REAP WHAT YOU SOW: AN ONTOLOGICAL APOLOGY.M

DANE ZAH

ORSKY

1. Work, a history:

Charles C Ebbet’s photograph: “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” is perhaps one of the most iconic

images of the 20th century. It depicts 11 men sitting atop a steel beam 69 floors above the New York City

skyline. You can tell even from across the room that these men’s hands are dirty, their fingers calloused.

They have healthy drinking habits and command an army of raucous language. One minute they’re

hanging by a rope forming together the skeleton of steel beams and the next joking about who will buy

the first round after shift’s end. These are men who hold each other to an incredibly high standard of

craftsmanship, who root out incompetence like foxes to quarry, hard fallible men, with strong work

ethics and the willpower to see that work through, no matter the cost. This is the self portrait of an

industrial America in its adolescence, as it began to wrench itself out of the great depression. And

though their names may not be written on the foundation or girders of the RCA building today, anyone

who knew them knows just as well that their very essence is infused into every square inch of it.

There is both great nobility and sadness in the work of these men, one rooted in a system

demanding a constant pool of renewed labor, often destroying the body and life of the laborers without

care or concern. It inarguably has led to some to the most elegant and fantastic achievements in the

history of mankind, yet this “ethic” that has set the tone of the industrialized world for the last century

has demanded great and often unforeseen costs. It has been “refined” from simply describing the way

one makes their way into the pure and undistracted need to amass wealth. In modernity this is often

achieved by doing nothing save playing with symbols that represent the work of others. This process has

seen both the “victory” of market based economics and the inevitable wreckage it has left behind. For

ours is an economy forged in the fires of expansion, tempered by the notion that if you work hard, if you

sacrifice often, then inevitably you will prosper. Yet we forget to take into account that this prospering

must come from a disparity both of others and the animate landscape upon which we depend. Yet an

even simpler question comes to mind, what is it that we’re trying to achieve? What is it that defines

affluence in the first place? In anthropology, happiness is defined as the least amount of division

between work and play. In preindustrial societies there was usually no division between the two. It

wasn’t until the first assembly line methods that work was no longer based on the end goal of

community/societal needs but only the effectiveness of production to equal surplus profit. We often

gloat on the comparative leaps and bounds modernity has on the hunting/gathering societies of the past

yet what are the standards by which we are making those assumptions? We muse on how much of their

time was spent just trying to survive, and yet research has shown that they worked ¾’s less than we do,

spending that time doing talk story with their family and community. While they may have lived shorter

lives, we seem to have forgotten to ask: “What is it that determines a good life, quantity, or quality?”

The author Heinrich Boil, in his satirical critique on this very subject tells the story of a Mediterranean

harbor: a poor fisherman is dozing in the midday sun. A tourist strikes up a conversation with him and

tries to convince him that he should go out and fish. “Why?” the fisherman wants to know. “To earn

more money,” replies the tourist, who quickly calculates how many additional catches, could make the

fisherman a wealthy man, with a large staff in his employ. “What for?” the fisherman again wants to

know. “You’d be so rich that you could lean back and relax in the sun,” the tourist explains. “But that’s

exactly what I’m doing now,” says the fisherman, and goes back to dozing.

Since Charles Darwin first wrote the origin of species, evolution has been defined as the ability

and efficiency of an organism to extract energy from available resources. Simultaneously, religion touted

that this process was sanctioned by the grace and glory of God. From the outset we weren’t concerned

with where that energy would go, what the end goal of extraction was, or how finitude played out

across time, we simply focused on how best to achieve greater and greater yield not just from the

environment but the labor used to acquire it. Even at the birth of the western world, the author Hesiod

wrote: “A gulf exists between man’s unending dreams and desires and the existing resources on earth

required to make them a reality.” In recent years that system has finally started to show signs of its

mortality. Economies across the world have run up against the limitations of “infinite” expansion, using

centralized banking to “create” emergency influxes of currency to bail out systems in catastrophic failure

only to depreciate the value of that currency as a whole at the cost of those paying into it. Families have

lost their homes, people holding jobs for over half their lives or more have found themselves

unemployed and without prospects, a morose pallor lingers in the air. The questions of why we equate

growth with progress or even why we work at all are being asked with increasing regularity. If our toil

doesn’t supply us with what we need, if it cannot suffer the elasticity of a changing world then what

good is it, and to what end do we suffer its short comings? My aim is to examine some of the historical

origins of how we think about work, specifically in reference to the western world and to trace those

alongside the loss of the telos or final cause. To examine how that has affected not only our relationship

with work but ultimately its link to the ongoing pursuit of meaning in our lives, and how we can

proactively seek new modalities to find both answers and compromises that will lead to a happier and

more congruent existence.

