Joshua Richter's elegant reading of Heidegger gives us something rare in philosophy of work: a phenomenological account grounded in how activity actually feels to the person doing it. His diagnosis — that commodification abstracts labor away from its situated meaning — is one I find deeply congruent with my own work, though I come at it from a different direction.
In Tragedy & Work, I argue that the defining wound of modern work is not merely the abstraction of labor-power, but the systematic destruction of what I call craft identity — the worker's sense that their competence matters to an outcome they can see and claim. Richter's teacher, redirected from genuine student engagement toward measurable metrics, is not simply alienated in Marx's sense. She has been institutionally redesigned — her role restructured so that the old way of operating (responsive, situated teaching) becomes invisible and uncredited, while the new way (metric production) becomes the only legible form of contribution.
This is where I would push Richter's workplace democracy proposal. Democratic voice is necessary but insufficient. Workers can be given voice in institutions specifically designed to neutralize that voice — a dynamic Carroll Quigley called instrument capture and Russell Ackoff called mess management. The teacher may win a seat at the table and still face a table whose design rewards abstraction over responsiveness.
In Humane Economics, I extend this argument: meaningful work requires not just democratic participation but power-aware institutional design — structures that actively make extraction costly and responsiveness rewarding. Heidegger shows us what we've lost. The harder question, which Richter gestures toward but does not answer, is: what design produces a workplace where situated judgment is the thing that gets you promoted?
That's the work still ahead of all of us.
— Gregory Sparzo, Tragedy & Work | Humane Economics (forthcoming)
I am admittedly not one well-read in phenomenology, but I believe there to be a parallel in something I've read in an adjacent text. Specifically, the idea that the specialization of labor post-industrial revolution has separated a human's work from their worth.
The "specialist" is someone who has handed over responsibility for most of life to other specialists. The eater no longer knows the grower; the grower no longer knows the soil as a living thing but as an input; health is delegated to doctors, food to corporations, thought to academics. Each specialist does one thing efficiently and is ignorant of, or indifferent to, the consequences of that thing on the surrounding whole. This produces a person who is competent in one narrow slot and dependent/helpless everywhere else.
Labor becomes something done for a wage in one compartment of life, while meaning, care, household, and place are supposed to happen in some other compartment. This division is false and harmful, in his (and my) view.
His ending point is this: Good work is work in which the doer can see and take responsibility for the effects, work connected to a place and a community, and a standard of care that isn't purely economic.
I can't help but agree with this. While the language may be different between your piece and Berry, the pragmatic result is that people feel disconnected from their work via the abstraction of their labor.
Thank you for writing this phenomenological exploration of work and meaning. Although I agree that phenomenology is an apt tool to diagnose the seeming degeneracy of social meaning in today's generation of workers, I would reframe the problem slightly differently, perhaps even further invigorating the need for change you presented in III. Democracy.
Using Heidegger's interpretation of meaning from the situated experience, a worker would derive meaning from their work precisely from the lived experience of the work; that is, the accumulated whole of the tasks they perform, the thoughts driving the motivations behind the work they do, the feelings they feel upon doing the work, among other aspects of the experience. I would argue that these phenomenological monads are not absent in a 'commodified' work environment, such as that of the teacher who primarily aims to teach to standardized test scores. Rather, meaning for this teacher is derived from their very experience in improving (or attempting to improve) their class's standardized test scores.
Perhaps not all of us have had the fortune of having been a teacher, but let me demonstrate the example of a student to bring this phenomenological point to life. We all may readily recall the example of the 'pitch perfect' student who, fighting against the torrents of the unwieldy expectations of their parents, is so apt to achieve top-of-the-class grades. Their lives revolve around their ability to master examinations, especially the standardized ones, for which work ethic through hours of practice is rewarded. Their whole meaning of the school experience, practically, then, revolves around their experience in the pursuit of high grades. Their self-esteem is intricately tied to their ability to achieve high grades; their frustrations are voiced against perceived unfairness in the system for grades (e.g., cheating students, students taking easier classes). I would argue this itself is a phenomenology that, for this high-achieving student, is just as real as the phenomenology of a normal student who lives the holistic school experience and derives meaning from its holistic aspect (including the social, athletic, etc.).
