FREE-WORK & ECO-WORK
by F Richard Singer III edition date 11/2007, revised slightly using red font in 7/2011
website: www.conceptualstudy.org email: richardsinger3@sbcglobal.net
The idea of a conceptual paper is
presented in the conceptual papers part of the above website. As with any
conceptual paper, this one is neutral with respect to any significant
paraceptual propositions (see below). Nor does it argue for or against anything
or any course of action. It merely presents and relates some concepts and
indicates how I find them personally useful in thinking about what people do.
Perhaps these concepts can be useful to some others persons. My decision to
write this paper was triggered by a comment I received in an email from Octavia
"Most people
feel they should be rewarded financially for what they consider their
intellectual property." - are we then more generous than others? Or
possibly more interested in sharing our ideas than in earning money from
them? I certainly can’t imagine much
greater reward than that woman who wrote me last week to tell me she had just
finished reading Circle for the second time; astonishing. Even more so that she
is the third person to write and tell me the same thing.
Note: The word ‘net’ means a network of concepts and conceptual relations. Saying that first cousins share a pair of grandparents gives a relationship between concepts used in our public net for ordinary family relationships. This statement is usually conceptual, since it is independent of any state of affairs in the realm of families. Saying that Jill and Barb are first cousins uses this net to but tells about an aspect that this net is intended to help us think about. Such information is paraceptual. There is a subtly in these concepts that is further developed and illustrated in Chapter 2 of my book A personal approach to Conceptual Philosophy.
¨ Conceptual statements are about concepts and relationships between concepts in some net.
¨ Paraceptual statements presuppose some net. They are often used to propose information about something in a realm that the net is intended to help us access.
Work: The capitalized word ‘IS’ means ‘is
conceptually within the context of this paper’, and will sometimes be used to
stress the conceptual nature of a statement. The central concept in this paper
is a concept of work.
Work
IS intentional activity whose main focus is on the production of some product,
where a product may also include a service.
Work can be extrinsically motivated
by a desire to benefit from some finished product. However it can also be
intrinsically motivated by anticipating the product or by the satisfaction
involved in productive activity itself. Altho these types of motivation can be
mutually supportive, they can also occur in ways that undercut each other. A
person can become so interested in the process, especially when it is creative,
that the product remains forever unfinished. Likewise a person can be so
focused on obtaining and using the final product that the production becomes
just a chore to be tolerated.
Side
Remark: I recall reading
about a motivation research project in which subject were extrinsically
rewarded for a task they enjoyed, that this increased the motivation, but when
the rewards were removed the motivation decreased below it pre-reward level.
Example
1: Most of my former
students had previously acquired a habit of being extrinsically motivated by
grades. Many were also motivated to study by a desire to learn. While such
motivation is partially extrinsic, it is more easily compatible with the type
of intrinsic motivation I wanted to make fundamental. I wanted the study to
motivated primarily by the desire to explore interesting problems and ideas. To
avoid grade motivation from undermining such intrinsic motivation I made
grading depend on time spent rather than on results. However even the extrinsic
goal of putting in time could obscure the intrinsic motivation.
Example
2: I work at sculpturing channels
in Plattin Creek. Since I seldom have a final product in mind and because the
activity is enjoyable and relaxing, my motivation is primarily intrinsic. Altho
I often have evolving products in mind, such as obtaining a channel clear of
all large rocks, these product goals also tend to be intrinsically motivating
However when they become too important or gets linked to a deadline, the
production process become a chore and my motivation becomes compulsive. It is
hard to say if my motivation has become extrinsic, since the only extrinsic
motivations I can imagine is my desire to look at or show off my work. This
does not account for the inner need I feel to get something done.
Example 3:
The product of coaching a little league baseball could be a winning or even a
championship team. It could be to produce a person oriented team in which each
members has the opportunity to develop and enjoy being on the team. These and
other product goals can be interrelated either positively or negatively, and
can provide extrinsic motivation for coaching. Coaching itself can be
interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but the goal of having a championship
team can obscure this intrinsic motivation while the goal of having a person
oriented team is likely to help maintain the intrinsic motivation.
Ordinal
Comparisons: We commonly
make ordinal comparison without any commitment to there being some underlying
phenomena that could be measured, and for the purposes at hand these are easily
understood. For instance I think that most people would understand if I said
that I worked harder today than I did yesterday. Furthermore if they asked
about how much harder, I would not think about measuring, and I might merely
respond by saying that I had worked a lot harder. All concepts in this paper
that involve matters of extent do so in this comparison sense. Thus the fact
that I imagine placing motivational factors on a line segment has no
quantitative significance. It is merely a heuristic device I use for
visualizing comparisons.
