Biological Ethics

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Chapter 3. The ethics of work

A. Ruiz Retegui

a) Introduction

Spheres of meaning of the term "work".

The word work - or its equivalents - has a remote origin, but its scope of meaning has undergone significant variations throughout history. For this reason, it is not very useful to make etymological analyses. Even today, the meaning of the word is so varied that it does not seem relevant to try to establish a precise definition. This is a certain difficulty, but at the same time it requires a reflection on reality, which is of great interest.

The reason why we avoid taking an exact definition of work as a starting point is that work has in recent centuries become the fundamental reference letter for the understanding of social articulation and thus, especially since Marx, for political activity. As political activity is the most threatened by ideological onslaught, work itself is very often understood from an ideological perspective. In our cultural world, work is a reality that is often mentioned, but is rarely seen in its true reality and its human significance.

This is why we explicitly intend to direct our attention to work in order to capture it as faithfully as possible. It is very likely that our considerations, precisely because they aim to faithfully grasp the broad reality of work, will end up in an organic exhibition that is not perfectly structured. This is not a limitation that should worry us, since the unity of the considerations made in thought should not be sought so much in the mere internal coherence of the intellectual construction as in the coherence with the reality that we are trying to understand.

From a rather descriptive point of view, it can be stated - staying at a very general level - that the multiple meanings of the word work all coincide in having to do with human action. Ordinary language calls "work" a certain subject of human actions, but not all of them. This word is also used to designate the result of the actions that receive this designation (for example, when it is said that a essay is "a good work", or that it is necessary to submit "a work on the thermodynamics of evolution"). Likewise, the object of these human actions is called work (for example, when we say that we have proposed "a work for the weekend").

Not every human activity is called work: there are human actions that are not so called. The delimitation between these two broad types of actions is not easy, and requires more detailed considerations.

The breadth of types of action that are referred to as work brings us back to important and fundamental questions of anthropology of human action and social configuration. The forms of properly human activity are very varied and, at their core, show the diverse characteristics of the human condition1.

As a living corporeal being, man has to carry out activities in which he attends to the "metabolism of life": he eats, washes himself, protects himself from the environment, etc. Within this sphere of human activity there are some actions that are called work and others that are not: eating is a human action that does not qualify as work, but preparing food sometimes does.

In order to carry out these activities, man has reason and hands, which replace the deficiency that man has in relation to the animals as far as instinctive endowment is concerned. Through his reason and his hands, man not only performs these actions in a free, not strictly predetermined way, but he is also capable of using instruments as such, and is therefore also capable of devising and constructing them. This "making instruments" or "making things" is also considered work, sometimes, perhaps most of the time.

Although the name work is common to the two types of activities we have referred to so far, it must be recognised that there is an important difference: although, in principle, the action of making instruments goes in financial aid with the metabolism of life, it is not wholly determined by the demands of that process, nor is it completely submerged in it. The metabolism of life is process, whereas those products manufactured as instruments remain stable alongside the process of life which they support. These stable objects, a permanent expression of the free rationality that has created them, form a stable "world", constituted by objects, permanent things.

The difference between the two types of activities that we have considered is obvious, because the "work" of a cook, a cleaner, or even a doctor, for example, leaves nothing behind: it is an activity that is completely immersed in the life process and, therefore, they are activities that are never finished, just as the life process is never finished. Those who carry out such work cannot show their "work". On the contrary, those who make things that last can show what they have made: an architect or a writer, by being able to show a stable work, achieves a dimension in their activity that did not appear in the previous case.

We still find a third subject of activities that are also called work, although they appear very distant from the previous ones. These are the activities that derive not simply from the metabolic-corporal character of man's life, but from its plural character. Indeed, the plural condition is not accidental for man, and his life is not simply life "together" with other men, but in the profound sense, which we have seen in the previous chapter, it is truly "living together". The plural condition is the basis of specific and varied activities, some of which are sometimes called work. Thus the activities ordered to the very organisation of human plurality, which is not, as in "social" animals - bees, etc. - predetermined by nature, and requires the intelligent and free activity of man, are usually called work. work are in this sense the activities of politicians, rulers, economists, jurists, etc. There are also other human activities which, without being ordered to the organisation of plurality, have their raison d'être in human plurality, such as the multiple forms of educational activities. work in this sense is the activity of the teacher, and that of the disciple. However, the activity of parents educating their children is not usually called work. Some human activities that arise directly from plurality, such as walking and talking with friends, participating in collective games, etc. are not in principle called work.

Social sense of work: the profession

In the previous paragraph we have underlined the expressions sometimes, sometimes, usually, in principle, because they show that the considerations made on a level of reflection that we could call individual or abstractly essential, are insufficient when compared with the consideration that is made of them in the coexistence between men as expressed in ordinary language.

In fact, the human activity of conversing with friends is not generally considered work , but the friendly chat of the teacher with the disciple who comes to consult him or with his colleagues is usually considered work in the corresponding field. Only a very restricted and productivist vision of the university could lead to belittle the moments of direct and friendly communication. Of course, these conversations can become banal and, in that sense, constitute a "waste of time", but who in a university environment could deny the qualification of work to the activity that takes place in a conversation of seminar?

Similarly, playing chess or football will not be considered work if the player does it for purely recreational purposes, but it is considered work if the player does it as a profession.

As a profession. Here is a word closely linked to our notion of work: profession. It can even be said that work is determined in its proper meaning when it is qualified as a professional work .

It seems that in forming our notion of work we do not have before our eyes only the human individual with its operative Schools , but implicitly reach the person as inscribed in plurality, in human society.

To conceive of work as a profession, to qualify it as a professional work , means that the human activity called work is not only considered from its roots, in the operational Schools of man, but also from the social context. We can affirm that a human activity is considered work professional when it is exercised, and insofar as it is exercised, as part of the social context, that is, insofar as it is inscribed in the set of functions of society, through which society itself is self-constituted, self-maintaining, self-developing.

The same activity, considered from the point of view of the individual person, transforms from being a mere leisure activity, or even a waste of time, to being a recognised work , professed before others when, for example, it is accepted by some social nucleus, and consequently, remunerated.

In the society in which we live, therefore, it is not work that produces the means to live. There is no immediate and direct relationship between the activity that is carried out and those means. The relationship is mediated by the function of society as a whole, which takes in the activity of each individual and, as a whole, produces the goods that it distributes in the form of wages. It could therefore be argued that, in a certain sense, receiving a salary is what in our society elevates an activity to the category of work professional. This reversal of causalities is at the root of much of the personal and social conflict around the "world of work".

In this perspective in which we move, it can be work to do almost nothing: the denomination of work is not given to an activity according to its own intrinsic nature, not even having a purpose other than the activity itself. "Having work" tells us almost nothing about the intrinsic quality of the person's activity, but rather about his or her integration into society as a whole.

Certainly, if the profession character of the work is absolutised, the work itself becomes fully functionalised in society as a whole and consequently the person himself is, in this respect, absorbed by the community. But here we are pointing out an important aspect that cannot be ignored if we want to take reality into account.

The collectivist perspective is strongly reductionist, but it is also inadequate to deal with the question of work from an essentialist perspective, that is, from the pure metaphysical essence of man, which inevitably considers man as universal and, therefore, as one. If we want to do justice to the reality of work , we need a careful consideration of human plurality, as a peculiar plurality of "unique beings", i.e. of absolutely worthy persons, each of whom constitutes a whole of meaning.

The notion of work, just like the biblical expression "have dominion over the world", does not only refer to the individual person and his or her active powers.

