(by Alix Marmin )
There is no life without work! ‘To man, living has always been synonymous with working’, claimed the philosopher Michel Henry. If this is indeed the case, how are we to explain the contradictions characterising the demands of our age? On the one hand, productivity, performance, and efficiency; on the other, the quest for well-being, recentring, and personal and professional fulfilment. In truth, this apparent discrepancy is but an illusion, as happiness has simply become a production factor like any other, one that must be maximised. If companies tend to interfere in our lives, it is simply because capitalism is an omnivorous entity: it consumes anything that helps it grow, continuing to do so until it succeeds in governing even the smallest aspects of the lives of its ‘salaried employees’. Indeed, it is well-aware of the fact that if happiness is injected in small doses, the worker or employee will be more motivated, more efficient, and thus a better source of profit. Ubiquitous, work imposes itself as the value of values, one that has an essential economic and social impact. What work do we mean, however? When reflecting on its evolution, the mistake would be that of projecting onto it the role and value that our time and age assign to it. On the contrary, at a time when bullshit jobs are flourishing (those superficial and socially irrelevant jobs that capitalise on useless and meaningless tasks), it seems essential to us to radically redefine our relationship to work and thus revert to its very essence. Putting things into perspective on a historical level will allow us to reflect on the concept of work, having re-situated it in the wider context of the action-contemplation dyad, in harmony with a radically European and contemporary worldview.
Otium and Negotium
Work has not always been man’s primary activity. In traditional, primitive and ancient civilisations, work was generally a stigma. A sign of social and moral inferiority, and unworthy of a good citizen, it was associated with a state of enslavement and submission to a master. It was regarded as a constraint arising from necessity, especially the material kind, and experienced as an inevitability. Indeed, freedom was only conceivable when exempt from this necessity, beyond the economic sphere. In his Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs,67 historian and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant highlights, at the end of a semantic analysis, the differences in work valorisation: in Ancient Greek, there is no single word that would serve as an equivalent to our generic and comprehensive term ‘work’; instead, there are several, according to the particularities and purposes of each activity (craft-related, technical, agricultural, etc.). Work was not understood as — nor unified into — one single concept, but subordinated to realities that were deemed superior, including ethics or politics. Restricted to the familial domain, i.e. to the private sphere, the oikonomia thus applied above all to the oikos (household) in the broad sense of the term, that is to say to the family, its slaves and its material possessions. By contrast, social and public life acquired its meaning outside the field of work, in the community’s most significant events such as celebrations, games, ceremonies, and war.
Work has not always held sway over contemplation. The Romans thus distinguished between labor, defined as arduous and painful work, and opus, which referred to (a) completed work. Whereas the former is reactive and often passive, the latter is, on the contrary, active, enabling the expression of a certain will. The Latin word otium is a concept inspired by the Greek skhole and referring to the free time that one dedicates to study and meditation, to fruitful leisure time allowing one to meditate and reflect on things. When misused, otium can take on a negative and unwanted form, causing slow-wittedness or laxness. This flaw had already been denounced in Antiquity, and traces of this pejorative meaning have survived in the word ‘idleness’. In its noble meaning, otium was glorified by Cicero, Seneca, and many Stoic authors, all of whom considered it to be the necessary condition for any action, in contrast with agitation and busyness, i.e. negotium. An accomplished man does not differentiate between action and contemplation and bears within himself the will to educate himself intellectually.
The purpose of work has not always been one of utility and profitability (see chapter 9). In his work on mediaeval economy, Guillaume Travers68 mentioned a society in which professions were not only limited to utilitarian and commercial considerations. Trade communities (guilds, trade associations) are, therefore, genuine living communities: they give everyday life its own rhythm and are part of social and religious existence. Thus, each trade association has its own patron saint, its own festivals, and also its own rules and traditions. In L’Argent,69 Charles Péguy70 speaks of a time when people gave the best of themselves in their work, which allowed them to find fulfilment and attain self-realisation: ‘When work is established as an absolute, one quickly becomes a poor worker. Indeed, one’s love of a job done well does not stem from their fondness of work itself, but from their love of perfection. It is, in fact, of metaphysical origin.’ In this respect, the construction of cathedrals during the prosperous European 12th and 13th centuries is an example from which one can truly learn a lot. Having studied the manner in which cathedrals were financed, Henry Kraus71 demonstrated that the choice to dedicate all excess wealth to this purpose rather than channel it towards other monetary and commercial items would have been deemed meaningless in a society that valued only utility and profitability.
The Ideology of Work
Work is valorised as an ideology. Indeed, the modern conception of work stems from capitalist production and economic growth. As for philosopher André Gorz, he describes work as an ‘activity belonging to the public sphere, one that is requested, defined, and acknowledged to be useful by others, who thus remunerate you for it’. Acting as a socialisation factor, work conditions our very integration into modern society and determines our worth. Its hegemonic authority would have us believe that it cannot be viewed differently, which is why Jacques Ellul perceives it as an ideological phenomenon that has permeated every stratum of society and, to a large extent, dominated our mentalities. He thus analyses the convergence of four Western trends that fostered the birth of the ‘ideology of work’: the ever-increasing difficulty in working conditions, which had to be justified by means of an ideology that presented it as a virtue; the relinquishment of traditional values and beliefs; the cult of economic growth, now defined as an absolute value; and the separation between those who command and those who obey.