The
Extrinsic-Intrinsic Dimensions:
I first encountered extrinsic-intrinsic motivational concept pair in a graduate
seminar on motivation. I sketch it here primarily because I will use it in
presenting two motivational work concepts. Let W be any specific work activity,
M the composite motivational factors for W. I imagine a line segment as a
heuristic device for an extrinsic-intrinsic perspective on W. If M seems to be
about equally intrinsic and extrinsic, imagine W at the midpoint. If M seems
primarily extrinsic, imagine W at or near the left endpoint. If M seems
primarily intrinsic, imagine W at or near the right end point.
Side
Remark: For a more complex
perspective I imagine the Extrinsic-Intrinsic dimension as the horizontal axis
and an intensity dimension as a vertical axis to imagine my motivation
perspective on W. I imagine this using arbitrarily chosen 2 by 2 square with
center at [0,0]. Suppose M seems to be of average intensity. If seems equally
intrinsic and extrinsic then I imagine W at [0,0]. For solely extrinsic use [0,- 1], for solely intrinsic use [0,1]. Increase
or decrease the first coordinate depending the intensity of the motivation.
Again using coordinates is a heuristic for imagining comparisons and has no
quantitative significance.
Another comment in an email from
Octavia focused my attention on the fact that the word ‘work’ is often used
implicitly for a concept that I call eco-work, and that eco-work is even
identified as the thing that a person does.
When meeting new
people (as I did up in
Note that the prefixes ‘free’ and
‘eco’ below refer to the motivation for doing the work rather than to what kind
of work is done. These motivational conditions are for clear cut case of these
kinds of work. There are other borderline cases and many cases that I would
classify using these concepts would be not be so clear cut. Some days I pull
weeds because I enjoy the activity and like thinking about what my garden will
look like if it had no weeds. This IS a clear cut case of free-work. On rare
occasions I think about what I have saved by not buying something to kill them,
but as long as this was a minor motivational factor this IS still free-work. It
would only be eco-work if this was a major motivational factor.
eco-work: motivation has a strong extrinsic
component involving personal economic concerns
free-work: intrinsic motivational component
strongest and no noticeable economic motivation
Eco-work may have a variety of
non-economic motivational components, as long has it has at least one strong
economic one. Earning or saving money is a major example of economic
motivation. However so is the acquisition or production anything that one
expects to use or exchange for good or services within the economic system.
Thus working for room and board IS eco-work. Work having some economic
advantage, but not strongly motivated by this fact IS not eco-work.
While free-work is conceptualized as
having a strong intrinsic motivational component, free-work also may also have
extrinsic motivational components. A person volunteering as little league coach
may be motivated by a desire to be admired for his effort or by a desire to
produce a winning team. As long as the intrinsic motivational factors are
stronger than the extrinsic one, his coaching activity IS to a large extent
free-work and for the sake of simplicity I would probably call it free-work
Much work IS neither eco-work nor
free-work. Consider mowing my lawn. Doing this to avoid paying to have it done
IS eco-work. Doing it to enjoy a good workout IS free-work. Doing it to prevent
the neighbors from thinking you are a slob IS neither free-work or eco-work.
Motivation that involves a mixture of all three such components is also likely
to be neither free-work nor eco-work, altho it could be eco-work if the
economic factor is strong.
Our society offers many options for
volunteer work such as, being on a school board, being a scoutmaster, leading a
book study group, handing out campaign literature, etc. Some communities even
have volunteer fire departments. Such work, may vary to the extent that it is
intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, and at such times as the intrinsic
components are stronger as the extrinsic ones, such work is free-work. At other
time the same activities may be fail to be free-work. Even volunteer work can
be eco-work. For example, consider working in a campaign with the hope that
this will help you obtain a government job.
Notation: P is a variable ranging over the set of
persons.
Ideals: An ideal for P IS a special kind of value.
An ideal may focus on some actual aspect of the world that P would have
preserved enhanced, or it may focus on some imagined aspect of the world that P
wants to help bring into being. To qualify as an ideal, the valuing must
persist over time, be applied to numerous situations, be acknowledged as a high
priority reason for action.
To classify a value as an ideal for
P has no moral or ethical connotations, and stating or adopting an ideal does
not entail advocating it or arguing for it. An ideal merely serves as a
potential guide for actions. This differs in several ways from the concept most
people have in mind when using the word ideal. This word has connotations of
laudability or goodness or even perfection; and people often argue about ideals
as if they involved truth claims. This is inappropriate for the concept I am
using. My concept of an ideal is introduced in A Personal Approach to Conceptual
Philosophy and developed in
the Part on Enactics (i.e. the part that develops a net for personal actions).
