A messy house poses a sticky problem for a philosopher, especially if molasses has dripped on the kitchen floor and the publisher is waiting for the last chapter of the tractatus.  While a Confucius or a Heidegger are doing the dishes and dusting bric-a-brac, who’s free to do the philosophizing?

Some of philosophy’s headliners from Plato to Foucault weigh in on this controversial topic, which rivals race, religion, and a random piece of Juicy Fruit chewing gum left on a church pew, as a source of discord.

Socrates – “Seminar”

Socrates: The true tragedy of Oedipus was that his eyes were put out after complaining to his mother, the queen, about old newspapers and magazines piling up.  Rather than cancel her subscription to The Times, she blinded him.

Gluteus: That reminds me. . .

Socrates: Yes, what thoughts lie under your venerable pate?

Gluteus: Could you deny the need to tidy up the socks, and clean up the ashtrays?  Since you have been subletting my atrium, many sheets of papyrus are mounting up around your desk, as well.

Socrates: Though this appears to be a dirty house, the ideal of the house isn’t unkempt with dirty togas strewn about.  Is it not true then that this is a temporary condition?

Gluteus: Indeed, it is so, Socrates.

Socrates: Then it follows that the clutter does not ultimately exist in the dwellings featured in Architectural Digest, which may be taken as archetypes of The House.  Further, I must behave as if the mess did not really exist, or I would not be able to concentrate on my upcoming real estate seminar at the Grand Ballroom of the Athens Hilton.

Gluteus: Real estate?  How can we assert that real estate is real in a world of shifting illusions?

Socrates: Confuse not realty and reality—especially in a volatile market.

Gluteus:  Your wisdom astounds me.

Socrates: Wisdom doesn’t wash the dishes, dear Gluteus.  It’s those infomercials for my Enlightenment Course that pay for a wonderful woman from Smyrna who does wonders with laundry and will free your mind for nobler topics.

Nietzsche – From a fragment, “The Will to Cleansing Powder”

         Cleanliness is next to godliness, Martin Luther declared, but God is dead, so nobody’s looking. The übermensch will not have to deal with such trifles as “cleaning up” or “tidying up” as the philistines call it.

Throughout Western Civilization the ideal of cleanliness has been exalted by little narrow-minded people.  To be clean or unclean epitomizes the issue of free will.  Furthermore, it provides ample opportunity to exert will over others, and superior man is noted for ability to persuade others to do the cleaning, especially at or below minimum wage.

        The true bourgeois cannot bear a mirror of life of all that is disordered and stench-filled in existence.  Wagner is the prototype of the shallow modern man, the artist enslaved to the bourgeois ideal. He freed himself and his lovely wife, Natalie Wood, of the vulgar yoke of housecleaning by hiring a live-in housekeeper. 

Aphorisms: Europe’s newspapers are full of hogwash, but they serve very well to dry glass without streaks.

Man is the only animal who argues about housekeeping.

Michel Foucault – “Hygiene: a Post Deconstructionist Perspective”

         The sexual assigning of the cleaning roles, almost always the woman in Western culture, is clearly an extension of the patriarchal, male-dominated society.  Claude Lévy-Strauss’ studies of women in non-western culture bear this out.  In the Yanomamo tribes of South America it is the job of the men not only to hunt and fish, but to clean fishbowls afterward.

        While harboring advanced views of freedom and nothingness, Sartre embodied the old European school of cleaning.  He merely masqueraded as a feminist when he suggested Le Courbusier start designing homes without restrooms, “to save women all the toil and trouble of scrubbing.”  In his own life, Sartre made the fatal error of leaving the cleaning to Simone de Beauvoir.  Boy, you should have seen their refrigerator after they returned from the philosophy decathlon in Geneva!