In order to understand how we interact with the concept of work in the present we must look

back to where and how it originated. All Abrahamic faiths believe in some sort of idealized garden in

which the first descendants of man didn’t have to work for sustenance. Yet from the outset, even in the

description of how God created Adam there are comparisons to a master craftsman who “breathes” life

into his creation. It follows that if God created man in his image then man would inevitably be drawn

towards a creation of his own. And so it is that after eating from the tree of knowledge, our descendants

are cast out into mortality, modesty, and toil. Adam to suffer unto the soil and Eve to the labor pains of

birth, in short from then on struggle was as much a part of life as was the breath that made it so. The

church being the authority on cultural identity well into the late 16th and early 17th centuries would

oscillate on whether work was a punishment for our sins our a transcendent penance for them. But it

stands that before the enlightenment to understand work was to ask: “How best might we achieve

salvation?” There were as many claims and views on this as they were individuals who pondered it, we

shall look over just a few.

St. Augustine believed that life was a “bed of pain” as defined by the obsession with material

acquisition and he viewed God as a doctor who would send “medicine” in the form of trials and

tribulations to distract us back towards the true nature of living. This truth was to refocus one’s energy

on the heavens and abandon any attachments we had to the realm of the physical. Work was an

opportunity that allowed us to imitate the work of the creator and thus become closer to the divine

nature of God. For Augustine, the corruption and inequality of this life were a direct result of the fall. It

was the aforementioned truth that emboldens us to suffer any ill so as to be better prepared to enter

into salvation as if “coming home”. Christianity however would soon begin to both aggregate and

deviate from this view in its own process of splintering. Max Weber a German economist who was first

simply interested in what he saw as capitalism’s wanton addiction to profit found the religious history of

work in his book “The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism.” He examined this divide

springing forth from the Protestant reformation. On one side you had the Roman Catholic Church who

believed like Augustine that the temporal world was flawed by original sin, human existence then should

be in a state of constant preparation for the next world. The best course of action was to fall back on

dedication to the divine through contemplation such as monastic life or church service. For those who

could not enter the church it offered sacraments such as penance and confession. For Catholicism one

endures the city of man in order to enjoy the city of God. Work was not so much important as was

knowledge.

On the other hand the reformers spearheaded by Martin Luther, believed that God had assigned

one task to each person and their duty was to find out and fulfill that task. Instead of removing oneself

one could engage in “good works” while waiting for the kingdom of heaven. To hide away from the

world was cowardice for the reformers; one must do what one is “called” to do. This is where we get the

term vocation. A man’s work becomes his faith personified. John Calvin, the catalyst for a more puritan

view saw both sides as flawed because they relied on the concept of penance: Catholicism through

church mediation and Protestantism through individual communication with God. He believed in

predestination of the soul, to Calvin, God had already determined those who would be saved or

damned. None of us could know which was which and to even ask was blasphemy, so work was a way to

take the mind off the question and to focus our energy into a positive outlet in the meantime. Putting

your whole trust in God would by default create a moral attitude. All three of these factions so far have

in common the deep need for theology to offer adequate explanations for deep matters of faith. On the

fringes of this debate were the Pietists, who looked not for salvation in the next world but this one. They

were taken to near hysterics, in their dedication to work and God, from speaking in voices to being

“slain” by the spirit. However the way they managed hierarchy and organization reminded Weber

almost exactly of a company or business enterprise. Methodists on the other hand didn’t believe that

righteous conduct alone assures salvation, to them you must “feel” grace actively in one’s life, unlike

Pietists they do not leave the world but engage it by being baptized in the Holy Spirit they achieve an

emotional certainty of grace, and thus a freedom from sin. This spiritual dialectic almost perfectly

mirrored the debate between the stoics and Epicureans during Greco-Roman time’s centuries earlier.

For Methodists it’s not the ritual that matters but the effect, how does it make you feel? Are you

regenerated? Baptists emerged during this debate holding the belief that only cognitively aware adults

could make the choice to rationally commit to their faith. Purity was maintained after this point via sola

scriptora or via strict scriptural adherence so that the word of God rules daily life. They answer the

question of recitivation by stating that all must choose to come back to the glory as we all are bound by

nature towards sin. Grace is central to their faith thus there was no “church” in the traditional sense but

only a place where the community would come together to congregate and learn from each other.

Weber saw this too as a transitionary space where individuals with their own interests conglomerated to

share in communal values much like the organization of capital interest. Since their faith was separate

from the space they could focus on the secular just as much as the spiritual.

Our country was both born because of and in the heat of this debate. Yet it was the

Protestant view of work that dominated those years, as most settlers were fleeing to America to escape

the chains that the Catholic church insisted were necessary to achieve salvation. Protestantism in its

many forms though agreed on one thing: that it could not be achieved by magical sacraments, or simply

doing work out of obligation. What was needed was a proof that would both inform them of their divine

status and lead to a productive life reining in the pull toward sin. This requires a rational form of

planning of the whole of one’s life in accordance to God’s will. Work became the focal point of faith,

while passive ascetical practice like prayer, contemplation, and monastic life in general were accorded

second place. Not just advocating a firm individualism but mandating the allocation of wealth as Godly.

