Relation to the world· Work and technologydifficulty
Meaning of work
Does work fulfill us, alienate us, or is it merely a necessity?
Is work the place where we realize ourselves and find our place among others, or what wears us down and dispossesses us, time taken from the rest of our existence? Seeing it as fulfilment can reduce us to our jobs; seeing it as mere drudgery can drain a huge part of our days of meaning. To take a position is to say what place work deserves in a good life.
Fulfillment
4Through work, human beings transform the world and transform themselves: they objectify their faculties, win the recognition of others, and shape themselves as subjects. Work is thus a path of humanization, not a mere chore.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (4)
Baconinferable
Salomon's House makes the inquiry into nature a collective work, parceled into coordinated tasks, and sets it at the summit of human dignity: to transform the world through methodical labor honors and fulfills the human being, far from being a mere chore. Still, Bacon prizes this work for its fruits and the utility it yields, which keeps an instrumental share in it.
New Atlantis (Salomon's House)
Hegelexplicit
Work forms the one who performs it: it is by shaping the thing that the bondsman of the master–slave dialectic gains a self-consciousness that the master, an idle consumer, has lost. But Hegel also sees, in modern civil society, the work that dispossesses and produces the wretched rabble, beginning the analysis of that would take up.
Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. IV (lordship and bondage) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §189-245 (the system of needs, the rabble)
Zhuangziextrapolated
The figures of accomplished craftsmen, the butcher, the wheelwright, the bell-stand carver, suggest that well-made work can be a site of flourishing and even of communion with the , when the gesture becomes effortless. But this accomplishment owes to recovered spontaneity, not to toil or useful production: the gnarled, "useless" tree is precisely the one that, serving no purpose, lives out its full life. The praise thus wavers between art as a way and the prizing of free leisure, against busy usefulness.
Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the useless tree)
Beauvoirinferable
Beauvoir sees work and productive activity as a decisive lever of emancipation: gaining access to work means, for woman, winning economic independence and transcendence through the project, against confinement in domestic immanence. Alienated labour exists (and then belongs to oppression), but freely assumed work is first of all a path of fulfilment.
The Second Sex (1949), vol. II, "Toward Liberation" (work and independence)
Alienation
3In its dominant forms, work dispossesses the worker: one becomes a stranger to one's activity, one's product, and oneself, reduced to a cog paced by the machine. The meaning of work remains confiscated as long as its conditions are not transformed.
Explore this position →Marxismexplicit
Labor is held to be the activity in which the human being objectifies and realizes himself: he imprints his mark on nature and recognizes himself in it. This is what makes the diagnosis so severe under capital: alienation is not mere drudgery or low pay but the turning of that activity against the one who performs it, along four dispossessions: of the product, which belongs to another and confronts him as an alien power; of the labor process, undergone rather than chosen; of his species-being, what makes the human a creative being; and of other people, reduced to competitors. Marxism thereby shifts the question of labor from reward to the very form of the activity: even well paid, wage labor remains crippling so long as the worker masters neither its end nor its process.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "Estranged Labour" · Marx, Capital, vol. I
Marxexplicit
Labour is in essence the act by which man objectifies himself and recognises himself in what he produces: it is this positive definition that makes its perversion measurable. Yet once the product belongs to another and the worker sells his labour-power as a commodity, what ought to fulfil him maims him: Marx breaks this alienation into four dispossessions, of the product, of the act of producing itself, of man's species-essence, and of other men. Against the economists who take this relation for a natural fact and against , who saw only its religious version, he roots it in private property and the relations of production: the dominant weight therefore goes to as the truth of present labour, fulfilment remaining the horizon of emancipated labour.
1844 Manuscripts, first manuscript (alienated labour) · Capital, vol. I, on <c>abstract labour</c> and the <c>fetishism</c> of commodities
Show more (1)
Sartreinferable
Under the influence of , Sartre analyzes labor in scarcity as the site where human praxis congeals into the practico-inert, turns back against those who produced it and breeds alienation. Yet labor remains the mode through which man transforms the world and objectifies himself in it, which leaves it a measure of possible fulfillment, beyond its dominant alienated figure.
Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), scarcity, the practico-inert, alienation
Necessity, leisure as the end
4Work answers the needs of life, but it is not the end of existence: leisure, understood as time freed for thought, action, or contemplation, is what gives human life its meaning. We work in order to be free not to work.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (4)
Aristotleinferable
Manual and wage labour is banausic: necessary to life but degrading for the soul, it occupies the slave and the artisan so as to free the citizen for leisure (scholè), politics and contemplation. Work belongs to necessity, not to fulfilment.
Politics, I.5-7; VIII.2
Platoinferable
The city arises because no one is self-sufficient: the division of labour answers the necessity of providing for needs, each producing best what nature fits him for. Manual work counts as a function in the service of the whole rather than as self-fulfilment, the highest flourishing being reserved for the philosopher's contemplative life.
Republic, II, 369b-371e · Republic, IV, 421e-423d
Diogenes of Sinopeinferable
The only labour worth anything, for Diogenes, is the effort on oneself (ponos), the training in virtue; paid work, the amassing of wealth and the race for useful occupations belong to a conventional servitude that chains one to factitious needs. An avowed beggar, he holds the sage's studious leisure to be the end, and busy activity a means at best tolerated: one works only so as to be able to stop depending. Worth lies not in production but in the freedom won by doing without it.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 49 and 56
Thomas Aquinasinferable
Work belongs first to the necessity of providing for life, but Thomas, heir to the monastic rule, recognizes in it a dignity that Greek antiquity denied it: it disciplines the body, wards off idleness and makes almsgiving possible. It remains nonetheless ordered to a higher end, the contemplative leisure (otium) in which the mind turns toward God, which stays superior to the active life. Hence a weight shared between necessity and a form of fulfilment.
Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 187, a. 3; q. 182 (active and contemplative life)
The worker therefore does not affirm himself in his labour but denies himself; does not feel content but unhappy.Marx · 1844 Manuscripts