What this entails, however, is a system of incentives that drives the lived experience in the first place. This high-achieving student was motivated to dedicate their entire school experience to academics due to the existence (or even perceived existence) of a system that ultimately rewards this behavior: good grades = good college = good work = good life. Taking Heidegger's supposition that meaning is derived from the lived experience itself, this implies that the system presupposes phenomenology. That is, in a classic chicken-and-egg fashion, the system came first, helping design the behaviors of the student that would ultimately lead to their phenomenology. Even if the student refused to submit to the idea that their meaning is derived from this flawed system of good grades = good life, the existence of this system helped motivate their behavior, which ultimately shaped their phenomenology.
This is where I would agree with the point made by fellow commenter Gregory Sparzo, in which he argues that democratic voice is insufficient. The more relevant question for me is how we can rethink the institutional system that shapes behavior in the first place. Presumably, the student had full autonomy in shaping their school experience, and out of this liberty was born their decision to dedicate their life to becoming an academic weapon. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a separate discussion. But what is clear is that the phenomenology of this 'commodified' student is vastly different than that of the student partaking a Humboldtian vision of education.
Richter’s Heideggerian analysis explains convincingly why meaningful work is experienced as participation in a shared practice rather than simply earning a wage. But I think there’s an even deeper story underneath it.
Evolution didn’t design us for contentment. It optimized for reproduction, not happiness. The consequence is that our motivational systems rarely allow us to stay satisfied for long. Up to now that wasn’t much of a problem because our environments imposed our goals. You can’t spend much time wondering about the meaning of life when survival itself supplied the day’s purpose. “Work” was how our goal-seeking psychology found direction.
If that’s right, the promise of AI raises a real concern. In many ways this shift is already well underway. Marx saw how work could become alienated and Richter argues convincingly that meaningful work has increasingly been reduced to labour and wages. AI may simply take the next step. Suppose the optimistic forecasts come true and machines remove most forms of necessary work altogether. A post-work utopia may not feel particularly utopian. We may discover that employment was never the thing we actually needed. What we actually need are demanding forms of purposeful activity.
The other thing AI won’t change is human nature. We’ll still seek status, form tribes, compete for recognition and look for purpose. Those motivations evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and they won’t disappear because we invented better machines. If meaningful work disappears without anything equally demanding replacing it those motives won’t disappear. They’ll simply find new outlets and not all of them will be desirable.
So I wonder whether the central question is really how to distribute the wealth AI creates. It may be how to build a society and institutions that continue to give us meaning and worthwhile things to strive for.
After rereading the quote you included at the beginning, I think the idea clicked into place for me a bit more. In the same way that we hear a sound and immediately recognize its source, not just as an abstract noise, maybe the most meaningful jobs are the ones where we can more immediately connect with the “purpose” of the work.
While your teacher example works well to clearly illustrate your point, I find it a bit soft in terms of how far removed the work is from its meaning. I think (or at least would hope) that most teachers operate more from the mindset of “teach these students what they need to succeed” rather than “teach them to pass a standardized test.” And if that’s not the case, it still seems like a relatively subtle shift to move back into that more meaningful mindset. A more dramatic example might be an office worker at a manufacturing company. While that person can intellectually connect their work to the company’s success, and in turn to the satisfaction of a consumer who buys the product, on a day-to-day level it seems much less likely that they immediately identify with that “purpose” in their work. The connection feels more distant and abstract.
With this in mind, I am wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on how the democratization of the workplace can bring more meaning to these more distant forms of work. Even if the person who balances budgets or manages payroll has more of a say in how they perform their job, it still seems very distant from the broader purpose of their work, in this case the production of what ever their company manufactures. Maybe you could say that they find meaning in the purpose of their immediate tasks, like making sure everyone gets paid or helping coworkers understand what resources are available. But if that is the case, wouldn’t that meaning have already been there? I love it if you could help me better understand this part of your argument.
Enjoyed reading this, Joshua!
