Work: Emerson, Wittgenstein, Gurdjieff

“But do your work, and I shall know you,” says Emerson in “Self-Reliance.”¹ (In the original edition, he wrote, “Do your thing”—that catch phrase of the 1960’s, or Transcendentalism 2.0.) Work is our thing, it’s what we all do—a universal activity, it would seem. Only little children and the elderly are exempt from such employment (even a vagrant has to work to keep alive, and the immensely rich are rarely indolent). Work engages us in our diurnal lives, and in this country it often defines who we are. “What do you do?”—frequently the first question a new acquaintance will ask—implies we are what we do. Perhaps we should amend Emerson here and say, “Tell me about your work, and I shall know you.”—But, of course, Emerson meant something quite different from that, which is why I happened to choose his remark as the epigraph to a volume of verse, Work Life. “Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself,” he goes on to say. In other words, do your own thing, not what the “game of conformity” calls for, which invariably “scatters your force” and “blurs the impression of your character.”² The emphasis, then, is on your work. It’s yet another call to self reliance. But it is also aligned with a more troubling thought of Emerson’s, this time from “The Poet”: “The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”³ This is a startling notion. In repose, I am incomplete—only half a man; to be whole, to be fully who I am, I must express myself in activity. He calls it “this necessity to be published”⁴ —the first instance, perhaps, of the “publish or perish” admonition. To do my work is not just to express who I am, it is constitutive of who I am. We all “stand in need of expression,”⁵ he says, and then goes on to remark, “In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret.”⁶ That’s quite a curious list of activities, but it turns out to be fairly comprehensive when you think about it. Everywhere we turn, we seek to reveal the secret of who we are. But that secret, he says, is painful. Why is that? What is the connection between work, expression and secret pain?

We might say, at first, that not to express ourselves in work is to conceal who we are, to make a secret of our identity. And since we are in need of expression, its lack will be felt as discomfort and a discomfiture. It is painful not to do one’s work; it is humiliating to be half a man. Work is an imperative. Emerson again: “Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself”⁷; which is to

Definitiva

© Pedro Díaz Molins

say, you will strengthen and augment yourself. And here we see foregrounded the further connection between work and self: work establishes who we are, but it also affects who we are. To work for oneself is to work on oneself.

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein writes: “Working in philosophy. . . is really more a working on oneself. On one’s interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things.”⁸ Wittgenstein is thinking of philosophy here as therapeutic: it administers a cure for the illness of misapprehension—specifically the “misinterpretation of our forms of language.”⁹ The problems that arise from this affliction have “the character of depth,” he says. “They are deep disquietudes.”¹⁰ Working on oneself dissolves the pseudo-problems that bedevil us; it doesn’t provide clear answers to such questions, it clarifies us instead. It alleviates our disquietude. This can only happen when we pay particular attention to expression, to the ordinary language we use in life. This is not as easy as it sounds, for “getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard.”¹¹ It requires honesty, for it is a matter of morality. A new...