The Invention of Work Quotes

“Augustine’s acknowledgement toward the genius of the damned presages what only later becomes a hallmark of Catholic theology, the adage that grace perfects nature and does not destroy it. The futility of our natural powers only gains its requisite dignity with the order given to it by God, not by the arbitration of our fallen wills or a lust for death shared with lifeless machines. The bourgeois affinity for parochial labor and the polity’s need for mobilization both resound in the twilight of antiquity, when Augustine reads in Virgil’s Georgics the same poetic condescension and misplaced praise. Labor properly so called belongs to the free man and in fact makes a man free. Salvation, like work, both sets us free and enrolls us in the civic responsibility of a polity. Work, like salvation, enjoys both a metaphysical and an economic status.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Repetition resembles even the foundations of all reality, the productivity of the Holy Trinity, which St. John Damascene describes in the language of imaging: “The Son is the Father's image, and the Spirit the Son's, through which Christ dwelling in man makes him after his own image.” To despise this facet of reality echoes the Lacanian “solid hatred addressed to being,” and depicts even God as subject to ennui before a kenotic descent.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Rawls’ hallmark “veil of ignorance” deals with unfairness as a moral failure on part of a social contract’s members. The “original position” to work as an hypothesis requires decoupling from everything concrete, and furthermore remanding everything concrete to economic and social (i.e. economic) outcomes. Intended as a thought experiment, Rawls has become the chief metaphysician for liberal democracies.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Employers conversely view the work of their employees, and the employees themselves, as a thing that belongs to them as a personal possession. This extends beyond some notion that workers have sold their labor or their “time” to the employer. Employers in practice completely own a worker during a designated period of work, and measure this ownership according to time. This is why time is managed and not the quantity or quality of tasks completed. The manner by which time is managed is similar to inventory management. When a worker fails to offer himself up for the designated hours, even despite the possibility of circumstances outside his control, the worker is expected to “make up” the time lost, much like reparations paid to an employer for stolen goods. Employers handle “lost hours” as part of loss prevention for physical products. The worker’s skills, ignobly called “human capital,” comports to an employer’s existing technologies for this reason: workers themselves become capital, and capital supports other capital through modification.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“While Europe appears to maintain more reticence embracing it, in America there is no question that work can only be discussed as a secular sacrament, with all the indignity one might expect from such a degrading genus. The Protestant qualifier to Protestant work ethic long ago dissipated, leaving the peculiarly American artifact of viewing one’s wages as a moral reward, one’s continuous employment as a state of grace and one’s retirement as an earthly paradise merited by one’s good works.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Whereas the received Law of revelation emboldens the Jewish mystic, the true materialist substitutes for Torah practical law or technology—technique, τέχνη. This positions the materialist over the cosmos, not as a member of the cosmos. Materialism always masks an underlying existentialism, and existentialism contains the inevitable character of process and arbitration. This finds the cosmos in need of fixing, in need of work, and for intelligence to act upon it and master it to that end: the divine coming into itself through work. The goal of existentialism, then, is work: as wages are compensation for toil, writ large is the universal tragedy whose last act, its redemption—its “payday”—is yet to come. Where our everyday work finds its necessity is in the cosmic Work whereby the ultimate meaning, the Sublime and the Divine, enters into the world once humanity organizes its rampant chaos.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Technology, it must be recognized, is not a solitary track of advancement. It is not a prefigured path which manifests in time, nor a hard-coded progression in which technologies unlock over time with sufficient resources and research. Each technology has an explicit purpose, operating conditions and set of skills that make certain human activities possible or more convenient. Technological progress is thus open-ended.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Work, thence identified as consistent, indefinite and systematic remunerative labor, foists its demands upon the employee and not the employer.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Work as a metaphysical act, the very “act of being” must be distinguished from labor; work as a remunerative economic invention must be distinguished from subsistence.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work