Working in Time: From Barbarism to Repetition
Amber Bowen
Religions August 26, 2021 DOI: 10.3390/rel12080565 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Time Spirituality Michel henry Work Vocation |
| Key points | Argues that reducing time to "clock time" in (post)industrial, profit-driven work suppresses the underlying spirituality of human experience, a condition the author diagnoses, following Michel Henry, as "barbarism." Proposes that phenomenological attention to time as given in cuisine, music, and craftsmanship, together with Kierkegaard's category of repetition, discloses time as constitutive of work and demonstrates the spiritual significance of human vocation. |
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.
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