Work has become an abstract activity. Globalisation has led to the disappearance of structuring standards and reference points, to an absence of direction: loss of one’s sense of reality, complexification, the geographic fragmentation of production processes, virtualisation, etc. We thus find ourselves unable to define the purposes that give our work meaning. It is all, furthermore, a consequence of management ideology, which has now been raised to the level of scientific discipline by so-called ‘coaches’ and made sacred by ‘consultants’ and other charlatans that specialise in the running of organisations. This ideology has proceeded to glorify ‘human resources’ (HR) in what is but a hollow and inflated type of newspeak, as company work becomes a genuine way of life, and employees a resource, a capital to be managed and profited from, and, above all, ‘men with no inner dimension’. For a company worthy of its name, human ressources are essential, having insidiously modified the very meaning of work by resorting to words that are as enticing as they are soothing: ‘the development of your creativity, autonomy and well-being’.
Work has ceased to be a part of life (in the strong sense). Instead, it invades and devours the latter to become a mere means to earn one’s living (in the weak sense): a necessary activity allowing one to obtain money, live off this money and finance one’s hobbies. The Greeks thus used two different terms, a weak and a strong one, to refer to life: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of being alive, and bios, a way of life that is specific to a certain individual or group. Ultimately, work has been gaining an increasingly important position in people’s everyday lives, perhaps even the most pre-eminent one. It is so difficult to resist the constant demand for flexibility, production and consumption that their working hours are getting longer in an almost natural manner, with their needs growing ever more numerous. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the increasing importance of the digital domain, which makes ‘disconnection’ even more difficult. What about all those pensioners who feel useless once they have stopped working and no longer find any purpose or meaning in their lives? Having lived to work, their state of mind stems from the triumph of the ‘ideology of work’ and from their own failure to unite life and work into one single whole.
The Reward of Rewards
When separated from life and regarded as a means to an end, work is no longer appreciated for what it is, but rather for what it offers, for the advantages that it brings. Friedrich Nietzsche refused to bestow upon wealth and profit a value of their own, calling for a sovereign kind of work, one whose purpose does not extend beyond it and from which we derive pleasure. After all, should life not be the driving force behind our actions, words and thoughts? Instead of embracing the fallacious contradiction between work and life, one had better advocate the union of these two notions into a homogeneous, coherent and harmonious whole that will allow people to develop the gift of self-sacrifice and self-realisation in the face of the disillusionment caused by a contemporary world devoid of values. To control one’s existence and give one’s life and activities their long lost meaning is, in harmony with Nietzsche’s precepts, to become men that ‘are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not to be the reward of rewards’.
The disappearance of otium leads to cultural and civilisational decline. Anything that might slow down the production and consumption pace, especially contemplation in its positive and traditional sense, thus inevitably disappears: the praise of beauty, commitment to city affairs and contemplation as defined by Aristotle are thus all relinquished. For modern man ‘has no time’ for contemplation, silence, and inner stillness, all of which are necessary for a ‘good and righteous’ life. There is, however, no need to choose between these two states. Let us therefore rediscover our taste for such higher and more rewarding activities! Let us also restore our taste for effort through manual work, which, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, dips our soul into the river Styx, as it teaches us to anticipate and foresee things, as well as to ‘reconcile, compare and establish relationships either from a practical perspective or with a useful end in view’. Action and Contemplation indeed. So how about granting our conception of work a new value that is not separate from but consubstantial with life itself?
Bibliographical References
Michel Henry, Réinventer la culture,72 Le Monde des débats, September 1993.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, 2018, translated by E. Roy as Bullshit Jobs, Les Liens qui libèrent, 2018.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs — Études de psychologie historique, La Découverte, collection Poche / Sciences humaines et sociales, 2005.
Guillaume Travers, Économie médiévale et société féodale,73 La Nouvelle Librairie, collection Longue Mémoire de l’Institut Iliade, 2020.
Henry Kraus, L’Argent des cathédrales,74 CNRS / Cerf, collection Biblis, 2012.
André Gorz, Métamorphoses du travail,75 Galilée, 1991.
Jacques Ellul (P. Mendès), L’idéologie du travail.76 Foi et Vie, issue number 4, July 1980.
Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Les Illusions du management — Pour le retour du bon sens,77 La Découverte, collection Poche / Essais, 2003.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,78 1882. Translated from German by P. Wotling, Le Gai Savoir, Flammarion, collection GF, 2007.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou De l’éducation,79 Gallimard, collection Folio, 1969.
For a European Awaking: Nature, Excllence, Beauty
Institut Illiade
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