Yet it was not the excessively rich that were espoused to have the ideal life but instead the newly born

upper middle class. Christians simply had to take advantage of God’s grace to make profit, taking cues

from Calvinism they believed that wealth and poverty were divinely mandated. In this way

Protestantism’s view of work set the foundation for a faith based economic system yet in the same

breath giving it the tools and allowance to easily part ways with its spiritual and thus moral limitations.

The actual point to Weber’s work was to trace how capitalism came to overpower its master, using it to

provide a disciplined labor force plus the continued reinvestment of profit that ensured its own

perpetuation. This created the first entrepreneurs who accumulated wealth not because of a dedication

to principles but for the sake of accumulation itself. Yet there are great implications in removing faith

from work. I am not nor will I advocate for a faith based conception of work however, as we will see

later on the universe abhors a vacuum. If you take away taboos, something is bound to fill the space left

behind. Without meaning vocations don’t exist, they simply become jobs often lacking continuity or

investment. This leads to process overtaking substance, and inevitably to discontent and claustrophobia.

Weber termed it an “iron cage”, or the process of rationalization replacing values and emotions with

rational and calculated conventions. He ended by posing the question never more relevant than right

now: Will our children have the opportunity to recall the ethical and passionate meaning of work? Will

they care to change their labor to produce things that may outlive their terms of creation?

2. Being and Doing:

It’s a clear day, light soft clouds are moving quickly above, a cool breeze blows across the valley,

in the middle there is a single large hill. It’s rocky in parts jutting this way and that as if trying to be

something more. There is a naked man at the foot; his chest and brow dripping with perspiration. His

hands and shoulders lined with old scars and fresh cuts weeping blood that mingles with the sweat and

dissipates across his torso and forearms. His hands are on a boulder no single man could seemingly

push, he looks like an ant standing next to a magnifying glass. Even with the breeze the air seems still, as

if the area surrounding him was an invisible wall letting nothing living pass. The sun beating down, his

feet set his face stoic. Just before his hands meet the boulder we see the faintest hint of a smile. It’s like

seeing a shadow in our periphery, only at the corner of your eye; if you were to blink you would have

missed it. And then he sets in pushing this ridiculous behemoth of limestone and shale up the hill, it

seems to take weeks, and when he finally gets it to the top [a plateau that isn’t even large enough for

the boulder let alone his feet] it rolls back down the other side, and he dutifully follows to begin again.

We grit our teeth and shift on the balls of our feet uncomfortably for him. It’s like watching a boxing

match that’s gone all wrong, the underdog that doesn’t come back like the movies getting the life

knocked out of him. There is just the horrible sound of contact, raw meat hitting the floor, the loss of

pride and blood. So why the smile, what could possibly be enjoyable about being punished by the Gods

to an eternity of toil, pain, futility? Albert Camus wrote the “Myth of Sisyphus” during a time when like

the religious split discussed above the western world had hit another fork in the road, but this time it

was about essence vs. existence. Either humanity was created by a great artisan and thus has purpose,

or there is no artisan and it is up to us not just as a society but as individuals to create the meaning in

our own lives. In Camus’s metaphor, Sisyphus smiles because he’s aware of his futility and thus can use

that awareness to his advantage. He can pay attention to the clouds, or the way the boulder feels on his

hands or the sun on his brow. He can choose to make the task about anything he wants and thus

through this process can find relief from the shackles of life, work, and death. Camus argues not to live

in delusion or evasion but to accept the absurdity of futility and in so many words, to shove on anyway.

He was dealing with what we described earlier, a world where the lack of purpose in our work had failed

us, but to understand this truly we have to go back to the start. And the start of Western inquiry is most

notably authored by Aristotle and his own study of final causes or teleology.

Aristotle lived in a terra-centric universe where all things were in a state of potentiality working

towards actuality via a purposeful momentum begun by the prime mover. In this way cause is not

temporally asymmetrical, A doesn’t always come before B. In modernity we live by Humean causality

[cause and effect]. We move from A to B where A is always different than B and always precedes it. The

past manifests the future in the present, wherein Aristotelian causality the future [actuality] pulls the

past into the present by its desire towards the eternal. This is a thing’s telos: to seek the eternal. This

telos or purpose is one of four causes by which he believed we can know a thing: “Men do not know a

thing til they have grasped the ‘why’ of which is to grasp its primary cause.” However it is important to

know that cause is a word we have affixed, the word he used was aitia meaning explanation. An answer

to a ‘why’ question of which there are always innumerable answers. His four causes were: material,

formal, efficient, and final. The material cause was that which from a thing comes to be [x is what y is

made out of]. The formal was the account of the essence and the parts of the account [x is what it is to

be y] it can best be described as the plan or blueprint of thing, how it stands in relation to other things.

