A Look into the Future. Józef Tischner's Thinking about Human Work

Jarosław Jagiełło

Abstract

This study does not present a complete picture of the philosophy of human work in the socio-philosophical thought by Józef Tischner. Instead, our focus is primarily on the diagnosis, which Tischner put in one of his recent and less known studies on the condition of human work in the era of the free market and the economic hegemony of the bill of rights. Exposing various threats and crises of contemporary work, Tischner criticizes the lopsided, that is, objective understanding of work. In this lopsidedness, he discovers a major threat to the future of work. Therefore Tischner also draws attention to the need to take into account the subjective or personal nature of work, which he understood as a conversation between people. It is this essential dimension of human work that was the subject of the long studies by Tischner. The present article focuses on these studies in which Tischner – giving a phenomenological description of work in its religious, anthropological and ethical aspect – indicates the need for the formation of the human ethical substance of consciousness work. An important stage of this formation is to present the human work as a space to build the community of responsibility, loyalty and mutual trust. In work regarded in this sense, Tischner sees a guarantee of moral governance of modern societies.

Keywords:

Józef Tischner, philosophy of human work, ethic of work, dialogue, community, religious aspect of work, anthropological and ethical aspect of human work, phenomenology, hermeneutics