Joshua Richter's elegant reading of Heidegger gives us something rare in philosophy of work: a phenomenological account grounded in how activity actually feels to the person doing it. His diagnosis — that commodification abstracts labor away from its situated meaning — is one I find deeply congruent with my own work, though I come at it from a different direction.
In Tragedy & Work, I argue that the defining wound of modern work is not merely the abstraction of labor-power, but the systematic destruction of what I call craft identity — the worker's sense that their competence matters to an outcome they can see and claim. Richter's teacher, redirected from genuine student engagement toward measurable metrics, is not simply alienated in Marx's sense. She has been institutionally redesigned — her role restructured so that the old way of operating (responsive, situated teaching) becomes invisible and uncredited, while the new way (metric production) becomes the only legible form of contribution.
This is where I would push Richter's workplace democracy proposal. Democratic voice is necessary but insufficient. Workers can be given voice in institutions specifically designed to neutralize that voice — a dynamic Carroll Quigley called instrument capture and Russell Ackoff called mess management. The teacher may win a seat at the table and still face a table whose design rewards abstraction over responsiveness.
In Humane Economics, I extend this argument: meaningful work requires not just democratic participation but power-aware institutional design — structures that actively make extraction costly and responsiveness rewarding. Heidegger shows us what we've lost. The harder question, which Richter gestures toward but does not answer, is: what design produces a workplace where situated judgment is the thing that gets you promoted?
That's the work still ahead of all of us.
— Gregory Sparzo, Tragedy & Work | Humane Economics (forthcoming)
Great read.
I am admittedly not one well-read in phenomenology, but I believe there to be a parallel in something I've read in an adjacent text. Specifically, the idea that the specialization of labor post-industrial revolution has separated a human's work from their worth.
The "specialist" is someone who has handed over responsibility for most of life to other specialists. The eater no longer knows the grower; the grower no longer knows the soil as a living thing but as an input; health is delegated to doctors, food to corporations, thought to academics. Each specialist does one thing efficiently and is ignorant of, or indifferent to, the consequences of that thing on the surrounding whole. This produces a person who is competent in one narrow slot and dependent/helpless everywhere else.
Labor becomes something done for a wage in one compartment of life, while meaning, care, household, and place are supposed to happen in some other compartment. This division is false and harmful, in his (and my) view.
His ending point is this: Good work is work in which the doer can see and take responsibility for the effects, work connected to a place and a community, and a standard of care that isn't purely economic.
I can't help but agree with this. While the language may be different between your piece and Berry, the pragmatic result is that people feel disconnected from their work via the abstraction of their labor.
Thank you for writing this phenomenological exploration of work and meaning. Although I agree that phenomenology is an apt tool to diagnose the seeming degeneracy of social meaning in today's generation of workers, I would reframe the problem slightly differently, perhaps even further invigorating the need for change you presented in III. Democracy.
Using Heidegger's interpretation of meaning from the situated experience, a worker would derive meaning from their work precisely from the lived experience of the work; that is, the accumulated whole of the tasks they perform, the thoughts driving the motivations behind the work they do, the feelings they feel upon doing the work, among other aspects of the experience. I would argue that these phenomenological monads are not absent in a 'commodified' work environment, such as that of the teacher who primarily aims to teach to standardized test scores. Rather, meaning for this teacher is derived from their very experience in improving (or attempting to improve) their class's standardized test scores.
Perhaps not all of us have had the fortune of having been a teacher, but let me demonstrate the example of a student to bring this phenomenological point to life. We all may readily recall the example of the 'pitch perfect' student who, fighting against the torrents of the unwieldy expectations of their parents, is so apt to achieve top-of-the-class grades. Their lives revolve around their ability to master examinations, especially the standardized ones, for which work ethic through hours of practice is rewarded. Their whole meaning of the school experience, practically, then, revolves around their experience in the pursuit of high grades. Their self-esteem is intricately tied to their ability to achieve high grades; their frustrations are voiced against perceived unfairness in the system for grades (e.g., cheating students, students taking easier classes). I would argue this itself is a phenomenology that, for this high-achieving student, is just as real as the phenomenology of a normal student who lives the holistic school experience and derives meaning from its holistic aspect (including the social, athletic, etc.).