The efficient cause was the source or primary principle of change or stability, the action that

corresponds to its existence [x is what produces y]. Finally, the final cause was something’s end or goal

[x is what y is for]. To put this in perspective we can look at any number of examples he used but for

brevity’s sake let us stick to a table. The table is made out of wood, having 4 legs and a flat top makes it

a table, a carpenter uses tools to make the table, and having a surface suitable for sitting, eating, etc. is

the reason it was made. In order to understand anything past the first two causes we must look at them

dynamically. Material and formal causes explain matter taking on or losing form and what that form is.

Efficient and final causes explain why the changes occured. The carpenter had a plan for making a

product he could sell at a profit, thus he used the tools to manipulate the form of the raw materials into

a table. Yet it is important before we move to place this firmly in context, and to clarify its importance.

Mathew Crawford in his examination of manual work in his book: “Shop Class as Soulcraft” discusses

constructing just such a table from a deeper light: “I once built a mahogany coffee table on which I

spared no expense of effort. At that time I had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet I

imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s

work. I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life, the defects in its execution as well

as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface textured enough that memory and sentiment might

cling to it, in unnoticed accretions. More fundamentally, as Hanna Arendt writes, the durable objects of

use produced by men “give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse

between men and things as well as between men and men.” The reality and reliability of the human

world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by

which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.” We

must take into account that the telos is not simply a word that describes why a thing came to be but the

mechanism by which we understand the meaning in our lives.

For Aristotle all things had a purpose, we could find out what that was through inference. For

artificial things this was external like the carpenter’s plan for the table; however for natural things the

final cause was internal. This wasn’t necessarily a purpose like we define it but a description of the end

of successive developmental change. Thus the form is the end; it’s what it is to be something. The

purpose of a thing is its nature, like a bird to fly, a fish to swim, etc. Aristotle understood that we cannot

know its true purpose but can look towards nature to provide us the tools through example to make

educated guesses. Things in nature for the most part operate through instinct, thus hey happen true to

form. Formal, efficient, and final causes can often have the same answer like in the case of the bird: the

questions what kind of a thing is it, what produced it, and what is it turning into, are all the same thing.

In nature the form exists prior to not as a result of the thing. It isn’t simply a classification by shape, but

function. To say what a natural thing is, is to say what it does. In this way we can begin to look at the

purpose of human beings, and subsequently the work they do. Human beings are the only organism on

the planet that can choose what they do in relation to and often in spite of instinct. For Aristotle man’s

purpose was Eudaimonia or happiness. This wasn’t a happiness in the sense of simple pleasure, but

instead the development of human excellence or flourishing. This is achieved by active contemplation

via rationality. Yet this had an otherworldly quality to it, humans too were striving towards actuality and

thus he while advocating for also diminished the attachment to the natural world. For teleology as

traditionally discussed is an apology for intelligent design. This is most famously described in the story of

the pocket watch found on the beach by a man who had never seen one before thus leading him to

ponder his own creation. So either god created us through work with the intention of being known or he

didn’t and has no interest in our affairs. Both arguments hold in common that if we really knew we

would reach transcendence, thus truly knowing is impossible. But it wasn’t until the enlightenment that

this came full circle.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the question of meaning came back into the western vernacular.

Christianity had previously replaced the philosophical dialectic with a definitive answer: man’s meaning

was both derived from and informed by God. Yet with the rise of classical physics and the parallel

momentum of the “new philosophy” the question was posed yet again. It would make intuitive sense to

believe that the end result of man asking about his meaning again would end in a search for just that,

but surprisingly what happened was quite to the contrary. From the outset of Cartesian doubt, we

began asking ourselves what we knew and how we could know it. This took a great many forms one of

the most important was Hume’s view of causality IE cause and effect, which we discussed earlier. Events

to Hume are necessitated by laws when correlated with a statement of relevant facts. Bertrand Russell

would later state that such laws do not provide the details of the causal process; rather they yield a

“table of correlations” between natural variables. Immanuel Kant took this depiction of perception and

the sensuous reducing it to the phenomenological, or the experienced. He postulated that experience

demands structures such as time, space and causation in order for us to cognitively process it. Thus

what we know is not the world as it actually is but instead what we have internally labeled it. There

would always be a "membrane of transition" between experience and cognition. The underlying world

just like the arbitrary one we placed atop it via convention was a mental construct and thus directly

informed by individual will. To Kant, neither God nor a prime mover followed from experience. And if we

cannot know God then we cannot know his purpose or our own. With Newton and Kepler’s laws of

gravity and motion the universe was painted as inert, the causes of great mysterious forces were

natural, plainly described and easily categorized. Owen Anderson, in his thesis on boredom and the loss

