People At Work: Demystifying the Meaning and Value of Work in Light of Ethical Freedom

This philosophical study is an investigation into the role of work for good human lives. Work is
here conceptualized as the basic activity of devoting energy toward intentionally changing
material, mental, social, or political worlds. Work is key to an active rather than passive life: it
enables learning, self-actualization, and building, maintaining, and innovating relationships,
communities, and environments. I propose an existentialist interpretation and affirmation of the
importance of work by bringing it into conversation with ideas from Simone de Beauvoir’s The
Ethics of Ambiguity (1948). I discuss work as a subject-directed activity, the meaning and value
of which is an ongoing construction by ethically-free subjects in a shared world. I interpret the
ascetic work ethic analyzed in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1905) as a spirit of seriousness: it misrepresents work’s meaning and value as given. I argue
Kathi Weeks’ post-work project, advanced in her monograph The Problem with Work:
Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011), wrongly forecloses
work’s liberatory potential by narrowly conceiving of work as wage labor and by dismissing
productivity wholesale. I argue that this conclusion is reductive and fails to account for the
meaning-producing dimensions of work, as articulated by the existential approach in which work
is not taken too seriously, as an important contribution to living a good human life.