What this entails, however, is a system of incentives that drives the lived experience in the first place. This high-achieving student was motivated to dedicate their entire school experience to academics due to the existence (or even perceived existence) of a system that ultimately rewards this behavior: good grades = good college = good work = good life. Taking Heidegger's supposition that meaning is derived from the lived experience itself, this implies that the system presupposes phenomenology. That is, in a classic chicken-and-egg fashion, the system came first, helping design the behaviors of the student that would ultimately lead to their phenomenology. Even if the student refused to submit to the idea that their meaning is derived from this flawed system of good grades = good life, the existence of this system helped motivate their behavior, which ultimately shaped their phenomenology.
This is where I would agree with the point made by fellow commenter Gregory Sparzo, in which he argues that democratic voice is insufficient. The more relevant question for me is how we can rethink the institutional system that shapes behavior in the first place. Presumably, the student had full autonomy in shaping their school experience, and out of this liberty was born their decision to dedicate their life to becoming an academic weapon. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a separate discussion. But what is clear is that the phenomenology of this 'commodified' student is vastly different than that of the student partaking a Humboldtian vision of education.
Richter’s Heideggerian analysis explains convincingly why meaningful work is experienced as participation in a shared practice rather than simply earning a wage. But I think there’s an even deeper story underneath it.
Evolution didn’t design us for contentment. It optimized for reproduction, not happiness. The consequence is that our motivational systems rarely allow us to stay satisfied for long. Up to now that wasn’t much of a problem because our environments imposed our goals. You can’t spend much time wondering about the meaning of life when survival itself supplied the day’s purpose. “Work” was how our goal-seeking psychology found direction.
If that’s right, the promise of AI raises a real concern. In many ways this shift is already well underway. Marx saw how work could become alienated and Richter argues convincingly that meaningful work has increasingly been reduced to labour and wages. AI may simply take the next step. Suppose the optimistic forecasts come true and machines remove most forms of necessary work altogether. A post-work utopia may not feel particularly utopian. We may discover that employment was never the thing we actually needed. What we actually need are demanding forms of purposeful activity.
The other thing AI won’t change is human nature. We’ll still seek status, form tribes, compete for recognition and look for purpose. Those motivations evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and they won’t disappear because we invented better machines. If meaningful work disappears without anything equally demanding replacing it those motives won’t disappear. They’ll simply find new outlets and not all of them will be desirable.
So I wonder whether the central question is really how to distribute the wealth AI creates. It may be how to build a society and institutions that continue to give us meaning and worthwhile things to strive for.
In my view: a life mission chosen by the individual rather than by God
After rereading the quote you included at the beginning, I think the idea clicked into place for me a bit more. In the same way that we hear a sound and immediately recognize its source, not just as an abstract noise, maybe the most meaningful jobs are the ones where we can more immediately connect with the “purpose” of the work.
While your teacher example works well to clearly illustrate your point, I find it a bit soft in terms of how far removed the work is from its meaning. I think (or at least would hope) that most teachers operate more from the mindset of “teach these students what they need to succeed” rather than “teach them to pass a standardized test.” And if that’s not the case, it still seems like a relatively subtle shift to move back into that more meaningful mindset. A more dramatic example might be an office worker at a manufacturing company. While that person can intellectually connect their work to the company’s success, and in turn to the satisfaction of a consumer who buys the product, on a day-to-day level it seems much less likely that they immediately identify with that “purpose” in their work. The connection feels more distant and abstract.
With this in mind, I am wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on how the democratization of the workplace can bring more meaning to these more distant forms of work. Even if the person who balances budgets or manages payroll has more of a say in how they perform their job, it still seems very distant from the broader purpose of their work, in this case the production of what ever their company manufactures. Maybe you could say that they find meaning in the purpose of their immediate tasks, like making sure everyone gets paid or helping coworkers understand what resources are available. But if that is the case, wouldn’t that meaning have already been there? I love it if you could help me better understand this part of your argument.
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