The human meaning of work

To find significance or meaning in something means to place it in an intrinsic relationship with a "source of meaning". When some reality is considered as meaningful by itself, the others acquire their significance through their connection with it. This connection can be of various kinds subject: of intrinsic union, of finality, of perfection, etc.

Thus, for example, when what is considered significant in itself is money (insofar as it allows one to do what one wants: which means that what is significant in itself is basically what unconditioned freedom wants to propose, not money), any activity acquires significance, is sufficiently justified, when its connection with money can be shown. As long as this connection has not been achieved, the partial significations continue to demand a "what for".

The source of authentic significance must be something that has the quality of being valuable in itself and not in relation to something else, i.e. it must not be a "value relative to something else" but a "non-relative value", "an absolute value". The only absolute good in the world created by God is the human person as such. As such, that is, as a human person and not as a mere means to do other things, or as capable of understanding or of producing works of art.

To fully understand a reality is, therefore, to connect it with the human as such. In these pages we will try to find the relationship that man's work has, not with the production of consumer goods, or with the preservation of the environment, or with the maintenance of liberal democracies, but with man's own humanity. What is this relationship like, does it really exist, is it a necessary relationship, even if man had all his needs met, would he have to work? Even if man had all his needs met, would he still have to work? What does work mean then? If it seems that in all activities that are called work the immediate meaning is taken from what is caused outside the person himself, how is the person affected?

In a very general preview of what we will see later on, we can say that the core of the problem of the human question of work lies in establishing in a theoretically clear way - and one that can guide the concrete internship - the relationship between the productive dimension of the activity and the immanent dimension or the dimension that affects man.

b) Approach to thinking about the work

Pre-modern significance of the work

In the pre-modern world - prior to the 17th century - the work is considered above all as the activity by means of which man tries to dominate nature in order to meet the multiple needs of his biological life. This includes two aspects: a first one, the intervention in nature, the "mechanical" or material meeting with it, and a second aspect which is the efficiency of the activity itself, the capacity to achieve objectives or produce things. The first aspect gives the word work a clear nuance of hardship and effort, because nature appears to him as inertia that resists domination and man, only painfully and laboriously, manages to impose himself. We could say that this is a negative nuance. The second, on the contrary, when considering efficiency, has a positive nuance.

These two aspects have been reflected in almost all languages: there are in almost all languages two different words for work as a painful confrontation with nature and work in its aspect of efficiency; at Spanish, to work and to produce.

Between these two senses - painful effort and efficiency - the predominant one in the pre-modern world is the former, and that is why the idea of work has a negative accent. This is the significant accent still retained in Spanish of the adjective "laborious" to indicate some goal or some activity. But to qualify as "negative" the meaning "laborious" requires an explanation in order to avoid that the identification between negative and painful or laborious could give the impression that we are uncritically situated in a hedonistic perspective.

For the Greeks, properly human activity is the life of the polis as such, i.e. political life. In contrast to this properly human activity, which is free and public, was the internal activity of each family, which was dominated by biological needs. Those who live there - the wife, the children, the slaves - do not have a properly human life, because their activity is not free, they do not manifest the uniqueness of their persons, but are totally immersed in the realm of the process of meeting needs Materials, i.e. of the Economics.

It is therefore clear from this perspective that the idea of work had a strong negative connotation, in that it prevented the exercise of man's own activity.

If in some philosophical schools of late antiquity (Cynics, Stoics) the work came to be considered a means to virtue, this was not really an essential change in the evaluation, but rather an insistence on the repulsive character of painful activity, by means of which apathy is attained2.

The transformation of the meaning of work in modernity: the productivity boom

The primacy of the sense of effort and suffering over the sense of efficiency was reversed at the beginning of the 17th century. The determining factor in this reversal is the change of perspective introduced in the Philosophy internship and in the theoretical Philosophy itself.

The nascent development of the new sciences, which replaces pure contemplation of nature with planned experimental intervention, leads to giving primacy to action over contemplation in order to reach a true knowledge . It will no longer be a matter of an attentive and contemplative gaze to reach the truth of things in themselves, but of active intervention, of operating on them to make them submit their secrets. This means that not only the means or the method of reaching knowledge has changed, but, and this is the most important thing in the end, the very knowledge that is sought has changed: it is no longer the truth of things, their radical meanings, their meaning and purpose, but the laws of regularity in their behaviour.

Man is building ever more sophisticated devices to penetrate the secrets of nature. Consequently, the paradigm of human action will be this victorious and dominating intervention on nature. It is not the primary and explicit aim of the practical result ; what is intended is certainly knowledge, but in such a way that it is intimately linked to the internship, either primarily by the foundation of this knowledge and by the experimental verification, or by the perspectives of domination over the world that it opens up.

These will be the factors that determine the primacy of productivity made possible by the technical machinism that will follow the newborn positive sciences. Of course, in the 17th century all this is more of a perspective than a reality, but it will still be sufficient for the birth of a new mentality with regard to work.

It would not be idle to point out that this new perspective did not immediately achieve its aims. Then the physical work became harsher, and the conditions of the workers much more inhuman than in the preceding centuries. The process culminating in the emergence of the proletariat has no link of continuity with the workings of the pre-modern centuries. The peculiar conditions of the working classes, which will reach their extreme conditions in the 19th century, are the very direct consequences of modern machinism, and have very few features in common with the conditions of the underprivileged classes in antiquity or in the centuries of the Age average. In this respect it should be remembered that the remarkable improvements in the conditions of work are improvements not so much over conditions before machinism as over conditions that originated in the beginnings of machinism itself.

In any case, these harsh circumstances appear at first only as a price that had to be paid, and indeed was paid, in order to put on internship the new image of the world and the prospects of domination that opened up to man. As far as we are concerned, the interesting thing is that it was at this time that man became aware of the potential effectiveness of his power. The meaning of activity is the development of his own effective power to transform nature and, above all, to produce. This means that productive action will not receive its legitimisation from a different purpose, nor from a supposed human nature, but from itself.

Consequently, man's way of understanding his life in society is transformed. As productive activity is privileged, the pre-eminent men are those who produce, while those who dedicate themselves to the nobler activities according to the old Philosophy internship - politicians, jurists, clerics, etc. - will come to be referred to in the 18th century by Adam Smith as passive elements.

Human society is no longer a plurality of people sharing a vision of the world and living from a common human tradition, but a set of productive elements unified by the correlations due to the organisation of work. The community is not unified by ideas, but by the organisation of labour: the human community will be above all a "partner-labour" community.

Locke formulates for the first time one of the most clearly valid dogmas in our world: the "natural" access to property is the work, and therefore, property will be in principle as private as the body itself that serves the person to work. The pre-modern forms of access to property (inheritance, donation, occupation, conquest, etc.), although in a certain way maintained, will only be considered traditional forms, but not the natural form. Moreover, it will be the same work that man makes with the rough elements that nature offers him, which gives things their value.

There is no need to insist on the permanence of these dogmatic principles, even in our current worldview. As an example, it can be pointed out that even in intellectual circles, which should be the most attentive to reality and less dependent on imposed dogmatisms, one can still find deep traces of the evaluation of work as productivism. The well-known aphorism publish or perish, which seems to be crudely in force in some university environments, is, in the internship, something very different from an encouragement to speech in the broad academic community. If this were the case, there is no doubt that many of the books and journals that are published would never see the light of day.

The reductionism of the modern Philosophy internship

The modern approach with the privileged notion of productivity is not only a reversal of the classical approach, but a profound reduction. Indeed, the classics distinguished two aspects in all human activity:

The first is that it produces something outside the acting power, and in this sense the action is transient. The Greeks called human action in this aspect poiesis, and the Latins, and the Christian tradition, facere.

