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willowJun 3, 2024

part of the reason marx’s analysis that workers are compensated for the time it takes to produce and reproduce themselves is so brutal is that the weekend feels like just enough time to get back on my feet, but before i can start stretching out and pursuing my own interests, i’m knocked down again

willowJun 1, 2024

i’m too weak for a 5/2 work week split

willowJun 3, 2024

and frustratingly, it instrumentalizes my so called “free time”. i couldn’t tell you why, but my entire life i have been deeply preoccupied with having autonomously determined free time; i have been and continue to be profoundly disquieted by its absence.

willowJun 3, 2024

raymond geuss, history and illusion in politics, pg. 126

willowJun 3, 2024

willow @dreary.dev

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raymond geuss, history and illusion in politics, pg. 126

This last point about the distinction between the merely instrumentally good and that which is inherently or categorically or absolutely good in itself marks a watershed in political thought which has not, I think, received the attention it descrves. Kant, Max Weber, and Habermas think that this distinction is sharp, and designates a basic and ineluctable feature of human thought and experience. Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and Adorno, on the other hand, think that the distinction is relative and contextual, and that it is a sure sign of a deliciency in a society if this distinction is given too much prominence or taken too seriously. For Marx and Dewey, the distinction is a remnant of a primitive state of society in which slaves did the instrumentally necessary work, and parasitic aristocrats pursued the good for its own sake. The distinction between means and ends, things good in themselves and good for something else, intrinsically good and good for its consequences, or inherent and instrumental value is a distinction one can perfectly well make within and relative to a certain established context of thought or action, but it is neither a fundamental nor an absolute distinction. What is a means in one context, may be an end in another, and in many spheres, especially those in which human activity is freest, the distinction will have only whimsical application. The members of a non-demoralised orchestra may make their living by playing so that to some extent they play for the sake of the money they earn, but the music they make may also have inherent value for them. In a fully developed and free human socicty most human action would be performed both because of the good effects or consequences it would have and because it was experienced as good 'in itself' by the agent.

John Dewey, Democracy and Education, pg. 266

Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure, The Origin of the Opposition.

The isolation of aims and values which we have been considering leads to opposition between them. Probably the most deep-seated antithesis which has shown itself in educational history is that between education in preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure. The bare terms "useful labor" and "leisure" confirm the statement already made that the segregation and conflict of values are not self-inclosed, but reflect a division within social life. Were the two functions of gaining a livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the opportunities of leisure, distributed equally among the different members of a community, it would not occur to any one that there was any conflict of educational agencies and aims involved. It would be self-evident that the question was how education could contribute most effectively to both. And while it might be found that some materials of instruction chiefly accomplished one result and other subject matter the other, it would be evident that care must be taken to secure as much overlapping as conditions permit; that is, the education which had leisure more directly in view should indirectly reinforce as much as possible the efficiency and the enjoyment of work, while that aiming at the latter should produce habits of emotion and intellect which would procure a worthy cultivation of leisure. These general considerations are amply borne out by the historical development of educational philosophy. The separation of liberal education from professional and industrial education goes back to the time of the Greeks, and was formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into those who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved from this necessity.

adorno, minima moralia § 84

Timetable . - Few things separate more profoundly the mode of life befitting an intellectual from that of the bourgeois than the fact that the former acknowledges no alternative between work and recreation. Work that need not, to satisfy reality, first inflict on the subject all the evil that it is afterwards to inflict on others, is pleasure even in its despairing effort. Its freedom is the same as that which bourgeois society reserves exclusively for relaxation and, by this regimentation, at once revokes. Conversely, anyone who knows freedom finds all the amusements tolerated by this society unbearable, and apart from his work, which admittedly includes what the bourgeois relegate to non-working hours as 'culture', has no taste for substitute pleasures. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. The parents for whom it was a matter of prestige that their children should bring home good reports, were the least disposed to let them read too long in the evening, or make what they took to be any kind of intellectual over-exertion. Through their folly spoke the genius of their class. The doctrine inculcated since Aristotle that moderation is the virtue appropriate to reasonable people, is among other things an attempt to found so securely the socially necessary division of man into functions independent of each other, that it occurs to none of these functions to cross over to the others and remind each other of man. But one could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in an anteroom, at his desk until five o'clock, than playing golf after the day's work was done. Only a cunning intertwining of pleasure and work leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society. Such experience is less and less tolerated. Even the so-called intellectual professions are being deprived, through their growing resemblance to business, of all joy.

Atomization is advancing not only between men, but within each individual, between the spheres of his life. No fulfilment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes, no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workaday world and set it on fire. While in their structure work and amusement are becoming increasingly alike, they are at the same time being divided ever more rigorously by invisible demarcation lines. Joy and mind have been expelled equally from both. In each, blank-faced seriousness and pseudo-activity hold sway.

The conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given to the latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the other servile in its social status. The latter class labored not only for its own subsistence, but also for the means

June 24, 2025 at 8:14 AM