of the final cause describes how Darwin went still further limiting life to efficient causes; a species

wasn’t guided by form or function’s movement towards the eternal but simply the genetic attributes of

survival. He goes on to Marx and Freud defining naturalistic motivation behind societal and individual

organization. Even human desire was reduced to: “non-human patterns; a struggle to overcome

alienated labor, seek pleasure, or overcome repression”. Thus, temporally asymmetrical causation could

be used to describe the universe and everything in it IE the efficient cause. From this moment on living

wasn’t about asking why but what or how. I cannot stress enough how underplayed this paradigm shift

was and is. Before the enlightenment meaning was god’s domain, the minute it became man’s instead

of continuing the pursuit we got distracted by how bright and beautiful progress was. We set out

separating ourselves from it unto an exponential compartmentalization in which the whole picture was

scrapped for parts and fed to specialization. Today we can create nearly anything our heart desires, as

much of it as we could ever want, faster than we ever dreamed, we can trade it, sell it, buy it, share it.

We can explain it, recreate it, and refine it. We can brand it, advertise, and politicize it. We can do all

these things totally and wholly without ever asking the simplest of questions: As free thinking rational

animals should we? Or better stated, should we not?

Two immanent philosophers looked at this very phenomenon in relation to how it had affected

modernity and in specific work. The first was mentioned in a quote earlier, Hanah Arendt. She is most

notably remembered for her assessment on totalitarianism and the holocaust. Arendt was interested in

the fundamental structures of political experience and the conditions that necessitated its existence.

She wrote: “The Human Condition” in an attempt to explore the oscillation between vita contemplativa

[contemplation of the eternal] and vita activa [action as the engaged political life]. Arendt believed that

that the western philosophical traditional had devalued action since antiquity. To approach the

problems she saw coming from a malformed relationship to the vita activa she broke down the human

modality into two distinct parts: Animal Laborans [corresponding to toil that produces consumer goods]

and Homo-Faber [One who’s craft expresses one’s being and creates transcendent satisfaction]. She

argues that the industrial revolution replaced the craftsman with the wage slave, thus we began to

interpret things not by the way we made them but as products for base consumption and the rate and

efficiency of their production. This specialization/division of labor didn’t create a golden age, but instead

forced all to a labor of necessity leading inevitably to Weber’s iron cage. Life is consumption; to

consume you must produce, so life is production. Life becomes overshadowed by labor and its

mechanization diminishes the worker while increasing the amount he is expected to produce, in this

way labor comodifies humanity. The product is replaced with the need for a continuing innovation of

process which becomes the most important form of knowledge. The result of this is a submission to the

procession of history as infinite and therefore on a long enough time line as purposeless. We could only

know what we ourselves made, thus began the move from an ethic based in ontology to one rooted in

epistemology, being becomes process. Thus man turned away from both contemplativa and activa and

withdrew into himself.

She asserted a call back to the vita activa as a solution to the divestment away from

engagement modernity had fostered. She broke the activa into three categories: labor, work, and

action. Labor was life itself or what was necessary for survival, like food or water which was consumed

as fast as it was produced. This leads to futility because it only sustains one’s life until death. There is no

product of labor, much like Camus, she states that the facts of life are birth and death and labor exists

between them. Work for Arendt, in contrast to labor is the byproduct of humans giving shape and

structure to the arbitrary forms used to make sense of the world. Work creates the context in which

social life can unfold. We don’t need Aristotle’s table nor does it exist in nature. Man envisions it in a

piece of wood and manifests it through some level of violence. For Arendt the individual labor or work

of men doesn’t really stand up to time. Thus it’s not death [mortality] but birth [natality] that defines

the human condition, the ability to create new things from existing structure: “Man is free because he is

a beginning”. Arendt’s action is the new, what always happens against the overwhelming odds and laws

of probability. It is what distinguished action from behavior IE something regulated or habituated. An

action however is made in the public realm. A man acting alone would have no morality or at least not

as we know it now. Thus the societal norms engage each action as it is made and either integrate,

disseminate or deconstruct it. The human condition is only paramount in as much as it is plurality. For

Arendt work leads to the action of people coming together to exercise their capacity for agency:

“Freedom is the raison d’etre of politics, and its field of experience is action” Though we must labor out

of necessity, our actions can change human interaction with others and our environment. We live in the

world and perceive it; this perception dictates how we interact not only with it but with each other.

Action was our ability not simply to produce materiality but to seek a dialectically derived truth which

could change cultural ends.