A second aspect according to which the action is nothing more than a modification of the one who performs it and in this sense the action is immanent (for example, the act of knowledge). Human action in this immanent aspect was called praxis by the Greeks; in Latin agere.

These two dimensions were presented as irreducible, and have different measures:

The measure or the rule of praxis is man's humanity, that is, the correct agere will be that which fulfils man according to its truth. The perfection or human quality that enables man to act rightly, that is, so that the effect of his action has repercussions on himself in such a way that he not only does not destroy it, but also fulfils it according to its truth, is prudence. Prudence enables a person to become a better person through his actions.

The measure of the facere is the very "idea" of the thing to be produced. The correctness of the work that the person who builds a thing or a machine carries out is measured by the "plans". Thus a successful facere is one that achieves what was foreseen. When the result is defective, we are dealing with a failed facere, because if the construction of a table is so defective that the result no longer has legs and the top is not horizontal, we cannot even speak of making a table badly, but of not having succeeded in making a table. The quality staff that makes a person capable of a successful facere is art. Of course, all properly human action reverts on the person himself. Productive action also has a permanent result , that is, it creates a disposition in the person himself, but this direct effect is art, that is, the qualification of the person in order to achieve this production. By being qualified by art, the person does not become better as a person, but in terms of the production of the external effects to which art is ordered. That is to say, art makes the person better not in himself but only in a certain aspect. Through art the person is perfected not as a person but as a doctor, or as an artist, or as a politician, or as a journalist, and so on.

The irreducibility of agere and facere can be seen when we see that a person can achieve great perfection in the sphere of productive action, and yet remain frustrated as a person. External works of great perfection can be carried out at the cost of damaging one's own dignity staff. B And similarly, other defective ones can be carried out which, nevertheless, have meant an exercise of virtue, and, therefore, a perfecting of the person as a person.

The classical approach had reached with B depth the terms of the problem of human action, which are expressed in the two dimensions of action, in the distinction between agere and facere, and it can be said that in early modernity the problem is solved without confronting it, that is, by implicitly denying it. Of the two poles of human action, one of them is privileged in such a way that the other is in fact ignored and even denied.

The logical result is that the realisation of man is situated in the production of goods. It could be said that, although any attempt to consider the truth of man is explicitly rejected, here too the Philosophy expelled through the door re-enters through the window. The fulfilled man will be the one who produces, while those who engage in activities that are not directly productive are considered to be parasitic and useless existences.

The articulation of the classic Philosophy internship and its limits

Classical thought sought to maintain the various dimensions of human action and to establish the articulation between them.

The first and most elementary articulation is established by affirming that the production of things, that is, the facere, is not something separate from the agere, but intimately related to it. This relationship is one of finality. The mere production of objects, be they houses or books, have no meaning in themselves, but only insofar as they are ordered to the life of the person. Therefore, the facere, although it has a measure of its own in its order, has a further measure in the life of the person. To the extent that it serves life, in whatever way, the production of things acquires a human meaning. Thus, the most elementary articulation between agere and facere leads to what was the decisive articulation in the Christian tradition: the moral articulation.

The moral articulation takes into account the distinctions that the classical Philosophy noted in human action, and keeps a watchful eye on the plurality of dimensions that exist in the active human being.

Man, in fact, has a very wide field of action: his operational possibilities are very varied. In each of these capacities there is, we could say, a capacity for realisation and, consequently, a possibility of frustration. Even in each of the active capacities the possibilities are multiplied: he who has chosen to dedicate himself to science, renouncing his possible achievements in the field of law or architecture, will still have to choose, because he has no material possibility of cultivating all the fields of science, just as he who dedicates himself to literature must choose, because he will not be able to read all the books. It has been said that the passage from youth to maturity takes place when one realises that one no longer has an unlimited time ahead of him, but only a certain, though unknown, issue number of years, and that he will probably not be able to read all the books he has on his Library Services, i.e. when one experiences in a lacerating way the truth of the classical aphorism ars longa, vita brevis.

A real work of discrimination is then required between the requests that are experienced as a consequence of the multiple operative capacities. Man trusts to fulfil himself as man, but how is this fulfilment realised in concrete terms? If human fulfilment were to consist in the realisation of all his active capacities, the person would be irretrievably condemned to frustration, because ars longa, vita brevis. Experience shows that human fulfilment is not the realisation of the maximum of active possibilities either. Moreover, the absolute striving for fulfilment staff, the pursuit of one's own happiness and fulfilment is not only futile, but, if carried to the point of tension, it breeds neurosis. On the contrary, the lives of people who have perhaps renounced splendid personal possibilities, serving and loving others, are sometimes manifestly happy, fulfilled lives.

It seems that we are then led to a perplexed status : is the fulfilment of man as such only in self-giving and in Withdrawal? Are the natural inclinations that impel us to realise the active capacities we possess only a delusion?

On the basis of these questions, the classics affirmed the distinction we made above: the realisation of man in his various sectoral dimensions made him good, fulfilled him, in a certain respect. But it is only in the dimension of man as man that man becomes good - or bad - in himself. The dimension of man as such was called the moral dimension.

Human fulfilment is not the pure unfolding of its operative capacity. The person does not find the orientation to attain his fullness in the mere inclination of the operative powers towards his action. But the concrete operative capacities, with their own dynamics and logic, even if they are not determinant for the ordering of man to their fulfilment, are significant.

Thus, the realisation of active possibilities is not an absolute requirement of man as such, but only through his submission and direction to moral reason. Thus, what we could call the "realisation dimension", i.e. man's inclination to realise his possibilities, and the dimension of submission , which we could call the dimension of man as such, are intimately articulated, since the ethical dimension is the dimension of submission, of man's acceptance of his truth as the measure of his action. These two dimensions, which in principle seem to be opposed to each other - while realisation is experienced as affirmation staff, submission appears as self-denial in self-giving, self-abnegation - in reality require each other, because the dimension of submission finds its expression in the moral dimension, which does not deny realisation, but orients it and guide towards the truth of man. Human capacities without moral reason would be blind, but the ethical dimension without the powers, with their inclinations and their energies, would be empty.

But moral reason can only guide the operation of the powers if it reaches a knowledge of what they do, that is, from the knowledge of the meaning of the action that is performed.

Which subject of knowledge do we intend? We have already seen in chapter one that knowledge of the action we need to make the moral judgement is knowledge of the human meaning of the action, i.e. the knowledge that captures in what way the person himself is involved in the action. The human effect of the action can be more or less immediate, and therefore requires some way of reaching the effects that the action has on the person, either directly or indirectly, as secondary effects.

The limits of the classical articulation between facere and agere stem precisely from the limits that existed in pre-modern times to reach the human dimension of action through its effects. For this reason, his treatment of action was too simple and tended towards a closed consideration of the nature of the act, and considered its consequences, at least the secondary and far-reaching ones, as accidental.

The cause of this limited vision is to be found in the pre-modernists' conception of the human world as something already definitively configured in the agrarian and urban social organisation. This assumed that the framework of human interference with the world was fixed, and that human actions did not reach it, because the potentially disturbing effects of that order were absorbed and cancelled out by the general processes: the organisation or ordering of the human world was strong enough to digest any extraneous factor or disturbance.

This vision meant that at that time the conditions did not exist that allow us to understand work as a world shaper.

