those of you who support me are doing so in honor of whatever goodness I’ve brought into your life. But you aren’t paying for it, even though I still get paid – you’re offering honoraria!