Abstract

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.

Highlights

  • Many contemporary ethicists, philosophers, and even political activists have given considerable attention to the way that work has become impoverished in a post-industrial, techno-driven era

  • Especially in the Reformed tradition of Christianity have sought to restore the significance of work by casting it in terms of vocation or calling

  • I have argued that Michel Henry helps us take up that very practice by spiritually diagnosing our dominant conception of time as barbaric and that Kierkegaard allows us to redirect that concept in ways that spiritually revive it

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Summary

Introduction

Philosophers, and even political activists have given considerable attention to the way that work has become impoverished in a post-industrial, techno-driven era. Western society in part by challenging the material conditions that make work oppressive, inhumane, and denuded of personal significance.. Western society in part by challenging the material conditions that make work oppressive, inhumane, and denuded of personal significance.1 Whether by secular transformation in the name of human dignity or religious significance in the name of vocation and calling, what lies at the heart of both approaches is an often unacknowledged concern for the underlying spirituality of the human experience of work. While Henry is helpful in analyzing the spiritual destitution of such an approach to time (and, to work), I turn to Kierkegaard’s account of temporality to fund a more phenomenologically robust account of the spiritual significance of human vocation

Time as a Metric
The Anti-Spirituality of Barbarism
Work under Barbarism
Time under Barbarism
Time in Other Modes
Italian Cuisine
The Craftsperson
The Work of Repetition
Conclusions
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