Perhaps nowhere is the change in perspective of modernity more evident than in the different treatment of so-called omissions in the pre-modern era and in the modern era sample . In the pre-modern era, omissions, even voluntary ones, are properly omissions and are explicitly treated alongside acts of commission. The reason is that omissions remain with the individual and do not affect the world, which, in any case, will remain as it is. In the modern perspective, when the awareness of the human character of the world becomes progressively more pronounced, voluntary omissions come to be considered almost in the same way as positively performed acts. Responsibility for the world and history is considered so strong that any attitude, whether of omission or commission, is seen as contributing to the shaping of the world.

c) The birth of the Philosophy of the work

The awareness that it is the world itself that is being shaped by human action developed throughout the 18th century, which could be called the century of history. What at first appeared as a simple inversion of action and contemplation gradually permeated all levels of human self-understanding, which from various perspectives was seen as result of its own action. The 18th century was also the century in which the instructions of transcendental idealism was established with Kant, Schelling and above all Fichte.

With these two elements - economism, which reaches its peak in Adam Smith, on the one hand, and transcendental idealism on the other - Hegel elaborates what we could call the first great Philosophy of work, in the broadest sense.

Hegel's attempt is to recapture the dimensions of human action - facere and agere - that had been pointed out by Aristotle. But, in view of the unnatural and fixed character of the structure of the human world, he tries to account for the importance of the product of his action for man himself. If the human work produces things that remain outside, man alienates himself in that work. For this reason, the articulation between facere and agere cannot be either merely instrumental or moral, because for Hegel, in both cases, man would be alienated in his work by definitively losing the form he gives to his work.

In this perspective, the achievements of human activity are no longer seen as mere products of man's work , but as peculiar manifestations of a "spirit" - understood as a historical totality - to which man himself owes his own determined existence: every man is a "child of his time", i.e. a product, not of natural conditions of ahistorical essence, but of a mentality, of customs, of a Education, which essentially make him a point of peculiar condensation of the spirit (the word spirit means historical totality).

But the Hegelian doctrine is not only important as a moment in the history of the Philosophy, but also in the concrete determination of history through its decisive influence on Marx. The Hegelian left, and Karl Marx in particular, will carry out an interpretation of Hegelian thought that involves a transformation of Hegel's dialectics to the realm of working activity, of man's intervention in nature, which is seen as the real shaping reality of the world. Every other dimension of human existence is literally reduced to epiphenomena of the relations of production. For Marx, History, the only recognised science, is the making of man by man, by means of work; and man is nothing but the birth of History, i.e. the product of a process in which the real determinant has been the satisfaction of immediate needs through action in nature.

Although both Hegel and Marx present their reflections as a total explanation of reality, the limits of their approach are very serious. They have the merit of having discovered unknown aspects, and of having confronted strictly new problems, but in so far as they allow themselves to be intoxicated by the novelty of what they have discovered, their doctrines are necessarily partial, and, in so far as they elevate their perspective to an absolute criterion and reduce all other dimensions to epiphenomena or derivations of their postulates, their doctrines are distorting and false.

In this perspective, the human person is literally dissolved in the collectivity; no aspect, no dimension, no space of the person can be recognised that is not a function of social relations.

And, of course, if man is dissolved as a mere moment of becoming, human nature is even more dissolved in a total lack of meaning of its own. From this perspective, no meanings of its own can be found in the world; it is the realm of a mute and neutral facticity, simply subjected to man's economic or productive dominion. If "everything flows", it is useless to try to find meanings supposedly derived from a permanent nature, which would be of interpellation for human action. Something like a "naturalrule " or "natural law" cannot be recognised. Nor would it make sense to seek an organisation of human plurality on the basis of "what man is".

The historicist perspective and its Structures

The initial change takes place when, instead of feeling that man is situated in a stable world, he comes to feel that he is situated in the midst of a world in which all the elements are changing. When, through the development of technology, the objects that man has built and that make up his world - from cities and houses, legal ordinances and plans for programs of study, to the most common and everyday objects, such as a pen or a razor - are constantly being replaced by "better ones". This phenomenon, which has been going on forever, was so slow that, until recently, the changes were not particularly noticeable in the space of a human life. However, over the last few decades, the capacity for technical improvement has become so overwhelming that most of the things we use quickly give way to others. We no longer have a world shaped by stable realities, but by industries or processes that constantly provide us with other objects. Durability is no longer a desirable quality, as it would be an obstacle to renewal. A few years ago, the famous Volkswagen was advertised as a car capable of running for almost unlimited kilometres: it was still in the perspective of a world made up of durable objects. However, this has not been the case for a decade now. The aim is for objects of use to fulfil their function more and more perfectly and to be ready to be replaced by new products as soon as they are produced. The technical development induces a world of "disposable" objects. Today's printed circuit clocks are a typical example. Their accuracy, and thus the ability to fulfil their function, is much higher than that of the more expensive older clocks. But it is no longer conceivable, as in the past, for a father to bequeath a watch to his son.

If, at the beginning of this chapter, we said that there is a distinction between human activities or work by which man attends to the necessities of life and leaves nothing behind him but the process of life itself, and those activities by which man manufactures things that are intended to be durable, we must say that this distinction tends to be dissolved by technology. Objects are no longer pretended to be durable and increasingly resemble metabolites.

Although there is no doubt about the advantages that technology has brought to human life, we are a long way from the adoration of the productive work that was characteristic of the beginnings of the scientific and technical development . Reservations about the limitless development of technology do not only arise from the new fears that invade man in the face of the overwhelming destructive or manipulative capacities that technology is offering. This is its most elementary aspect. The question arises not only from the dangerous products that technology makes it possible to produce, but from technology itself as a fundamental shaper of the world. The question is whether a world so shaped by work is truly human, or whether the adoration of work, the passion for work cannot place us in an environment that turns against man.

It is not, of course, a question of longing for the idyllic country existence, but of pointing out the human limits of such industriousness, without rest and contemplation, without repose or transcendence.

Certainly, not everything in our world today is subject to the dominance of technology. There is still much that is stable in the realm of our existence. But the question is not what is permanent, but the mentality of change, of improvement, of progress, which induces the striking "use and throw away" of so many things. It is the mentality according to which what is new is good and what is old is bad. The institution of the "best seller" is a sample of how, even in the field of literature, creations have a very limited validity, almost like newspapers. Something similar could be said of music: it is no longer a question of creating "other" music, in addition to that which was composed years ago. Here, too, the change is more profound. Perhaps it is still said of some compositions that they "will remain". But the vast majority of musical productions are subject to the same law of total metabolism; they are consumed for a few months and then they become obsolete, they lose their relevance and others will take their place.

This perspective has the positive value of showing some real characteristics of the human condition that had not been noticed or pointed out in previous intellectual explanations, but they have, as we said, the limitation of their partiality, and when they inspire a human organisation, that is, when they reach a validity internship, their partiality becomes a falsehood that falsifies, that is, mistreats human reality itself.

Risks of the company shaped by the work

We can point to two negative characteristics of the world configured according to the omnidetermining vision of work.

The first is that society is becoming consumerist, a consumer society. This expression does not only refer to a society made up of people who are themselves wasteful and lack the virtue of temperance. The scope of this expression is deeper. It is about a society, a human world, in which the realities that constitute it are no longer stable objects intended to be used in a lasting way, but objects of short durability with respect to the life of the person; therefore, they are objects that could be called objects of consumption.

What is characteristic of this world is that the short durability of things is not due to unintentional defects in their manufacture, but, as we have already seen, it is due to the very structure of the system of the primacy of work, of the ever more fully dominant productive activity. Consumption, the renewal of their objects of use, on the part of people, becomes a requirement of the system produced by growing material perfection. If the people living in this society were to adopt a "thrifty" attitude and take the means to conserve their objects of use as much as possible, the productive system would collapse.

