The Concept of Work

The Concept of Work
The daily life of man is composed of things whose meaning is hidden in the mystery of their familiarity.

Other examples would be love, companionship, sincerity, honor, sport, ennui and community-feeling.

Many would think that those things of familiarity we experience when we speak of honor or of work is not caused by the kind intelligibility which places an object above definition.

Time needs to be defined. Its familiarity is not that of a primary notion, and “work” is immensely farther than “time” from the condition of primary intelligibility.

Being anterior to any definition, however is only one of two causes of indefinability; the other is the lack of essential unity.

A complex whose components are not compromised within one essence cannot be defined.

For instance, it is possible to define the physician, and it is possible to define the singer, but it is possible to define the singer who is also a physician, or the physician who is also a singer.

Thus our second problem is that right now we cannot be sure whether the term “worker: conveys an essence or a mere aggregate of intelligibilities.

Indeed, as Werner Sombart would have it, the word might be without any real meaning, albeit usable it conversation because meanings may be assigned to it at will.

And so all that can be said at this point, even assuming work to be an essence, is that determining the approach from which the intelligible unity of work may be perceived remains a difficult problem.
The Concept of Work