One conception of work, which I’ll call “Catholic” for lack of a better name, is instrumental. We work in order to experience contemplative leisure. Aristotle began this line of inquiry, and Josef Pieper took it up in Leisure: The Basis of Work.

A second I’ve furnished in my book Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga of Work as well as in a recent article, “Body Like a Rag, Mind like a Mirror.” In both cases, I see work as the arena in which spiritual practice unfolds. On this view, work is not instrumental–it’s not a means to an end beyond work–but it is is secondary. Of primary importance is the study of the mind and of the ego in particular; of secondary importance is that impetus for this practice, which is work.

I’m straining to understand Kojeve’s An Introduction to a Reading of Hegel. One point, nonetheless, is decently clear: work, in the broad sense, is fundamental to becoming fully human. Work is neither instrumental nor narrowly educative; it’s thoroughgoingly formative, deeply pedagogical. Kojeve, for example: “In his work, he [the slave] trans-forms things and trans-forms himself at the same time; he forms things and the World by transforming himself, by educating himself; and he educates himself, he forms himself, by transforming things and the World.” It’s through work that the slave formulates the idea of freedom, and it’s through conduct that the slave goes beyond enslavement and mastery.

I can only think that by so doing, the agent is trying to fashion the world into a human world, into a home. The agent, through work, makes this dwelling into a home.

I don’t yet see how to make sense of the particulars of this account, but there is something hazily attractive or propulsive or at least intriguing about this picture of human beings. We are purposive beings whose realization of freedom must come, somehow, through the movement of history.