This status gives rise to a human subject increasingly full of needs. Propaganda systems have been tuned to generate a need for the most sophisticated new products, so that if they are lacking, life seems to be devoid of fundamental elements. The consumer society breeds perennially dissatisfied people.

There is no doubt that, in this society, man has more and more instruments at his disposal to do what he wants. But it is precisely the instrumental character of the products that can be an obstacle to giving a human evaluation to this society. Indeed, it can be said that instruments are neither bad nor good in themselves, and that, insofar as they enable man to achieve his goals with less material resistance, they are good. The point is that it is not only a question of a status in which man has better instruments, that is to say, it is not a question of comparing situations in which the instruments are precarious with others in which the instruments are more perfected, but of evaluating a status in which the instruments are progressively improved. Then it becomes clear that, along with the progressive expansion of human intervention, there are also other effects, which are not certain to make the world more humane.

In addition to the growing needs, man is led to an attitude of confidence in the total mastery of the processes Materials of nature, so that for all the limitations and pains encountered in life, a solution is almost demanded by means of scientific and technical mastery. The primacy of action over contemplation is immediately translated into a pre-eminence of the interventionist attitude over the attitude of the search for the meaning of natural phenomena. In no area of life is the corrupting character of this reversal so clear as in the change of attitude towards pain sample . Man has always tried to find a way to alleviate his pain. But this search was no obstacle to finding meaning in pain itself. Today, pain is almost exclusively a trigger for man's struggle to eliminate it. Pain itself has ceased to be a mystery closely linked to the mystery of man himself and has become a technical disturbance to be treated technically by experts. This attitude has certainly led to invaluable progress in medicine, but it has left, or risks leaving, man literally defenceless in the face of unavoidable pain. The cringing resource to psychotropic drugs in cases where what is needed is the exercise of virtues, and the increasingly frequent cases of suicides for objectively trivial causes have common roots in the unilateral confidence in man's total mastery over nature. The consumer society is an intemperate society that relies more and more on the financial aid that artefacts can lend to human life, and consequently turns away from the cultivation of those vital dimensions where technology can lend less financial aid. The consumer society is a superficial, sensual, fast-paced and boring society.

If the development of technology is valid, it is valid as a corrective to the status in which man was prevented from living humanly by factors Materials. But when technology comes to decisively shape society, the correctives that are needed are much more powerful, and perhaps painful.

In addition to boredom and tension, the feverish consumerist society leads to an estrangement of man from his work, as never before, and for which, moreover, it is not easy to envisage solutions.

Indeed, the production of ever more functionally perfect artefacts implies a complexity in the production process that is difficult to grasp at a single glance. Moreover, given the mathematization of many of the problems of research basic, we have reached the paradoxical situation status in which many of the things that man does are not understood by anyone. Mathematics makes it possible to project a large part of technical problems on an extraordinarily efficient operational basis, but although it allows operations to be carried out, it soon becomes unintelligible: mathematics is at first a financial aid for quickly and precisely elaborating conceptual processes, but when it begins to develop according to its own laws, it soon gives rise to operations that cannot be conceptualised, and the technique slips out of man's hands. It becomes a problem to "master one's own domain".

This is the second negative characteristic of the world shaped by technology. The complexity of the production process of such sophisticated products requires that each of those involved performs only a minimal part, ignoring at internship what the others involved in the same process are doing.

The complexity of what needs to be done by several, or perhaps many, people could perhaps help to form the awareness of working in a team, but in the internship such a pretension is excessive, as it would suppose that each one of those involved reaches the totality and is capable of understanding their work precisely as part of a process whose meaning they recognise and make their own. This is an excessive anthropological pretension and, moreover, runs counter to the very tendency of the process where, through fragmentation into smaller and smaller steps, what is required of each of those who work in it is so simple that, as Marx acutely warned, it leads to the annulment of the difference between work skilled and work unskilled.

This fragmentation of work is not only due to the complexity of the intended product, but to the search for productivity. This is where the analyses of Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree: productivity is due to the division of work rather than to work itself.

The primacy of work in the consideration of society leads to considering human society as a labour organisation, that is, as a rational artifice to articulate coexistence, so that workers come together in their work to produce more and better. This would be a mechanical articulation that makes politics a technique and society a building constituted according to the model of technical constructions, in which each of the elements is alien to the whole, being integrated into it only by extrinsic factors.

It is possible that the effort to overcome the difficulties inherent in this social system is very difficult. Perhaps the core topic of all these problems lies precisely in the importance given to the productive work . Even if it is disguised as the imperious need to "create goods", the social organisation based on this work rests on the tremendous error of considering man only as a being who works, or destined to work. This idea is strictly modern, and, in the terms in which it is presented today, it is alien to the Christian vision of man.

d) Elements for an ethical consideration of the work

The perspective we must adopt for the ethical treatment of work cannot be merely mechanical, or economic, for we are not primarily interested in the articulation of the physical-chemical forces that are undoubtedly always involved in the human work , nor are we directly interested in the productivity and interrelationships due to or required for greater efficiency.

The ethical treatment calls for a perspective based on man's humanity, i.e. we are interested, as we saw in the first chapter, in showing how man's humanity is involved in the activities known as work, and, therefore, how the various aspects of this activity are subject of ethical interpellation for human freedom.

Fundamental anthropological principles for an ethics of work

In contrast to the abundant philosophies of work based on man's productivity, we have seen that what constitutes man as such is his openness to God. Without this openness to absolute transcendence, the uniqueness of the human person is lost; there is no way of adequately substantiating either man's absolute dignity or, therefore, his radical transcendence in relation to nature, of which he is also a part.

Man's openness to God, which is what radically constitutes his spirituality, is compounded, as we have seen, by an openness to other men and to the world. An address to God that does not embrace human plurality, as we have seen, would reduce the vision of man to the consideration of an "angelic" and cosmic being.

These assumptions already tell us that the foundation of the social articulation of human plurality is not to be found, as the theorists of society in early modernity thought, in legal organisation. That is to say, human society cannot be considered as a rationally organised set of elements - people - who in themselves are indifferent or even refractory to social bonding: the foundation of society is not in organisational laws, but in the person himself.

This observation is particularly important, because the immediate tendency when considering the problem of the right organisation of society, in order to make work truly human, is usually to raise the question of the organisation of partner-labour, and it thus becomes a problem that is automatically referred to those who are responsible for drawing up the laws that organise society. The anthropological presuppositions we have pointed out point us in a different direction: it is not primarily about the organisation of partner-labour, but about man's self-understanding. It could take this form: how should man understand himself so that his work does not become an obstacle to his self-fulfilment, but is part of his path to fulfilment and contributes to creating a world in which the truth of man is respected and proclaimed?3.

Each human person constitutes, by virtue of the direct and individual creation of his soul by God, a whole of meaning. But human plurality, and the whole world, also constitutes, in a different way, but integrating the previous one, a whole of meaning. The cosmos, and the whole of history, is a whole of meaning which includes a multitude of elements which are also, each one, a whole of meaning.

This principle is fundamental in order to reject the vulgar concept of alienation, according to which whenever man is dispossessed or submission the product of his hands, he is wounded, violated by alienation.

The concept of alienation, which is common in today's mass culture - although more than a defined concept, it is almost a magic word with an all-purpose meaning that can be attached to any status that is to be disqualified - is an assumption according to which man must always achieve the full meaning and scope of what he does. Basically, this idea is rooted in the budget that only man, with his unconditioned decision, can give meaning to what he does. Thus, if he does not achieve the full meaning of his action and its consequences, he is being manipulated by someone more powerful, who has expropriated him of his action in order to integrate it into the meaning that, by virtue of his status of power, he can create.

