Working in Time

The task of ethicists, philosophers, and theologians to restore the dignity of human labor and vocation in a (post)industrial, techno-driven society is motivated by an often unacknowledged concern to restore the underlying spirituality of the human experience of work. Due to its ability to interrogate the range of givenness in human experience, phenomenology is a method particularly suited to explore this spiritual dimension. In this essay, I offer a phenomenological analysis that attends to the way our experience of time either suppresses or discloses the underlying spirituality of work. (Post)industrial societies reduce time to "clock time", or an objective unit of measurement of production. Since increased production per unit of time is necessary for profit, we live and work in a society that is continually racing against the clock, and we find ourselves existentially pitted against it. I diagnose this reductionistic perspective of time, and its ensuing consequences, as a form of what Michel Henry calls "barbarism". Setting aside the assumption of time as exclusively "clock time", I then attend phenomenologically to other ways in which time gives itself to consciousness, namely, in cuisine, music, and craftsmanship. Finally, while Henry is helpful in analyzing the spiritual destitution of such an approach to time (and, consequently, to work), ultimately I turn to Kierkegaard's account of temporality, specifically as articulated in the philosophical category of repetition, to disclose time as constitutive of our work and thus to demonstrate the spiritual significance of human vocation

Aesthetics · Barbarism · Civilization · Consciousness · Dignity · Epistemology · Reductionism · Sociology · Spirituality · Temporality · Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies · Law · Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychedelics and Drug Studies

• The Phenomenological Mind

  Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi•Phenomenological Mind•2007

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• The End of Work

  Open Access•John Hughes•End of Work•2007

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• The Concept of Being as Production

  Michel Henry•Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal•1985

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• The Problem with Work

  Kathi Weeks•Problem with Work•2011

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