Nurturing
an Imagined Ideal: To
nurture an imagined ideal V IS to act in ways that help V to be realized.
Personal nurturing of V IS nurturing by a person. Social nurturing of V IS the
concerted nurturing of V by an organized group or by some social institution.
To effectively nurture V IS to do so in a way that has a significant impact on
bringing V into existence. Some ideals, such as being an honest person, can be
effectively nurtured by purely personal nurturing. However due to a variety of
factors beyond personal control, individuals can have personal ideals for which
personal nurturing is not sufficient. For example effective personal nurturing
of the personal ideal of staying sober can be supplemented by the social
nurturing of Alcoholics Anonymous. Some ideals, such as the ideal V of a
society without interpersonal violence, may be primarily determined by
evolutionary forces that persons can neither understand nor effectively
influence. V may not be possible even if nurtured by the vast majority of
persons in the world. However a person can nurture V by effectively nurturing
the personal state of becoming and remaining nonviolent. This IS seed nurturing
for V, i.e. it involve effectively nurturing another ideal state with some hope
that doing so could lead towards an effective nurturing of V. However unless
seed nurturing is undertaken with an awareness that it broader effect may be
minimal, it can result in disillusionment.
Free-Worker
and Eco-Worker Concepts:
While clear cut cases of free-work and eco-work are mutually exclusive, a
person may engage in either type at different times. P IS a free-worker to the
extent that P free-work is a major factor in P’s life and that P would choose
this to be the case. P IS an eco-worker to the extent that eco-work is a major
factor in P’s life regardless of whether or not P would deliberately choose
this to be the case. As usual, the concept of extent in this case is ordinal
rather than quantitative. A person can be primarily a free-worker, primarily an
eco-worker, primarily a worker whose motivational factors are mainly extrinsic
and non-economic. However main motivational factors in a person’s life can be a
mixed in such a manner that none of these classifications would apply. Note
that such classification are value neutral, and are merely intended to give one
perspective on thinking about the role motivational factors can have in
relation to a person’s attitude towards work.
Free-Work
Ideals: My personal
free-work ideal to be primarily a free-worker and to help others become aware
of their potential as free-workers and if they choose to move in a free-worker
direction to help them with this goal. My social free-work ideal is sow seeds
for a social structure that is at least as supportive of free-work as it is
supportive of eco-work. My vision of my social free-work ideal is fairly vague
and could be satisfied by a variety of social structures, and my social
free-work ideal can be any aspect of the world that is also compatible with my
other ideals.
Related
Claims: My classification of
my social free-work ideal and my personal free-work ideal as ideals involves no
claims about their worth. However there are some related claims that could be
made in this regard. I find both A and B too vaguely formulated to examine, but
also not highly relevant to my choice of my social free-work ideal. C is a
claim think is relevant, and my conjecture that C is true is the main reason
for focusing on a free-work concept.
A. Most
people lives would be better off if my social free-work ideal was implemented.
B. My
social free-work ideal is ethically better than a state in which eco-work is
more prevalent.
C. Some
people lives would be enriched if they could become primarily free-workers.
My social free-work ideal could be
socially nurtured, by trying to establish an organization for its promotion
thru encouraging the appreciation free-work, analyzing how work done now as
eco-work could be more effectively done as free-work, disseminating information
about free-work potions, convincing many people that Claims A and B are
correct, etc. I am more interested in nurturing my personal free-work ideal
mostly for its own sake but also as a seed ideal for my social free-work ideal.
The part my personal free-work ideal that applies to shaping me is an ideal I
effectively nurtured long before I retired from eco-work. I have also been able
to effectively nurture the part that applies to others persons in a few cases.
The main way I have nurtured my
personal free-work ideal was by deliberately choosing to emphasize free-work
over eco-work in my own activities. I adopted this ideal long before focusing
explicitly on the concepts of free-work and eco-work, and except for a few
years of duality around age 20, I have been extremely comfortable with the
attitudes it entails. One of the main powers helping me in this was a deeply
the ingrained perspective indicated below. This is a conceptual maxim about
personal worth rather than a claim; i.e. it shows that I apply a finite
ordering concept of worth in terms of worth to persons, and that this concept
does not apply to comparing persons to each other.
Persons are the creators of worth and are too
important to have their worth evaluated.
If I was to assign worth to persons,
I would merely say that each persons has infinite personal worth.
