Empowerment, Work and Ethics: Lessons from Heidegger

Abstract

This brief note is about the intrigue connection between empowerment, work and ethics. The paper looks at empowerment from Heidegger's perspective. Empowerment is the crux of Heidegger’s 1943 treatise on “the essence of truth”. For Heidegger, empowerment is the active aspect of truth. In other words, truth is the activity of empowerment. Truth, work, freedom and empowerment for Heidegger belongs to the same family of words, each representing the aspect of the other. Empowerment and work are closely related ideas. The link is now being rediscovered in empowerment literature. However, in early 19th century and 20th century, though it was called an era of the industrial revolution, it had a different understanding of work as labour. Work as labour in Taylor’s scientific management, for instance, was conceptualized as work bereft of workmanship in the factory context. Taylor looked at work as physical labour, especially the labour of loading and unloading and the labour in which workers are treated as human animals meant to use the body obeying the will of the manager. He insisted that workers should not bring workmanship in factory work. Work was treated as a divine commandment along with dictates of work ethics, distracting from which is a grievous sin for Calvinists. Work as ethics in this sense was taught to erstwhile slaves throughout the world in ‘slave schools’ to trigger transformation from slave dependent capitalism to labour oriented capitalism. On the contrary, the essence of work is empowerment, claims Heidegger. It is opening up one’s comportment to the power of being qua being human. It is liberation itself. Heidegger looks at being as an activity and not as an entity. Being is an activity in time that goes under the experience of self-revelation into truth, the truth of freedom. Being works out its freedom through empowerment and resoluteness: this is the thesis Heidegger presented before us. The paper explored the connection from the Heideggerian perspective.