Moreover, the vulgar concept of alienation, which is attributed to many works carried out as a whole, becomes a negative concept by virtue of an unstated but implicitly operative premise. That premise is Marx's concept of man, according to which man is basically a being-for-itselfwork. It is then logical that work 's own idea of alienation, i.e. of submission or even of "selling out", is profoundly negative: if the core of the human is constituted by being-for-itselfwork, by stripping man of his work, i.e. by alienating himself from his work, he alienates himself from himself. Alienation will not only have a negative nuance, but will be radical negativity. Alienation becomes the radical or fundamental form of evil in Marx's anthropology.

If certain social or economic systems are inhuman, it is not because the human being gives up the product of his work, but because his dignity is not respected, i.e. he is not treated according to his truth, and is thus mistreated. But the truth of man does not claim that the person cannot be considered as a means. Kant, the philosopher who made the affirmation of the absolute value of the human person the principle of his ethical reflection, did not formulate the demand of this principle as a prohibition that man should not be regarded as a means, but as a prohibition that man should not be regarded and treated only as a means, i.e. fully functionalised. Kant was thus making position, that man is a whole of meaning, but at the same time he is integrated into a plurality of men, each of whom is also a whole of meaning, and the totality is also a whole of meaning. By virtue of his condition of being integrated in a plurality, man can submit his work, or even his whole life, for others, without for that reason it can be said that he has been fully functionalised. His dignity does not prevent this donation, nor does it demand that he be given an understanding plenary session of the Executive Council of the whole in which his donation of work or of himself is integrated: it is up to human dignity to know that in this way he is contributing to the good of all. It is illustrative that it is in military environments, where each person is most called upon to be integrated into a whole, whose concrete action or purpose he cannot or should not know, and even where he often has to expose himself to the submission of life, that the sense of honour, of dignity, is most developed staff.

It could be argued that what is radically dehumanising is to induce a self-understanding of man as a mere producer of objects or, as it is often said in a rather euphemistic way, as a creator of goods. For this reason, the solution to the questions of work cannot be along the lines of informing the worker of everything that is done on the business, which may be of interest to him in part, but in another part it is of no interest to him, just as it is of no interest to the Username bus driver to know all the regulations of the transport company. Only a radically economistic point of view could claim to humanise the work of the workers by making known all the activities of the business, so that the workers would feel more of their own the product of their work - sometimes this is strictly impossible; nor, obviously, would it be a question of putting the workers in more technically comfortable circumstances, with more flexible working hours and higher wages..., and, much less, of merely increasing their culture "because then they will produce more and better", etc.

The core topic lies in the anthropological principle of avoiding economism, i.e. avoiding productivity as a radical human dimension, and therefore considering that human society does not have its ultimate and radical foundation in the work. Even if productivity is a self-evident demand, and has its laws - precisely the economic laws - this demand for productivity must be considered analogously to the demands for fulfilment presented by the operative powers of the person. These impulses - those of the powers, for the person, or those of the economy, for society - are not ethically indifferent, but they cannot be the determining factor: they must be realised for the good of the person.

This obviously implies relativising - not denying - the importance of work. The urgency of this rectification of perspective can be seen in a very direct way in our society: the crisis of the unemployed workers, if it is not for the economic hardship it causes, is unintelligible from the premises of the materialistic mass culture, because according to this perspective those subsidised by the public treasury would be precisely in the status of the privileged who live at the expense of others. The boredom and frustration that can be recognised in those who do not have a work, if it is not - I repeat - due to the anguish of the means Materials to survive, can only be explained by a question of spiritual poverty of the person, who does not know how to find any other meaning to his life than that of material occupation at work.

The truth of man, and the human dimension of his activity, above and beyond its productive dimension or its dimension of realisation of his Schools, is of paramount importance for a real understanding of the true human importance of work. Only from this understanding will it be possible to avoid uncritically assuming uncritical diagnoses of the problems created in modern society around work. In particular, it is particularly urgent to avoid the diagnosis that refers the frustrations of so many people to the fact that they lack a work where they can develop their creative possibilities. The work is not man's salvation, but love, self-giving. The conception of man as a producer of things has radically changed section from the classical conception, according to which properly human life was life characterised by friendship between people, and by dialogue or speech and the free action of man among others.

Some practical consequences

a) Man must exercise in the work the virtues that constitute the human fullness: If the creative call is composed with the generation that is the principle of the plurality and worldliness of man, its fulfilment as a person must also be inscribed in the relationship with the world and, concretely, in the attitudes that are called work. . That is to say, the sphere of the work cannot be closed and separated from the properly human sphere. To affirm a complete autonomy of work, with its own laws and logic, and to make it impenetrable to properly human criteria - service, justice, loyalty, submission... - would be, basically, to accept a duality in man, according to which what is properly constitutive of the person, that is, openness to God, would be "a matter of the soul", while the questions of work, being a matter linked to materiality, would be "a matter of the body"4.

The temptation of dualism, insofar as it separates man from his truth, is the real temptation to alienate man. When man falls into it, he understands himself and behaves in a way that is alien to his own truth.

b) In his work man must contribute with others to the creation of a "human world": From the fundamental anthropological principle of man's creatureliness, we have deduced that the radical dimension of man as such, i.e. the ethical dimension, is a dimension of self-giving: man is fulfilled, reaches his fullness, to the extent that he realises the call to love that has constituted him.

But as this creative call is composed with generation, human plurality is not alien to this fulfilment. We have already seen that, by virtue of the peculiar composition between creation and generation, it is not correct to contrast nature and history or nature and culture. We have already said that man, in order to become what he is by nature, needs Education. This Education must be taken in a broad sense. Parents educate first and foremost, and then teachers and other people; but all the elements that constitute what is usually called culture also contribute in a more or less decisive way. In this way, each person enters into a relationship not only synchronic but also diachronic with human plurality, since culture, from language to customs, are result of the human tradition in which the person was born and lives.

It is clear that the cultural form and the Education of a person largely determines his worldview and his attitude towards the demands of his nature. Of course, this determination is not absolute and, in fact, in the same cultural status there are sublime and abject behaviours. Human freedom and the capacity to grasp the truth of things is not completely mediated by cultural forms. But the influence of the "world" in shaping the mentality has to be taken into account.

For this reason, the human work cannot be considered solely in the perspective of what it immediately produces: the work is never an action that ends in the production of its own mechanical effect. If we consider work in a way that transcends the simple mechanical perspective, we must see human action more broadly as shaping the human world. For this reason, an ethical consideration of work that considers the goodness of the action only from the technical perfection of the object produced would be inadequate. To say that to work well is to carry out objects or acts with technical perfection according to the laws of production would be to fail to overcome the economistic vision of work. This risk is very much alive and can be disguised by reducing the world-shaping effect itself to the condition of a secondary effect. This wider effect, but also more complex because it does not involve a single person, cannot be ignored. It would be unacceptable for someone to claim to have worked humanly well, if what he has realised with great perfection is a gas chamber, the use of which is unambiguously murderous. Similarly, one cannot humanly approve of a person's work who, even if he or she has done it with great technical perfection and generosity, contributes to shaping a world that induces inhuman behaviour. This is a particularly serious aspect for those who work in politics or in business or in the positive sciences.

