7 ms·

Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work

• some_furry 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/ObSHo https://archive.ph/ObSHo
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  "Ora et Labora" is an old but virtuous cycle.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    >"Ora et Labora" is an old but virtuous cycle. Like a penny farthing or a more-modern Trek (for example)? Or my mum that was known as the town bike, and so here i am - the result of linkage rather than a quick pull? The Benedictine motto, "Ora et Labora," has also come to be understood as a direction of offering up the hardships of labor so that the offering is a prayer. Work can thus become a prayer in and of itself. Prayer and work are constantly linked, pulling on one another. Together these acts mold us into better people.
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    Interesting compared to le malheur mentioned in the article, wherein factory repetitive work demands no mentation at all...
• daviddaviddavid 4y ago
  Probably worth noting that Wittgenstein and Weil both came from relative affluence. Wittgenstein's father was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Famous composers such as Brahms would perform at their house. While not close to Wittgenstein, Weil's father was a medical doctor.
  • patcon 4y ago
    Kinda makes sense to me that the wealthy might be the astronauts of this thinking. My experience being voluntarily without home (and living in parks) tells me that erecting a barrier between your work and your material needs, that allows you to more objectively assess the personal value of the work. You need to run experiments of sorts, and imho it's hard to have that liberty to truly A/B test unless the requirements of normal work are relieved (whether through wealth or minimized needs). In some ways, I felt more kinship with the wealthy and retired when I was being a hobo of sorts.
    • fezfight 4y ago
      Agreed. Without the pressure of 'do this or die', these wealthy men can enjoy work. Because at any time, they can simply leave. Kinda like Mike Rowe waxing on about Dirty Jobs and work ethic. It lacks the full weight of the cost of failure.
      • colechristensen 4y ago
        But it is also subtle life advice. Set yourself up so you can leave and you’ll have a much better time at work.
        • fezfight 4y ago
          Yeah, but it's only speaking to a small subset of the lucky folks who can do that.
          • swatcoder 4y ago
            Sure, but the Venn diagram of those "lucky folks" and the people on this site has unusually high overlap. It doesn't hurt to remind some of the stressed out and overworked among us that living below one's tech-industry means can pay off in work satisfaction, even if it means foregoing some more immediate pleasures.
            • fezfight 4y ago
  • hospitalJail 4y ago
    > Wittgenstein and Weil both came from relative affluence. I've seen this come up many times in Philosophical discussion. The words to live by are those of privilege, who have rarely experienced the lifelong hardships of slaves. However, plenty of people have read the words of (stoic) philosophers and have adapted them to extreme environments like torture. They say it worked and got them through. Do we need a modern day slave to independently come up with the same philosophical conclusions to call them a universal nature? Or can we derive them from logic and possibly data?
• rcktmrtn 4y ago
  This was a good read. For me, more inspiration to pick up something by Simone Weil at some point. Another similar essay I liked, contemporary to both Wittgenstein and Weil is "Why Work?" by Dorothy Sayers [1]. [1] https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/faith/Why%20Work%20by%20Dorothy%20Sayers.pdf https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/fai...
  • everybodyknows 4y ago
    Published 1942, in the intriguingly titled volume Letters to the Diminished Church.
• richardanaya 4y ago
  Ayn Rand is a philosopher who talks very directly on how productive action at work (or anywhere) are the morally good.
  • Philorandroid 4y ago
    She wrote at such incredible length about meaningful labor in the pursuit of happiness -- "productive value" as she put it -- and a soulful existence in general. It's a shame that there's such a negative knee-jerk reflex to the mention of her name.
    • InitialLastName 4y ago
      In the same way that people use Stalin's policies to discredit Marx, people use the policies and behaviors of Ayn Rand's adherents to discredit her. At some point, when everybody who reads your books uses them to justify toxic behavior, negative knee-jerk responses become the proper societal equivalent of an immune response.
      • richardanaya 4y ago
        Comparing Stalinism to Objectivism is an apples to oranges comparison. There's never been a country run on the principles of objectivism. There's many countries that followed Marxist ideology to a logical conclusion and ended up in unsurprising mass death.
      • everybodyknows 4y ago
        Or the teachings of Jesus, as abused by the Spanish Inquisition, Jim Jones, David Koresh ...
        • Philorandroid 4y ago
          ... or the music of the Beatles, according to Charles Manson. If a bad actor wants a scapegoat, they will find one.
      • 4y ago
• MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  When you have an open-ended job, you don't get to have a feeling of accomplishment until you finish a task. Because of this, certain forms of manual labor can feel more immediately gratifying because they allow you to see a task through to completion. While I think that the work I do as a software developer is better and more personally meaningful work than the work I did stocking shelves in a grocery store (because it validates my previous efforts), I'm not sure that at the end of the work day that I feel more fulfilled than when I was on a grocery stock crew. Being able to exhaust myself physically through work and then doing whatever my mind wants me to do definitely felt better than working while sitting in an office chair all day and trying to find exercises that give me the same sense of satisfaction.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    For a little over 10 years, I was both a full time software engineer working 8 hours a day and a part time fitness instructor. I felt much more fulfilled after a one or two hour fitness class than I did after an 8 hour workday at a computer.