Whereas Arendt looked at how our relationship with work affected being, Ferdinand Toennies

looked at how it affected our interactions with each other. Tonnies believed man was a volitional being;

we will our world into existence. He identified two different types of social organization chronologically

divided by the industrial revolution. He believed that industry didn’t just change how we worked but the

very way we engaged with each other. His metaphor was the feeling you get from an object made with

unique intentions by a specific person verse something made by using an exact formula towards the end

of profit. The first type of social organization he described was the Community or Gemeinschaft. This

was the original condition of perfect unity among human wills. Community is born from family. It is a

balance between leadership and compliance. Obedience is derived from the enjoyment members of the

community experience from their relationships and this motivates them to work harder. It is authority at

the consent of and for the sake of all. The home where blood and proximity authority is exercised

provides the first model for community members. These relationships contribute consensus among its

members which define how work is viewed and participated in. The village is basically a larger

functioning household that provides protection, preserves knowledge/traditions across generations and

organizes labor for the preservation of the common good. The community is the breeding ground for

“natural will” which creates social relationships that grow organically and create tradition. Those

traditions help us use past experience to frame future experience as an accumulative unfolding. Human

beings come to know and cherish what they believe the community values as good. They choose

willingly to contribute to furthering the community’s welfare. Natural will directs members to desire

specific ends at the out cost of putting all things aside and the upshot of compelling them to overcome

any obstacles presented. This is what allows for a community’s values to be expressed across time.

Toennie’s example is the youth that decides to become a local police officer, teacher, or priest so as to

give back and perpetuate the common good. It was a way for the individual to embody values more

permanent than the life of a single human being.

In contrast to this was the society or Gesellscaft. This was born from an aggregate of humans

bound by transaction. In the community a member’s skill or trade would be used as a literal exchange of

value. When money was created, it by nature was an arbitrary value both systematizing and organizing

but also removing how the person was directly linked to their work. Members were now linked solely to

a consensual denomination. In the society it is for the good of the self not the whole. The worker sells

his labor to a merchant who makes a profit of that labor as a commodity to a third party. The process

becomes wholly utilitarian, the means to an end. The worker ceases to be engaged in craft, is simply

preforming a job at the bequest of a contract. Their work then is gauged against the expectation of time

and output, and the contract holder will expect to cash in on the productivity as profit. If the worker is

not contributing to the increase of that profit they will be deemed expendable. The worker moves from

being a subject to an object. This creates a cognitive dissonance between man’s conceptions of his work

as an expression of his will. Industry determines man’s worth based on the number of workers available

to the contract holder and their ability to maximize that holder’s profit. This mental climate is conducive

to what Toennie’s deemed “rational will” or to think and act only in relation to the immediate future. It

is a system that dehumanizes itself, as all indubitably consequentialist methods do. By breaking down all

factors and applying a set value to each outcome, decision making inevitably becomes nothing save a

cost/benefit analysis. In Society a person’s underlying values are not a reflection of his community but

only his personal goals. There is no urge towards continuity or tradition, we only need look at

technologies effect on many indigenous youth and their relation to the traditional knowledge that will

be lost if they take no interest in it to illustrate this. Toennie’s aim was to find a balance between both

community and society as well as natural and rational will. He encourages people to become “authors”

of their own lives. Authorship he writes: “aggregates and amalgamates communal, societal, and

personal values into a process rather than a power struggle.” Work is communally a duty through which

each contributes to the common good. He believed that acting in response to and seeking the

flourishing of the community as an end made work rewarding. He looks back to the Roman communitas

where citizenship was about having the “right stuff” and exemplifying communal values as opposed to

following laws based on acknowledged consequences. It’s about what you were doing not what you

weren’t. In the end he believed the glue that holds all types of social organizations together is how the

power of will and action shape human interdependence. “Will is the human binding agent, and the most

identifiable form of will, is one’s work.”

3. Sine labore nihi:

In Alchemy the ultimate end more important than and necessary for the transmutation of base metals into gold, is a purification of the self. The journey towards an axis point of the many selves we present to others, and ourselves. It is both a charge and warning to and for the initiate that this is not a process to be undertaken frivolously. Just as Dante passes the threshold into the underworld so too must man accept that to know thyself is to acknowledge a great many demons. Eliphas Levi, one of the first modern magicians described it thus: “The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.” In each of us there is good kindling, fresh flint, and the possibility for flame. All that’s required is the proper application of friction. I think he would agree with Alexander Pope’s heed: “die of nothing, save the rage to live.” Just as Toennies pointed out, there is no greater expression of individual will than our work. With the right eyes we can see our lives and choices as an unfolding of that will. We each are given a choice to take assessment of who we really are, and from that swirling pool of possibility and potential much like Luther’s vocation, choose to refine what “calls” to us. I read a book when I was young, a novel by an author who in recent years has come under some pretty heavy scrutiny. The book was “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand, and in it there are a great many fallacies, prejudices and misconceptions just as there are in nearly every book of the human cannon. And while I do not advocate or even agree with many of her ideas, I believe in the heart of what is written there, which is a strong and able protagonist who lives his life by a code. In it is one of the most eloquent and explicit depictions of the passionate and dedicated life I have ever encountered. In the opening pages, a young architect who knows himself and what he believes is being let go by a school who would ask him to work against those beliefs. In response he says: “I have, let's say sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find joy only if I do the work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards.” Those standards are the borderlands between meaning and chaos. For truly to ask what work is, is also to what end, and thus purpose we undertake it. It is to ask if there can be meaning in the universe and thus inevitably what that may be. In the previous pages I have outlined first the religious history of how we formed the western

work ethic, one that was meant to be both a distraction and a ticket to salvation. We moved then to an

inquiry of work in relation to the final cause and what effect that had both on the individual and society.