In this respect, it should be remembered that a humane world is not one in which there are more possibilities of control over nature, or which is more rationally planned, but one that induces attitudes that are properly human5. A world is more human the more it encourages people to live in love and at submission. There is no doubt that a society in which people are trained to "know how to defend their rights", even before they are taught to have an interest in human goods, engenders or tends to engender an unsatisfied human subject , constantly demanding new comforts, selfish and distrustful, critical and unrooted, in which it is difficult for the ideal of faithful and generous love, of the truly human submission that constitutes the truth of the person, to take root.

c) Man must recognise what he owes to tradition and to his environment: The anthropological principle that tells us that man, in order to become what he is by nature, needs plurality is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the field of knowledge. Indeed, when we are faced with reality, we learn to organise the immense accumulation of affections that this reality provokes in us, according to points of view, orderings, approaches that we have learnt and incorporated in such a way that it almost seems to us that this way of seeing derives directly from our pure nature.

This becomes much more decisive when it comes to the scientific knowledge . The scientific training in a given specialization program and with a given school gives us not only access to specific problems, but also the approach of their treatment and the principles of their solution. In fact, the interest that some researchers show in the problems of their work - an interest that must undoubtedly be considered very intense and real, as they devote their best efforts to them for years - can only be understood if it goes beyond the pure field of interest staff and knowledge staff . We could say that this interest can only be explained if we consider researcher as part of a human group that generates its own interests. If it were not for that ensemble, and outside it, it would be almost unthinkable that anyone would be interested in these issues. In fact, when highly specialised researchers explain the object of their efforts to the layman, the layman only manages to recognise the interest of work by virtue of the general interest of science.

It is indeed very curious that, after long centuries of studying nature, some momentous discoveries have taken place simultaneously by seemingly unrelated researchers. There is still disagreement as to who was the true founder of differential calculus: the English still claim that it was Newton, while the Germans attribute it to Leibniz. Leibniz and Newton were undoubtedly two brilliant talents, but if we admit that this coincidence was not pure chance, we must recognise that the status of mathematical thought, of the tradition in which both thinkers were formed, contributed in good part to finding.

Only a deluded ignoramus of human reality could claim exclusive paternity for his thinking and his, even genius, approaches to new problem-solving. True, such a delusion may be driven by vanity and the desire to survive, but then it would not hurt to note that the truly great talents have shown themselves to be deeply indebted to their teachers, even in cases where they have given a transcendental twist to what they learned. Karl Barth speaks of his Marburg years where he studied with Hermann, "the unforgettable teacher": "I have absorbed Hermann through every pore" he would later declare. In this respect, the statements of the Göttingen physicists in the 1920s, who developed the second generation of quantum mechanics, about what they owed to the atmosphere of those years are stimulating.

In this respect, today's society is sample paradoxical: on the one hand, it strongly encourages the recognition of synchronic dependence, i.e. dependence on today's society, but on the other hand, it induces a feeling of independence from tradition. No time like ours has ever sample been so reluctant to acknowledge its debt of gratitude to its elders. No matter how great the genius of a researcher or a thinker, it must always be acknowledged that tradition is for him like a giant that enables him to climb higher and see further. A great thinker of almost ten centuries ago summed it up graphically in this expression: "I am but a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant".

d) The work must be carried out in a spirit of service: Knowing oneself to be part of a whole must lead man to an attitude of generosity. Just as he has received a world from his elders, he should be concerned about the world he will leave to his children. Just as man's work has its roots in the work done by those who preceded him, so too those who come after him will receive the world that we leave them. The responsibility of this transmission must lead us not to pass on a world made up exclusively of our findings or our problems. We have been able to achieve our achievements and have dealt calmly with our problems on the broad basis of the whole that we have received. If we were to pass on our problems alone, we would leave future generations in a much more precarious position than our own, status . If we have been able to indulge in certain vagaries, it is probably because we felt the protective network of tradition beneath us.

But there is also a closer and more immediate aspect of the human condition that calls for generosity on work. This is the aspect that Marx had called alienation and that he, in a very powerful intellectual effort, tried to eliminate theoretically. In reality, the aspect of the human work that Marx called alienation is not alien to the human condition, nor is it dehumanising. As we have already said, the fact that man is a whole of meaning does not require him to always make all the sense of what he does. Rather, it is up to him to know that he himself and his activity are integrated into broader units of meaning, without, for that reason, attacking or diminishing his dignity staff. Man must know how to work for others, and he must be generous with his own work, know how to submit his own work so that whoever has the mission statement to coordinate the complex work, integrates the contribution of each one in the joint unity.

Similarly, whoever is responsible for this coordination must bear in mind that the elements he or she integrates in his or her coordination work, although they must be parts of a whole, are not exclusively parts of a whole, since they originate in the activity of people who are a whole of meaning and therefore not completely functionalisable. This articulation cannot be based on anything other than virtue, in the form of prudence that can be called political prudence in the broad sense.

The political prudence that must be possessed by those who are responsible for coordinating personal work is similar to the prudence of a doctor: just as a doctor needs extensive technical knowledge of the workings of the human organism, so he who directs people in their work must have sufficient technical knowledge to be able to coordinate the individual contributions adequately and effectively in order to achieve the final product. However, just as the doctor is not guided in his work exclusively by this scientific knowledge, but places it at the service of the condition staff of his patients, so also the director of a human work as a whole must avoid subjecting people to the despotism of technical laws.

Technical laws, like medical science, can be learned by studying books, but human reality, whether of the sick or of workers, can only be treated justly if it acquires a connaturality with the value of the person. This cannot be learned by studying. Virtue, which is the human quality that expresses this connaturality, can only be acquired through a prolonged attention with it and with an attentive and open attitude so that this value penetrates and shapes one's own heart.

To the extent that the humanisation of the fields of work is entrusted to the ever more perfect organisational Structures , there is a departure from the only principle that could lead to the desired humanisation, i.e. the person is being treated only as a part, and is thus being separated - alienated - from his or her truth.

It is clear that this alienation is not avoided by seeking the highest possible welfare for workers. Procuring welfare cannot be confused with respect for dignity staff. Rather, it has to be recognised that most of these welfare concessions are more akin to the care of equipment, which also requires a certain attention special care to prevent damage. The provision of comfort can also be entrusted to technical files. The humane consideration of people, on the other hand, is a matter of the most solicitous attention. Any moderately sensitive person can clearly distinguish between the fact that he or she is granted or given comforts Materials, or even provided with cultural opportunities, and the fact that he or she is treated as a person.

e) The relations of work must be properly human relations: If, as we have seen, the relations proper to human plurality, among which the relations of work must be counted, are not alien to the humanity of man, but are intimately articulated with it, the relations of work must be properly human relations.

This is one of the aspects on which the most serious misunderstandings hang, for it is perhaps in this aspect that the consequences of considering man exclusively as a being for work have the most violent impact. This perspective is deeply rooted in the vision of the world and of man in today's culture and has obvious manifestations in the field of human relations along two apparently paradoxical lines:

The first could be characterised as a call for solidarity, although the meaning of this word is rather ambiguous. From the point of view of labourism, i.e. the view of man as a being for work, solidarity comes to mean "awareness of class". It is not so much a matter of knowing how to look at each person, with his or her circumstances and needs, as an absolutely worthy being, but rather of feeling belonging to the same homogeneous collectivity, i.e. feeling each other as points of condensation where a class or a "collective" becomes conscious. It is not consciousness staff, but consciousness of class: what becomes conscious is not the irreducible person, but the class. This form of solidarity has its proper place in the mass movement or in the general assembly, and knows little of solidarity between singular persons. Moreover, it is refractory and considers deep and dense human relations undesirable. Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, this form of solidarity is fully compatible with a strong individualistic egoism.