    • reidjs 4y ago
      I'm going to assume you were paid significantly more for the engineering work, which enabled you to live comfortably. I imagine if you reversed it such that you were working 8 hours as a PT and 2 hours as an engineer, you may find the opposite to be true.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        Fair point.
• Cupertino95014 4y ago
  A good article. Two people who are remembered for the quality of their minds and their writing, but they still weren't too proud to do things that almost no one will remember them for. Except the people who saw it.
• fumeux_fume 4y ago
  Would love to be part of the 0.01% of people who consider possibly getting a job so they can mesh their "powers with the resisting gears of the world." Lol, this article sucks. Try harder "true conservatives!"
• lordleft 4y ago
  This is going to sound ironic, but it's not: another philosopher who found purpose in work was Marx. To Marx, work was central to self-expression and human thriving, and part of capitalism's failure was a de-coupling of the results of a worker's toil from the worker, leading to estrangement and alienation. There's a reason why every other people's republic, for better or for worse, valorized the coal-miner and the farmer.
  • jfengel 4y ago
    The "valorization" was for the worse, and that's Marx's point. If the workers actually received contentment from their labor, they wouldn't need any external validation. They'd just do it. When Marx spoke about alienation, he was talking about industrial manufacturing, not producing commodities. Capitalism benefits from production lines, where you're working on a small piece of a product and don't feel ownership of the process. And you don't get financial benefit because any profits go to the people who own production lines. Early 20th century communist revolutions happened in less industrial countries, on the idea that farmers and miners who owned the farms and mines themselves would get a larger share of the profits. But it never worked out that way, for a ton of reasons -- mismanagement being key, but really the fact that commodities don't produce the kinds of profits that drove Marx's theory. Marx's ideas of alienation were driven by highly profitable industrial manufacturing. The world today is insanely more profitable than Marx ever dreamed, and that presents a lot more opportunities for workers to feel ownership. We have the luxury of supporting artisans -- including farmers who grow less food for more effort but offer other benefits, even if purely intangible ones. I don't think there's ever going to be "artisan mining", and I don't think miners were ever going to be well accommodated in a Marxist society. The best you could hope for is turning the mines over to the workers and letting them profit.
• Bakary 4y ago
  What bothers me about any principle related to work is that work itself is so very contextual. - The same work can be exciting or traumatic depending on whether it's a task you set yourself or got roped into by some other entity. A CEO can easily be less stressed than a low-level employee despite having tasks of greater responsibility and magnitude (see Whitehall study for instance) - The adjustment of interest in the same exact task can occur in an instant, as soon as you become aware of the new context, and regardless of whether there's any material change e.g. learning that you are underpaid compared to your coworkers, or having someone tell you to do the chores you were going to do anyway, or if someone tells you they set out the task for you because they think you are the only person competent enough for it - It's far easier for talented people like Witty or Weil to find self-actualization, because the range of tasks they can try out to satisfying effect is vaster and more compressed in time. Furthermore, they are more adept at lacing their actions with mental or aesthetic qualities such as philosophical statements, which makes rationalization easier. - Work is becoming more virtualized and hard to pin down, especially in the digital space. Imagine describing to Witty a person whose specialty is to find vulnerabilities in Instagram's network protocols to be able to make enough queries to catch juicy usernames, which will in turn be sold to third parties optimize the sale of a virtual deed of ownership of a virtual picture of an ape. He's smart and would probably get the idea quickly, but still...
  • UncleOxidant 4y ago
    > The same work can be exciting or traumatic depending on whether it's a task you set yourself or got roped into by some other entity. Indeed. A question I often think about: How can we keep our work from damaging us? Many of us have experienced damaging work - work (or a work environment) that is actually causing us mental or physical harm. And others can be in exactly the same job/environment and not experience any damage. I haven't come up with much of an answer to the question, but autonomy, control and choice seem to have something to do with it. But there's also futility and frustration that even those who choose a task can feel.
    • gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
      Is that a valuable goal? It’s like asking how can we keep from ever being sick? Or how can we keep from being sore? Damage is a necessary part of life. Suffering will drive innovations within work or drive you out of a job. Both are decent ends.
• evr1isnxprt 4y ago
  Two people who did not have to work to survive found purpose generating useless semantics. By their time physical science had placed upper and lower bounds on what’s possible even if the public was not aware of it. I get the appeal and went through that phase in life, but no theories have superseded Entropy, Relativity; yes the information we generate is always “out there” but it loses structure, the meaning of it being out there is relative. Information theory is a model for discovery, not memorization. Daily life is as it looks; work to survive for some, subsist on their work for others. Those who spend more time subsisting might try discovering literal self sufficiency, and those who work to live might try spending more time subsisting. That’s all I get out of past philosophy these days.