I have let most of the thinkers cited here speak for themselves both in their criticisms and solutions, and

so now likewise I turn to my own. As described from the enlightenment on following the loss of the final

cause the nature of work became wholly epistemological IE moving from a focus on being to process.

Thus the question remains, what are the long term costs of taking the guiding question of purpose out

of the dialectic? I cannot stress enough here the fallacy of believing apples are oranges or that square

pegs can fit into round holes. I would in fact argue that taking the why questions out of science and

replacing them with hows based on reductionism was the single most detrimental choice in the history

of mankind. To leave only the efficient cause as an adequate stopping point is to blatantly invite a

vacuum. It’s like taking a drug addicts supply and replacing it with placebo, putting your faith on the

dependency being ”fooled” into believing everything’s the same. It’s to invite base consumerism and

entertainment, gluttonous excess and environmental degradation to become our new distractions, our

new tickets to salvation. But we know better, in every breath we know that our feet are resting on a

sphere that’s spinning at thousands of miles per hour hurtling round a burning star in a solar system and

thus universe so infinite we cannot begin to fathom it. And the distractions inevitably fail us, because

our instincts scream the truth, there is no such thing as a free ride: Sine labore nihi: nothing without

work. It is hardwired into every neuron to search out the meaning in our lives, and to know that that

meaning comes most often in the times of struggle that demand the best from us, that push us to

problem solve and apply what we have learned: not simply to “do”, but to do so creatively. The

question then becomes not what the effect has been but instead how can we find adequate answers

that fulfill not just transcendent but practical problems? If experience fails us, if we cannot know the

world as it really is, then what can we know?

As stated earlier, Empiricism claims that experience cannot inform us about God, or give a true

account of the world as it actually is. However, instead of scrapping the pursuit we can reevaluate the

question. We can ask if this is indeed the proper application of empiricism, or if another modality might

better suit our aims? Don’t get me wrong, I do not advocate for a solely deductive truth. I propose

instead that we rely on inference balanced with intuition. There are things we instinctively know to be

true that can reinforce and enrich the empirical laws that govern our world. These “instinctive” truths

can in fact take them places they need to go. By attempting a Cartesian “restart” as it were [without the

division], we can realign ourselves formally with the underlying reality on which that form depends. So

what can we know? What is infallible? Aside from the fundamental forces of the universe, few things are

as solid as the laws of thermodynamics. We know that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; we

know that systems tend towards entropy and that that entropy will eventually rest at zero. This gives us

the beginning strokes of a portrait for the universe that we live in, one that by our own existence allows

for an infinite variety of creative outcomes. So many in fact that even Douglas Adam’s super computer

couldn’t wholly calculate them all. To go a step further, in the 19th century the Heisenberg uncertainty

principle established that the most fundamental building blocks of our universe were inherently

temporally symmetric. In other words using perfectly elastic particles we can successfully extrapolate

from the present both to the past as well as the future. Thus even though we are culturally conditioned

to think of time in terms of past to present it’s actually a relative phenomenon. Pierre-Simon Laplace,

picking up where Aristotle left off asserts that the universe does indeed contain both the potentiality

and actuality of any given object in all directions, temporal or otherwise. In short this statement

removes the efficient cause as sufficient to explain how the emission of a quantum particle may be

conditioned by the circumstances of its absorption. This is just a highly specialized way of saying that the

future can have just as much effect on the past as vice versa, our very perception of an object can affect

its action. But more than this it invites us to re-examine the battle between idealism [the world is a

construct of the mind] and materialism [consciousness is simply a product of matter and energy]. If we

can affect the way events take place it would follow that those events can likewise affect us. The

classical solution to this is dualism [there is both matter and mind] but still there is so much more to this

debate than can be quantified, let alone the questions around how they interact. Here again we run up

against the limitations of our cognitive, sensory and even imaginative faculties. Quantum physics affirms

the underlying truth that when it comes right down to it, at the end of the day after all the empirical

facts are weighed, tallied and applied, we really have no idea what’s going on. However, instead of

letting what we can’t know determine who we are why not let what we can know guide our meaning. I

assert that we can look to a neo-teleology to help us deal with the implications of this. It can blaze new

paths towards both a joyous and responsible future via the construction of congruent forms.

