Relation to the world· Work and technology
Fulfillment
Axis: Meaning of work — Does work fulfill us, alienate us, or is it merely a necessity?
Through 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.
Philosophers 4
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)
Show inferred positions (3)
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)
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)