I think that my attitude towards my
personal free-work ideal begin to emerge when I was 12 years old. Having a variety
of interest, I was often engaged in intrinsically motivated work. In particular
I enjoyed the work involved in camping, especially building a campsite with
simple tools using only materials gathered from freely available. However I did
not respond very well to extrinsic motivation. We had a cherry tree in our back
yard. I told my mother that cherry pie was not worth the effort of cherry
picking. This is but one of many instances in which I was expected to engage
work whose benefits did not seem to compensate for the tedium involved. This
was the case even when mowing our neighbors lawn for money. Having my basic
needs met, I preferred free time to money, and after a couple of times I quit
this job. I was told that I would have to work for a living when I was an adult
and that this was good practice. I vowed to myself that I would find a way to
earn a living doing as little onerous work as possible. I recognized that one
key to this was to be thrifty and keep my economic need simple and that this
was a challenge that I would enjoy. This enjoyment of simplicity remained as a
major asset in nurturing my personal free-work ideal.
At the end of my first year of
college I decided that I wanted to teach college mathematics, and that this
would be a way to earn a living doing work which would be mostly intrinsically
motivated. However after a year of graduate study my formal education was
interrupted for financial reasons. I was married with a two year old daughter.
I was able to obtain a computer related job because of my mathematical
competence. However no mathematics was involved in the job. I took this job
primarily because they would pay for further graduate work, and I thought I
could tolerate the work until I was able to complete a doctorate. I recall
thinking that working 40 hours a week and another 5 hours for transportation
left 123 hour not directly related to the job. Subtracting another 56 hours for
sleep left 67 non-job related waking hours. In spite of this I was unable to
adjust and this triggered my first collapse of will. It was then that the
duality in my attitude towards eco-work emerged in force. For the only time in
my life my infinite personal worth attitude faded, and I felt a deep sense of
shame because I could only manage a part time non-professional job which was
not sufficient to support my family. I felt I should have a suitable job, but I
rebelled at the need to do work for purely extrinsic reasons.
During the next 4 years, I taught
secondary mathematics, and while a large part of this job was onerous, my
interest in mathematics and in helping others learn provided considerable
intrinsic motivation. Since this was considered a suitable job, my sense of
shame disappeared and my infinite personal worth attitude reemerged. However
the duality in my attitudes still persisted. It was not until I started
teaching at the college level that I was able to firmly believe the social
expectations about work were wrong and my attitude was right. It was only after
I was able to formulate my net for doing that I was able to see that my way
thinking of this in terms of right and wrong was not appropriate. Now I would
say that becoming a free-worker is personal choice, perhaps contrary to social
expectations. Moreover I do not know whether a more free-work society would be
better than a more eco-work related society. I can give reasons for my choice
of a free-worker type ideals, but ethical consideration have very little
relevance to the choice of this or any of my other basic ideals. For a fuller
discussion of the relationship between choosing ideals and ethical
consideration see The Ethical Impact of Will.
Once I begin teaching college there
were a variety of ways I could nurture my personal free-work ideal. I
transferred from a major university to a small college with a 3 person
mathematics department. Altho I then had to teach three courses rather than
two, there was no pressure to do research, so all of my research became
free-work. Furthermore our department had considerable autonomy and was run
internally by consensus. Thus I was able to choose what courses I wanted to
teach and the times for teaching them, and while this was still eco-work, a
major part of my day to day motivation was intrinsic. Still there were
restriction that I would not have encountered in a totally free-work setting.
One problem with eco-work was the
pressure to have courses with enough students to be economically viable. I felt
that grades were a major barrier to the kind of learning I wanted to encourage,
and for many years, our Master of Arts in teaching program did not give grades.
However changing conditions, such as school districts linking tuition benefits
to grades, made it hard unable to attract students to a program that did not
give grades. It was even more difficult to attract undergraduate majors into
courses that did not give grades. Many worried about how this would affect
their future after graduation. No such problem occurred when I retired and
taught without pay and refused to give grades.
Even when employed I was able to
make one significant move towards becoming more of a free-worker. I reduced
negotiated a reduction of my eco-work to two courses by taking a salary
reduction. This allowed me more time for free-work, such as doing more informal
and individualized work with students. This even made the pressure to tailor
courses to attract students seem less restrictive. Much of my free-work
involved designing materials that helped alleviate the restrictions involved in
grading. Specifically I had materials that encouraged multiple options within
the courses I was teaching.
My
Personal Free-work Ideal and Other Persons: Part of my personal free-work ideal is to help others become aware of
their potential as free-workers and if they choose to move in a free-worker
direction to help them with this goal. As with the other part of my personal
free-work ideal this part is both a seed ideal for my social free-work ideal
and an ideal in its own right.