What we can know, not necessarily empirically but intuitively is that all things across

time do seek the infinite. Because the question isn’t: “what compels motion?” but instead: “What are

the creative implications for energy in a closed system?” All things may change form but they consist of

one continuous stream of energy. Thermodynamics set the tone for the cyclical patterned interactions

of the natural world that follow IE the carbon, food, and water cycles. Arendt believed that the human

condition was [at least in as long as we are earth bound] predicated by its context and more importantly

by what’s happening within it. If function can give us form, why can’t it give us meaning? The proper

function of an animal at the top of the food chain is stewardship; any other choice leads to extinction.

This isn’t simply reliant on instinct when reason is involved. We must CHOOSE to survive. That choice is

the path to meaning, just as Toennies claimed: we will our world into existence. I think maybe what he

meant by world, is more properly labeled meaning, not simply by creation but acknowledgement. It

stands that the final cause of each human being is ultimately individual, based on human nature in its

relation and interaction with experience. I assert here that whether God exists or not, our telos is joy, or

better stated, Aristotle’s Eudaimonia. I know of nothing more useful to rationally attain it than

congruence through environmental dialog. I know of no better personification of joy than work. Gibran

said it best: “You work that you may keep peace with the earth and the soul of the earth. For to be idle

is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty

and proud submission towards the infinite.” Our choice then is whether we acknowledge and act on our

ability to overcome irrational axioms and heuristics derived from hollow convention. In moving past

these, we can both acknowledge and create the meaning in our lives, one that mirrors the meaning so

evident throughout the cosmos.

To do this we must recognize that to seek meaning is actually to seek the joy inherent in it. That

joy is found through work in general and the creativity achieved after mastery in specific, both of the self

and the world. I want to clarify that I don’t mean perfection, nor do I mean one should endeavor to

“master” the world, instead what we attempt to master is our effect on it and how well our actions align

with those same natural cycles. This then can’t be just any work; it must be the work chosen as Friedrich

Schiller notes, when we are free, or in other words a work that takes telos to heart. Thus an ontological

work ethic is in order, one that brings action back into dialog with meaning. This is how we create new

feedback loops, so that convention is informed by balance and thus feeds back into cultural creation. By

holding to an ethic that is deeply informed by and congruent with the natural cycles of the animate

landscape not only will we flourish but will do so as an integrated living system.

I suggest that we begin to bring the why back into our daily lives. If we begin an endeavor

by first asking what the end of that action is not only will our goals be more effectively reached but we

will feel an honest joy in achieving them. To do this we must break away from the work/leisure

dichotomy, where work is associated with drudgery and leisure freedom. We must ask why Joe Smith

gets up at 3am on Saturday morning full of energy, wholly alert and engaged for his weekly hunting trip

but can’t ever seem to get out of bed during the week for his 9 to 5. Work is any of the million things we

openly choose to invest energy into. When a person does good work, when they foster and hone a skill,

something they truly love to do and can offer that skill or product you have the foundation for the most

beautiful moment in life: the feeling of competence and efficacy forged though personal

acknowledgement of ability and tempered by the same in and with others. To undertake the equivalent

exchange of value for value is how we learn real and healthy pride, not one rooted in arrogance but self-

respect. It is the foundation for all functional relationships, and the cornerstone for building lasting

community. We must begin not only to bring the why back, but to connect it to legacy both as

individuals and communities. What are the effects of our actions across time? Legacy is how we emplace

ourselves where we are, how we build the reference points both physically and mentally to remind us

who we are and who we’re becoming. Work is legacy’s tool to do this, as well as how it records time. We

frame our lives by the pivotal decisions we’ve made. And how impossible would it be to think of those

without also accounting for the work done to make them. Those men sitting on that beam 69 floors

above the skyline, they weren’t just there by chance. They understood that you get what you put in. Our

work not as westerners but rational creatures isn’t just about money or culture, sometimes it’s not even

about the specific job we’re doing, it’s about how and why we’re doing it. Work is the way we choose to

invest in our own lives and thus the world. I know of no greater signifier of a man’s emotional state than

looking at his work ethic. Craftsmanship is more than just a way to describe how something has been

made; it is a direct extension of character. If humanity is to survive the coming changes in its

environment it will be because of men and women who honor competence and efficacy over

convenience and impulse. If you are to make a life for yourself in that world, it will be by the

effectiveness of the creativity that struggle demands of you. A struggle that will charge us not simply to

survive but to flourish, to find the work that lights up our being, and sets fire to our hearts. I have been

asked often what is true; of the many things to call into question I have come to put my faith in the

simplest of things. I believe in the sweat on my brow, the dirt under my nails and the smile on my face

[boulder or otherwise]. But if I had to start from scratch, if I could take nothing else with me, it would be

only five simple words: you reap what you sow.