2023-09-09 08:51:36
As of: September 8, 2023 9:05 a.m
Hardly anything shapes our lives as much as work. The first to recognize this was the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. In the podcast Tea with Why, Denise M’Baye and Sebastian Friedrich talk to the author and philosopher Mesut Bayraktar about Hegel’s understanding of work and society.
How has the concept of work been thought about in the history of philosophy?
Mesut Bayraktar studied philosophy and writes novels and plays. In 2021 he published an investigation into Hegel’s philosophy of law entitled “The Mob and Freedom”.
Mesut Bayraktar: Work as a philosophical category has long played a minor role in the history of philosophy. We hardly encounter this in antiquity and the Middle Ages. There are elements of action theory in Aristotle that are very exciting. In his surviving fragment entitled “Oeconomia” he reflects on how the product of different labors can have the same value, even though they are different things. In modern times – with the emergence of capitalism – it is philosophers from the circle of political liberalism such as David Hume, John Locke or Benjamin Franklin who speak of humans as “tool making animals”.
The common message from these people is: “The fruits of your labor belong to you. Whoever works shall own what he has produced.” This also creates the ideology of the autonomous, self-working individual, which is still fueled today: that everyone is the creator of their own happiness. In modern society, however, we often observe exactly the opposite. The fruits of my labor belong to someone else – I only receive a wage for them. People like John Locke could have known it. Locke was a member of the Royal African Company and the Virginia Company, trading companies that profited from the enslavement of people from Africa. This duplicity is encountered there again and again. Things then get really exciting with Hegel.
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Denise M’Baye and Sebastian Friedrich talk about the big questions in life and always make a connection to everyday life.
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We tend to associate other big concepts with Hegel: dialectic, spirit, freedom. What role does work play in Hegel?
Bayraktar: In his early writings he writes a lot about the essential characteristics of being human. Three terms emerge: language, work, tool. Today, tools are work equipment – and so is the machine. Unlike the philosophers of liberalism, Hegel always looks at society when considering the concept of work. In what context does work take place? For him, work is always a social relationship. Think of the division of labor in civil society. If you think about these complex concepts: dialectic, negation, essence, appearance. What is the underlying center of all these concepts, these movements that one encounters again and again in Hegel? A central moment is this permanent work activity, the permanent productivity of the subject.
Hegel is the first to describe modern society as a society of work and exchange. He notices that work has two sides – like everything you encounter with Hegel. On the one hand, work is a relationship of domination according to which societies are structured. On the other hand, work is a human being’s relationship with self-education and liberation from nature.
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Hegel said: “Consciousness comes to itself through work.” How would you explain this quote?
Bayraktar: In this context we have to talk about what alienation and appropriation mean for Hegel. He uses this pair of terms to describe the logical structure of work. For Hegel, alienation means that man, by working with nature, steps out of himself and realizes his essence or his inner being in the world. The second step is that this processed object is in turn appropriated by people. There is a kind of withdrawal taking place. In economic theory one would speak of consumption. Sometimes it is the case that people can no longer easily take back what they have produced through work. Because he does not understand what he has done or because he is refused the opportunity to take back what he has produced. This contradiction drives humans to a higher form of consciousness. He thinks about it: Why is this? Why can’t I own this? Did I do that? How did I do this? How can I do it better? This is what Hegel means with this sentence: “Through work, consciousness comes to itself.”
Does consciousness also come to itself if the work is not self-chosen?
Bayraktar: At this point, Hegel starts directly from a class social model. He recognizes that work is not only an individual activity, but also a social activity. The individual makes a contribution to this social work. And if he appropriates something to meet his needs, then of course he also consumes the products of others. The question is: Does the human being or consciousness succeed in coming to itself through the work of (another) or does it not succeed? Is another’s labor denied him, or his own labor withdrawn from him, by the master consuming the slave’s labor? This is where things get interesting in terms of social theory – and this is where you find the connections to Marx.
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Marx repeatedly uses the term “alienated labor,” which he also borrows from Hegel. What does that mean?
Bayraktar: Hegel was the first to recognize that man is the product of his own work. Man was not created by any higher beings, but what he is is because of what he does. Marx inherits this idea, which opens up the space of history. Marx, who experienced industrialization in the 19th century, observed in this context that the working class – contrary to the promises of modern society – was denied the fruits of labor. That the working class actually gets poorer rather than richer through work.
He explores this idea using Hegel’s concepts, especially in his early writings, where the concept of alienation appears. And he notices that the relationship between alienation and appropriation, man’s self-realization, is disturbed in reality. He attributes this disruption to private property. He describes the ownership and property relations as a radical, biophysical break between the working body and the means of work that this body needs in order to realize itself in the world.
There are then four forms of alienation. The first is that the working person no longer has any connection to the product of his work. Self-realization is gone because the product belongs to the entrepreneur – and not to me. The second is that working people no longer have any connection to their own work activity because work is becoming more and more dull. The third form of alienation is that working people lose connection with themselves and with other people because they only experience people as lone fighters – in all-round competition. And the fourth is that working people lose their connection to society (in Marx, “species being”). Because society becomes more of a means to the end of my personal interests.
Today we live in a society in which we also identify through work. Work is part of self-realization. Now our society is also changing, for example through digitalization. Can this still be used in our society today?
Bayraktar: Marx uses the term alienation to describe the loss of relationships – of relationships with fellow human beings, of relationships with society, of relationships with his work. In modern times, this loss of relationship means nothing other than loneliness. I would add that loneliness is one of the most radical forms of oppression.
When we think about digital technologies, about AI or algorithm-driven work processes, we notice that work is becoming more and more anonymous, more and more isolated. Also work provided through platform economics – for example Uber drivers. This makes me feel like I’m self-employed, but in the end I earn very little and am left with the risks and liability on myself. People suffer from this lack of relationships. Anyone who has ever been in temporary work or had to go to the employment office feels this firsthand. At the latest when it comes to the complex: How can we regulate our metabolism sensibly with nature in order to avert ecological catastrophe? At that point at the latest, this consideration of alienated work becomes enormously important. We need to ask the question, how do we organize work in a way that is rich in human relationships and that we do not destroy nature?
Denise M’Baye and Sebastian Friedrich asked the questions in the philosophy podcast Tea with Why.
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This topic in the program:
NDR Culture | Tea with Why – Philosophy and Us | Aug 23, 2023 | 06:00 a.m
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