The other person most directly
affected by personal free-worker ideal has been my wife Charmayne. My decision
to become primarily a free-worker is a decision which she has always supported.
From the beginning of our relationship we have discussed our ideals and values.
Altho hers are rooted in a biblical faith and mine are rooted in me, their
overlap is significant. Her attitude towards work is less radical than mine,
but she has always place a high priority on the kind of work that nurtures her
faith based values, and most of this work has not been eco-work. Free-work is
not as relevant to her and most of her non-eco-work is probably a mixture of
free-work and extrinsically motivated work. However my free-work ideal has been
instrumental in allowing her to make eco-work of secondary importance. It is
our discussions about the relative importance of material and deeper needs that
helped enable us maintain the decision that my engagement in eco-work could
meet our material need, leaving her able to nurture her values thru
non-eco-work.
Most of my friends, while aware of
my own choice to emphasize free-work do not find this choice relevant to their
own lives. I can think of two exceptions. It should be clear from the comments
I quoted from Octavia that she has been influenced by the fact that I have
nurtured my personal free-work ideal. Bob Corbett, a friend who teaches
philosophy, says that my example of reducing my eco-work to 2/3 time was what
encouraged him to adopt a similar course of action. I also know that he gives
me some credit for the work he has done to examine the idea of living simply
and his decision to teach courses on that topic. I recently asked him if he
would comment on this, Appendix A contains an extended response. This was
followed by an exchange of email, a slightly edited account of which I have
included in Appendix B, primarily because it illustrates problems in my
attempts to communicate the perspective involved in conceptual study.
Barriers
to a Personal Nurturing a Free-Worker Ideal: One form of nurturing for either my personal free-work ideal or my
social free-work ideal is to recognize and confront barriers of two main types,
namely those relating to material needs and wants, those relating to a sense of
worth.
Material
Needs and Wants: For most
persons, an obvious barrier to becoming primarily a free-worker is the
prudential need to earn enough money to supply their basic material needs. In
his book Free Men and Free Markets, Robert Theobald proposes a guaranteed income, the level of which
would enable every person to live at a modestly comfortable level. Altho such a
plan would remove this material needs barrier to being a free-worker,
implementing it may not be possible because of prevalent social attitudes
toward eco-work. Specifically it seems many people feel that a family having a
member who is able to be engaged in eco-work should earn a living; for
otherwise they are sponging off of the productive effort of others. This may be
related to an even deeper upward mobility attitude which I have indicated below
with an excerpt taken from An Essay on Downward Mobility by Bob Corbett. This may be the main barrier many persons would face in making a
personal choice to become more of a free-worker.
A dominant
activity for most people in our culture is tied to the phrase upward mobility.
Even the poorest people dream of it and pursue it as they can. This phenomenon
of upward mobility seems to me the dominant motivation behind a huge range of
our daily acts. What do we pursue in upward mobility? Our own material
well-being and comfort; large and comfortable home(s) with more and more
amenities; constantly improved quality of these amenities (e.g. first a wood
floor, then carpets, then Persian carpets); multiplication of personal
belongings (clothing, toys, jewelry, electronic equipment); the piling up of
external amenities (fancy or extra autos, country houses, boats, ever-fancier
bicycles) and the search for security (stocks, bonds, IRAs, private suburbs).
There is nothing about most of these items which deprives us of liberty or
virtue. But as a sum they define a LIFEFORM, which has overwhelming
significance -- ever upwardness. How much is enough? Who of you can really
define the stopping point?
Eco-work
and Worth: The comment below
indicates an attitude that seems just as much a barrier as the upward mobility
goal that Bob discusses, namely that a person’s importance or place in life is
related to eco-work. This would not only be a barrier to becoming more of a
free-worker, but also to being a non-eco-worker of any other type.
When I was very
small my father came for a rare and precious visit to my school. When he left
he did so with the excuse that he must return to his business. I asked him
about this, and about what my own "Work" might be, and he answered,
"Your work is play." This statement has I know been a powerful and
very subtle factor in thinking about my life's activity. Not having to work for
money has only furthered my idea that what I do is Play and not Real Work,
amongst other conclusions I can draw from this.
I have also counseled several
students who had sufficient wealth to live in luxury using only the income it
would yield but whose self-esteem was linked to becoming financially successful.
Perhaps it is only a rare person whose self-image does not depend on eco-work.
The remark below reminded me of a discussion about ideas from Theobald’s book.
Your description
of Functional Worth set me to thinking about how difficult it is to have self-respect
in this culture if one is not directly earning money; it's such a
work-absorbed, Calvinistic culture, and if you then appear to "work"
and GIVE your product away-!
We discussed the question of work
incentives under such a policy. Only two of us said that we would not work in
order to obtain more goods and service than this minimal income would provide.
However as people revealed their personal reasons for remaining employed, I
discovered that the mainly it was because their jobs gave them a sense of
worth.
In my paper Self-esteem
& Worth I develop
several worth concepts in order to think about self-esteem. Here I merely
sketch them. An activity X has functional worth in relation to some system S to
the extent that it contributes positively to the functioning of S. Thus most
eco-work is considered to have functional worth in relation to our economy. X
has transformational worth in relation to an imagined aspect of the world to
the extent that it contributes bringing that aspect into being.
Using transformational or functional
worth concepts, P’s characteristics can be evaluated according to various
standards, and this can be important to P and may effect P’s self-esteem.
However I do not regard this as relevant to P’s worth as a person. A personal characteristic
IS merely valuable in relation to whatever purposes are at hand. As indicated
earlier, I conceptualize personal worth as deeper than this, altho I did not
explicitly formulate this concept until recently. Perhaps the most powerful
thing P can do to counter doubts about P's own worth is to repeatedly reinforce
a way of valuing all persons as having the same infinite worth, thus including
P.
It is easy for me to understand that
in our culture many people feel that they need eco-work to be worthwhile.
However this relation between eco-worth and feeling goes beyond just being
employed. The prestige of eco-work can even be linked to earnings. Comments on
the way teachers are paid in relation to other professions could be cited in
this regard. Self-respect can also be threatened by doing what society
considers eco-work without pay or with lower pay than the norm. Even when a
person is doing eco-work that they also personally value for non-economic
reasons, unless done in the context of acknowledged social practices, they may
feel that doing additional non-eco-work of the same type is devaluating. I have
always been able to find others who were interested developing more radical
educational options. However eco-considerations like those just indicated have
been a major barrier.
Reflecting on my experiences
sketched in the two examples below, as well as on and some of my other
discussions about doing things without obtaining either extra funds from the
university or from grants, I wish I would have formulation my worth concepts
long ago. Now I would say that there was no reason to expect what we want to
try to have any positive functional worth in relation to the current
educational system. In fact if it succeeds it might even have negative
functional worth to that system. However designing educational options is
something to be done because of its potential for transformational worth, and
even transformation worth may not be forthcoming. Furthermore neither the
transformational or functional worth of my work is relevant to my choice to
have infinite personal worth. Why expect economic support for such work? If it
comes from a grant, fine. But if it is important in terms of our ideals why not
consider supporting it as with our own work and our own resources. Our most
important work does not have to be our eco-work. The examples below are given
primarily to illustrate the previous comments and why I personally find
eco-work potentially limiting. However that also may reveal how my educational
ideals and my free-worker ideals are intertwined.
Example
4: When I became the
director of a program for mathematics teachers it was still being funded by a
grant. We had developed a flexible program in which students attended classes
that explored a variety of related topics. However they were not expected to
master any particular materials and could focus on any part of the materials
they found relevant. To implement this we used two teachers in the more basic
classes. When the grant expired the budget allocated was intended to allow for
only one teacher per class. Since I considered summers as the core component of
the program, I decided to accept this during the year but not during the
summer. As director I had autonomy in hiring as long as I stayed within the
allocated budget and did not pay salaries in excess of the norm. I considered
my summer salary as extra, and knew that the faculty I wanted felt the same
way. We agreed to teach that summer with two teachers for each of the classes
with each faculty member taking half the pay they had taken in the past. The
previous program director was no longer at the university, but had returned for
the summer. She was extremely complementary about how the program had developed
and indicated that this was one of her best teaching experiences. The other
faculty were also pleased with the results. However one faculty member who was
comfortable in working for half pay herself had reservations about this
practice. Not sharing her perspective, I do not recall it very well. It had something
to do with the idea that paying faculty at that rate even for this type of work
was exploiting them or demeaning to their worth.
Example
5: Since undergraduate
students normally take courses from various departments, designing options for
them was harder than designing options for graduate students. However I was
able to initiate an extremely radical option one semester, which one of the
administrator even referred to as an interesting piece of anarchy. The
university offered a sabbatical option in which a student could take a semester
to engage in some supervised off campus program and receive a semesters credit
instead of taking courses. I interested several faculty members in helping me
use this as a mechanism for what I called an on-campus sabbatical for
reflecting on owns own education. This was a much more radical option than the
sabbatical option had been intended to provide. The idea was that students took
complete control of their own education for that semester. The three of us who
supervise this endeavor met with students both individually and in groups to
discuss what they were doing. Other faculty could be supportive of their
efforts or not. Some students worked with almost no faculty input. Others
audited various courses that were part of the regular curriculum. The on-campus
sabbatical instigated a faculty debate, some claiming that what I was doing
might totally undermine our creditability as an academic institution. The most
objectionable feature was that students were guaranteed a semesters credit no
matter what, and some of them were doing things that many faculty members
considered worthless. Since I observed students learning things about
themselves, I did not feel that way. One of our brightest students learned that
she did not want to be in college at that time and so we lost some tuition. Did
this endeavor have functional worth to the university? I would be glad to
discuss this endeavor further with anyone who is interested.
Property
and Work: The opening
comment by Octavia mentions financial rewards for intellectual property. I
intend to write a paper on property concepts, and one topic in that paper will
to relate these concepts to eco-work and worth. For now I only make two brief
conceptual observations that I will examine.
(1) Thinking
of the results of work as property IS to think of the work involved as eco-work
to some extent.
(2)
Thinking in terms of property IS one way of thinking in terms of functional
worth.
Concluding
Remarks: As remarked earlier
this paper makes no significant paraceptual claims and neither argues for or
against anything or any course of action. Of course the paper abounds with
paraceptual claims to help bring these concepts into focus. I have tried to
make only minor paraceptual claims that I expect most people to find highly
plausible. However concepts can be acquired by using them to make paraceptual
observations of varying degrees of adequacy, and hence the truth of such claims
is irrelevant to understanding these concepts.
A large part of the paper focuses on
the relation of these concepts to my ideals. This is because the way I shape
concepts is by using them to think about what persons do. The person I
understand best is me, and ideals play such a fundamental role in my thinking
what I do.
In case this focus on ideals might
seems like an advocacy of these ideals or of any course of action nurturing
them, let me affirm that this is not even an implicit purpose. Of course I
would welcome allies in nurturing ideals that we share, but my attitude towards
ideals and doing is experimental. This attitude is developed in my book A Personal
Approach to Conceptual Philos0phy. Altho any brief explanation of what I consider a radical attitude
towards ideals and doing is likely to be misleading, I have tried to do this in
the conceptual paper entitled The Ethical
Impact of Will. Below I give an even more condensed sketch.
My fundamental problem is the
problem of what to do. A person might take either ethical or prudential or
hedonic considerations as most fundamental in grounding their choices. They mix
them in various manners. They may feel that in so doing they have or should
have grounded them appropriately, perhaps by reflecting on the purpose of life
or having this purpose revealed to them. I make no claim to understand what
this all about. My response is to look on what to do as an experiment in which
I take ideals as more fundamental than any other considerations. Furthermore I
use ideals, which while obviously suggested by the ideals of others, have no external
grounding. To regard living as an experiment that in some basic way I do not
know what I am doing or where I am going. For example my social free-work ideal
is stated in terms of a vague social vision. I might conjecture some claim
about my social free-work ideal being more supportive of some type of human
good than a more eco-work oriented society, but this would be a tentative
conjecture. Furthermore I am willing to nurture this ideal even if it might
turn out to be a viper that poisons me or society. However what if anything
come after this life is beyond my understanding, and the worst that can happen
to me in this life is misery or death. The former I have learned to manage and
the latter will happen someday whether I live experimentally or not. That a
viper capable of poisoning society might emerge seem unlikely because the
nurturing of my social free-work ideal is unlikely to be effective. For many
persons it might seem that the motivation for acting as if a tentative
conjecture is true may seem less motivating that acting from firm beliefs. I
find this to be the case in regard to a wide variety of my actions. However I
find tentative conjectures more motivating when it comes to deeper concerns.
Perhaps this is because I am extremely skeptical when I find myself taking
complex paraceptual claims as true, especially when I am so aware of the
complexities involved.
To skip the appendixes you can go back to Conceptual Papers
Or you can skip to Appendix B for the correspondence about the paper.
APPENDIX
A: Bob Corbett on His work
Earlier I said that Bob gives me
some credit for the work he has done to examine the idea of living simply and
his decision to teach courses on that topic. I recently asked him if he would
comment on this. Here is his response.
You are correct in what you say in
two main areas, but not accurate in the too humble influence you allow they
were to me. Your influence was more important than you know.
I had ideals much like yours before
I met you, but sort of thought they were precluded by several decisions I had
made. I married and brought children into the world. My sense of responsibility
said I had lots of obligations to the kids, though I would have been hard pressed
to name them. What I did know was whatever they were, they cost money. Thus I
had to work for money. I further purchased a house getting in deeper.
