Plato said that craft, or techne, “answers to a genuine human need and solves it.” Does our abstract, postindustrial work fulfill this criteria? Dr. Jeffrey Hanson, Anglican priest and senior philosopher at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, has dealt with these questions in his most recent book, Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition: A History of Labor in Human Flourishing.
In this episode, Jeffrey and Grant weigh the Platonic and postmodern ideas of work, asking: How do we find meaning in “meaningless” work? What is the proper place of work among the other values in our life? And, is work directed toward changing reality, or changing ourselves?
2:26 - The Anglo-Catholic liturgy trains us out of a mindset of “primordial violence” into a “logic of abundance.” This implies serving the universal practically in our local context.
7:12 - Work that engages the body attunes the person to reality and enables him or her to respond to it morally.
10:17 - Work is an effort at changing reality, whether that be the external world (as contemporary sensitivity suggests) or oneself (as pre-modern philosophy proposed).
11:54 - While Locke “ties work inherently to the production of money” and considers it a postlapsarian condition, for Plato, “work is directed toward the improvement or the remediation of some flaw in an aspect of reality.”
17:17 - Today, 95% of young people say the most important thing in their future is to have a fulfilling career. Postindustrial work “actually is being freighted with too much in the way of expectation that it will deliver all possible goods to the human being, including something like a source of meaningfulness, a source of dignity, a source of affirmation.”
20:18 - In order to see the internal goods of work that does not have a clear objective meaning, structural improvements must be made to increase the empowerment, dignity, and control of the workers in those professions.
23:42 - Much postindustrial work is exceedingly abstract and does not fulfill Plato’s basic criterion of techne: something that answers to a genuine human need and solves it.
26:30 - Besides changing their job, dissatisfied workers can focus on the internal goods of their profession and exercise practical wisdom by finding the value in their work.
29:39 - One cause of burnout is the inability to recognize the amount of expertise demanded for one’s specific sector of work.
32:54 - A Platonist recognizes that no work is ultimate, while Workism elevates work to a place of ultimacy.
39:01 - The condition of unemployment is one of the most damaging to one’s sense of life satisfaction and self-reported meaning.
41:58 - Young people may have trouble finding meaning due to a lack of global coherence, a purpose unmoored from a larger vision of direction, or a void of calling or mission.
45:11 - Suffering may impart meaning by giving opportunities to learn from failure and by strengthening meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Links:
Dr. Jeffrey Hanson, Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition
Wendell Berry on Local Economy
Walter Benjamin on Storytelling and Craftsmanship
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character
Jonathan Malesic, The End of Burnout
David Brooks, “The Organization Kid”
Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind