AR Gouin wrote:
>
[snip]
> Seriously, I'm all for GAI - its success depends on the way of its
> introduction. I'm also for reduced work time - not on a weekly basis but on
> a lifetime basis. Of my 40 years of "work", I can very easily identify at
> least ten that I could have done without. And they were not all made up
> 40-hour weeks. To trade 40 hours of drudgery for 30 hours of drudgery is
> not much of an improvement humanly and intellectually, even for the same
> income. In fact, most often I found great satisfaction where my workweek
> was much more then 40 hours of interesting and intellectually challenging
> endeavours, and not necessarily overpaid.
[snip]
This brings up a question I keep wondering about:
I think there
is a kind of "change of phase [state]" (ref.: Henry Adams) which
occurs when the work week changes from 7 days to 6: The "day
of rest" is introduced into daily life.
I don't see a similar "paradigm shift" (etc.) happening when we
go from 6 days to 5 (although, of course, 2 days of "time off"
per week is better than 1).
But might another such shift occur when the work week
goes down to 4 (or is it 3?) days per week? Does daily life
then shift, truly, from "living to work", to "working to live"?
Is it possible that a 3 or 4 day work week would
provide Everyman (woman, child...) with a measure of
true leisure (time not defined in relation to work), as
opposed to "time off" ("spare time", etc.)?
> "The end of labor is to gain leisure." Aristotle.
As Hannah Arendt wrote in _The Human Condition_, the ancient
Greeks' aspiration was freedom *from* enterprise, so that
they could pursue the normatively human life of
leisure (speaking shining
words and doing shining deeds in the peer social space of the
polis, where as Marx wrote -- albeit about the
future instead of the past -- there is no longer the
government of men but only the administration of things...),
whereas we have devolved into aspiring
to freedom *of* enterprise, i.e., to make more money as
the summum bonum. It is interesting to try to think of
"the invisible hand of the marketplace" as "The Good Beyond
Being" (ref.: Plato and Emmanuel Levinas).
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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