One of the most obvious forms of meaning of life is perhaps work. More than ever, we want our work to have meaning.
We want to be able to grow in our job, we want to create something and let it flourish, and preferably we want to realize something that lasts.
Although we also work to provide for our livelihood, the emphasis is increasingly on self-development. When we manage to develop ourselves within our work into who we are and what we can and want, our job becomes part of our identity.
As a result, work can also determine our meaning too much. If work is the most important or only form of meaning, we run the risk of ending up in a black hole if we can no longer or are no longer allowed to work.
Only in passing had I heard of that "Black Hole". There was a big chance of ending up there after your retirement. It didn't happen to me.
The first day after the summer vacation of 2008, I didn't get on my bike to go to work. I was now allowed to stay home forever, and that resulted in a very strange experience.
I was busy with all sorts of things, including Second Life, of course. It's a true story, there were days when I really wondered where I had ever found the time to go to work every day.
For many people, their work is the meaning of life. It gives them the opportunity to be who they are and how they want to be. Of course, that also made me think of myself here, myself, Herman Bergson.
In a few more months, I will be 20 years old, and I will be in Second Life. Apart from some health issues and personal moments, I have always been working here, and this is lecture 1185.
I experience my existence and certainly also my virtual existence as meaningful. What I do gives meaning to my life. The most important aspect of this existence is,
both in RL and in SL, that I have always been there in my work from the beginning to the end result. What I mean is this: the carpenter receives the rough wood and gets to work.
And he transforms this wood with his own hands into a beautiful chair or bookcase. If you think about it, to be able to stand in the work process like that is almost a luxury.
But what if the relationship between work and result goes wrong? Instead of a craftsman making a chair from start to finish, he only tightens a screw in a factory.
The end product becomes invisible and any personal satisfaction and fulfillment is impossible. Can you be so proud of your work? Who does not know images of endless production halls with rows of workstations to assemble parts of devices?
This is the result of industrialization in the 19th century, resulting in a working class for whom work meant survival and not meaning of life. This is what Marx called "alienation".
In Marx's theory, alienation is a systematic result of capitalism where workers are separated from the product of their labour.
Workers do not own their labour of the products their work. The fruits of their labour beiong to the capitalists, this causes a sense of estrangement and powerlessness.
Marx believed that workers are alienated from their humanity in a capitolist society because their work does not fulfill their human potential.
He observed four types of alienation: from the product, the working activity itself, oneself as a producer, and from other workers.
In feeling alienated from others and oneself, Marx postulated that the worker was distanced from the essence of what it is to be human: creative, free beings.
Something to think about anno 2025 with its Artificial Intelligence.....
Thank you for your attention... the floor is yours..
Main Sources:
MacMillan The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition
TABLE OF CONTENT -----------------------------------------------------------------
1 - 100 Philosophers 9 May 2009 Start of
2 - 25+ Women Philosophers 10 May 2009 this blog
3 - 25 Adventures in Thinking 10 May 2009
4 - Modern Theories of Ethics 29 Oct 2009
5 - The Ideal State 24 Febr 2010 / 234
6 - The Mystery of the Brain 3 Sept 2010 / 266
7 - The Utopia of the Free Market 16 Febr 2012 / 383
8. - The Aftermath of Neo-liberalism 5 Sept 2012 / 413
9. - The Art Not to Be an Egoist 6 Nov 2012 / 426
10 - Non-Western Philosophy 29 May 2013 / 477
11 - Why Science is Right 2 Sept 2014 / 534
12 - A Philosopher looks at Atheism 1 Jan 2015 / 557
13 - EVIL, a philosophical investigation 17 Apr 2015 / 580
14 - Existentialism and Free Will 2 Sept 2015 / 586
15 - Spinoza 2 Sept 2016 / 615
16 - The Meaning of Life 13 Febr 2017 / 637
17 - In Search of my Self 6 Sept 2017 / 670
18 - The 20th Century Revisited 3 Apr 2018 / 706
19 - The Pessimist 11 Jan 2020 / 819
20 - The Optimist 9 Febr 2020 / 824
21 - Awakening from a Neoliberal Dream 8 Oct 2020 / 872
22 - A World Full of Patterns 1 Apr 2021 / 912
23 - The Concept of Freedom 8 Jan 2022 / 965
24 - Materialism 7 Sept 2022 / 1011
25 - Historical Materialism 5 Oct 2023 / 1088
26 - The Bonobo and the Atheist 9 Jan 2024 / 1102
27 - Artificial Intelligence 9 Feb 2024 / 1108
28 - Why Am I Here 6 Sept 2024 / 1139
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