/lit/ - Literature

Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work's sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man's center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one's inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work's tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality.
>As long as faith was enough for the honor and dignity of human beings, no objection could be made against any work, however strenuous, if it only did not hinder a person in his faith. However, now that everyone is supposed to develop himself into a human being, relegating human beings to machine-like work amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker has to make himself dead tired for twelve hours and more, he is kept from becoming a human being. All work should have the aim of satisfying the person. Therefore, he must also become a master in it, i.e., be able to create it as a totality. One who only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, etc., in a pin factory, works mechanically, like a machine; he remains a dabbler, doesn’t become a master; his work cannot satisfy him, it can only tire him out. Taken for itself, his work is nothing, has no purpose in itself is nothing complete in itself; he only works into another’s hand, and is used (exploited) by this other.