The second line I was referring to is that of visceral and ruthless competitiveness. When man is presented as a being who is exhausted in his being for the work, the fight for the "work space" tends to become total. Since the work defines him, everything that leads to the work is in itself legitimised: the work is the supreme good and, consequently, the founding principle of morality. The result is that "anything goes": from declared enmity to hidden tripping. Relationships between people become tense and selfish, and full of suspicion because the colleague is seen not as a financial aid but as a competitor: the qualities of others are no longer a good but a threat to one's own pre-eminence. The world of work thus becomes inhuman, harsh, hard, exhausting, full of suspicions, grievances and merciless criticism.

In these circumstances, there is an urgent need to reconquer the human sense of relationships between people, which must be fundamentally relationships of love and self-giving. Obviously, this cannot be achieved by legal provisions or technical resources, but by the exercise of virtue. And virtue cannot be induced by mechanical means, but by connaturality with human values. It is very expressive that, even in the most supposedly technical and rationalist societies, attempts are made to establish "festivals" that promote the connaturality of citizens with the Constitution, with freedom, democracy, etc. The point is that as long as human sociality is not based on the virtue of connaturality with a vision of the person - and with the values that it founds - and is maintained in a diluted and indifferent affirmation of freedom and the pure self-determination of people, it cannot found a true human society.

The path of virtue is arduous and, although it may be affected by the cultural environment, it is irreducibly staff. It requires, in this area in which we move, financial aid mutuality, and this implies the search for the excellence of one's neighbour, even at the cost of one's own time, one's own resources. It requires learning to look at people as they really are, that is, as a good in themselves; it requires loving people for themselves and not only for what they know or produce, or for the financial aid they can give us, even if they also see themselves as such. For example, a sick person can never be just an interesting case for the publication of a article, even if he or she is also interesting; the touchstone will be the treatment given to the sick person painfully affected by a common disease. All this implies an effort to establish human relationships that transcend the purely work-related speech , to communicate on other more radically human aspects: vision of life, loves, illusions, worries, etc. In this way, relationships between colleagues or partners go beyond the strictly professional and become friendships in which the speech reaches the most truly radical human dimensions and, in this way, they are dignified. The prohibition in some circles to deal with the deepest human problems - such as religious ones - is not so much due to the desire to protect privacy, but to the principle that sociality is safe and firm when its foundations are strictly technical, and except for trivialities it is not allowed to bring out the staff from the innermost intimacy.

f) In the work doing justice to reality implies the exercise of fortitude and temperance: The world with which, in one way or another, man relates in his work is not a mere product of the human capacity to produce, nor does it constitute a storeroom of raw materials for man's dominion. The world has been given by God to man to guard and govern, but not to impose on him a despotism that is ignorant of any natural meaning.

In classical times man understood his relationship of dominion over nature in terms of symbiosis, i.e. man had to learn to conduct natural realities according to the very nature of those realities so that he could make use of them without doing violence to them (cf. chapter 14).

This perspective was fostered by nature's own resistance and the weakness of the technical resources that man could use for its mastery. This is why we said at the beginning of this chapter that the life of work had in pre-modern times a predominantly negative meaning: the aspect of tenacity or effort in the intervention on nature took precedence over the aspect of efficiency.

The modern development of technology has reversed the status and opens up perspectives in which the resistance aspect can be almost completely eliminated. At the same time, the biological and pharmacological sciences have reached such an development extent that physical pain can almost be avoided, even in those areas of medical intervention that were traditionally most inevitably painful.

The parallel loss of meaning of what constitutes human life and the corresponding fall towards hedonism has provoked a development of technology aimed above all at avoiding pain in order to have a mastery of the world that, in its pretension, has no limits, neither because of the penalty it entails for man, nor because of the nature of things. The fearful risk of this process is that it will lead to a government over the world that is not a recognition of reality but a despotic one, whose measure is not the person but caprice.

The world, now that all natural inertia has been overcome by technical power, presents no resistance to a man who has become blind and deaf to the groaning of nature. As a result, a human subject emerges, always demanding more facilities and refusing to make an effort. The despotic dominator wants his desires to be fulfilled immediately. Faced with fatigue and pain, man is no longer equipped with virtue, but is only stimulated to find solutions to these ills. Thus we see a veritable stampede against anything that might cause pain or discomfort.

In the face of this status there is an urgent need to recover the human sense of work as the domain of a world that is not its own work, and which therefore cannot be fully subjected to the domains of man. It could be said that a recovery of the meaning of work is necessary in its penal aspect. Certainly not because we accept the perspective of the Stoics, or because we claim that pain and tiredness are goods to be protected, but because they remind us that our mastery of the world is not absolute.

In the face of the danger of hedonistic dissolution of the person, temperance and sobriety stand out as the virtues of man in our technical and rationalistic age. The moderation of pleasure, according to the criterion of human truth, is thus sample a requirement in accordance with the truth of man's being in the world. It equips him against the danger of being unaware of reality. It gives him that all-important form of humanity which is the acceptance of reality as it is, and not as he would like it to be.

The subjection to time which constitutes the virtue of patience is particularly necessary when we are tempted to desire everything and at once. The passion for speed and comfort has made astonishing achievements, but it has uprooted man from his world. It would of course be ridiculous to try to recapture with sightseeing excursions what we have lost by travelling by plane or in the swiftest and most comfortable trains and cars. The ancient and venerable work of mercy that called for "giving lodging to the pilgrim" is almost unintelligible today.

e) bibliography and notes

(1) ARENDT, H. "La condición humana". Seix Barral. Barcelona, 1974, p. 19. (Original English: The human condition. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1958).

(2) RIEDEL, M. "work". In H. KRING. "Vocabulary of philosophical concepts" III. Herder. Barcelona, 1979.

(3) In his encyclical "Laborem Excercens" on the human work , John Paul II places as a starting point for the elaboration of an ethics of work, the consideration of work in the sense of goal, i.e. in its productive and world-shaping aspect, and the consideration of work in the subjective sense (cf. Part II on " work and man"). "The whole ethical problem of work is here. It is the problem of the realisation of the person in and through his work: to ensure that the externalisation carried out by the work does not entail a loss of the dignity of a free and conscious subject" (CAFARRA, "Lavoro e società: famiglia, nazione", in AA.VV. "Laborem Exercens", ed. Vaticana, 1981, pp. 198-199. Cf. also the study by CHOZA, "Sentido goal y sentido subjetivo del work", in AA. VV. "programs of study sobre la Encíclica Laborem Exercens". BAC. Madrid, 1987, pp. 231-266).

(4) The link between work and what is properly human has been implicitly ignored for centuries by asceticism and the various forms of Christian spirituality. B In this aspect, the teaching of Bishop J. ESCRIVA DE BALAGUER is a novelty: the spirit of Opus Dei is a spirit of sanctification of work (cf. especially the homily "Amar al mundo apasionadamente", in "Conversaciones con Monseñor Escrivá de Balaguer", 14th ed. Madrid, 1985). On the novelty and anthropological implications of this teaching, see RODRIGUEZ, "Camino y la espiritualidad del Opus Dei", in "Teología Espiritual". Valencia, 1965; ILLANES, "La Santificación del work". EPALSA. Madrid, 1981. And on the current incorporation into the Magisterium of the Church, cf. JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical "Laborem Exercens", Part V.

(5) "Conversaciones con Monseñor Escrivá de Balaguer", n. 119; ESCRIVA DE BALAGUER, J. "Es Cristo que pasa". Rialp. Madrid, 1973, n. 123.