I signed contracts with Webster U.,
and while technically only year-long contracts, I developed social relations
with other department and faculty members and entered into the spirit of
building Webster College and the philosophy department. The only effective way
to really do this was be employed there, thus, no matter how much I loved my
work and wanted to do it no matter what, money was involved everywhere.
I had already begun to do two things
before knowing this work/simplicity side of you much:
--
to simplify my own life to make it less dependent upon earned money.
However, this was less in order to do
less work than to free up more of my earned money to use it for charitable
purposes. I had already begun to do LOTS of other work that was work not for
pay, but was work in the behalf of other people to help them out.
Your model of more radical simplicity
than I had planned upon and then your decision to go 2/3 time as I remember it,
was a profound influence in holding out a model for me. I didn’t really get
that into gear well until 1989 when I resigned my full time position for a half
time one, and then took early full retirement just this June at age 62.
Secondly, our discussions over the
years concerning the advantages of freeing ourselves (my reading of what I
focused on) from work dependency in order to do "our own work"
(closer I take it to what you call free-work) influenced me a great deal.
Webster College/University was a good place to work for that. I wanted to
teach, to use my talents to challenge students philosophically and toward
simpler lifestyles and anti-materialist values. Many of my "required"
courses for my salary (which I needed both to live on and to give to my charity
work) were ones that I would have wished to do even were I not salaried, but
had I not done them within the structure, I wouldn’t have had the
infrastructure to reach the students. They were under pressure for degrees and
credits, and often took my classes with those motivations, but soon were swept
up in the ideas themselves.
Also, Webster U. realistically could
not have gotten away with using "volunteer" faculty were I in a
position to offer it. Too many complications with the structure of work in our
society. I should mention in this connection however, that many of us in the
early days, and I would suspect you among them, taught many courses as unpaid
overload. We all accepted that role. Today that is virtually unheard of.
In the years after 1994 EVERYTHING
changed. I got on line and began to discover that I didn’t need Webster U and
paid work to reach interested people and the people whom I did reach were not
there with many "mixed" aims such as grades, credits and degrees.
My work world took a quantum leap in
amount, I now work most of my waking hours 7 days a week 365 days a year at
what I’m interested in with a very small time out for paid teaching to have
some living income. I really don’t need that any longer since my retirement
benefits kicked in last month, but I do like the teaching for the same reasons
as before. I now am and can be much more selective about what I teach for the
school.
I current run 5 e-mail lists all of
which are moderated and require many hours of labor. The most work is a daily
e-mail service of news, discussion and inquiry concerning the country of
I have a Dogtown history list which
goes along with my Dogtown history web site which is nearly as large as my
Haiti site. Between the two my website in THOSE AREAS ALONE is over 2200
hundred separate web pages, virtually all I have written myself. Again, no
earnings from this work.
I have a travelogue e-mail list
which is not interactive, but just for those who want my travel writings on
I have a Nietzsche list which is
small.
I just recently opened a new
discussion forum with an e-mail list that began exclusively with former
students, over 100 of them, and now is adding people as I’ve posted our initial
discussions to a new web page I’ve created for that purpose.
In addition to that my website has
huge other areas including a massive repository of scholarly material on Vienna
as well as tourist info, probably 50% of the scholarly material is my own. Also
I have a book review page with many reviews and get a huge amount of e-mail
from that page.
In the areas of
To access Bob' website materials on simple living click on Simple
APPENDIX
B: Some Correspondence about the paper
Remark: I have edited the
correspondence for ease of presentation. Part of this is to remove comments
that make sense only in reference to earlier drafts of the paper, but I have
also modified some of the correspondence I sent to reflect thoughts that
occurred later. I hope this does not affect the essence of what has been said.
Bob’s initial email contained two parts only one of which is in Appendix A.
Below is the part directly related to the paper. I find it puzzling that he
interpreted the paper as indicated in his opening remark. I never suggest
measuring motivation, and I also think of motivation as complex and that
similar actions can be motivated differently at different times. However I do
not see why using the intrinsic-extrinsic perspective would suggest otherwise.
It is not intended as the only way of thinking about motivation.
Bob’s
Opening Remark: Richard, I
read the paper you sent and found it quite interesting, yet I have some strong
empirical doubts about reliable measures of motivation, and some worries about
the neat categories of interests and the measures of them.
His
Elaboration: I have a view
of human behavior as much more mixed that you seem to. I think motives are
tremendously mixed and that we are the best liars in the world to ourselves
about motives. Some things are clear and evidenced, namely some work earns me
money, some work earns me no money. That's not a motivation it's an outcome
fact.
Different things HIT me at different
times. Over a long period of time with my non-paid work I recognize various
motives.
--
I do things because I'm just driven to see it done. For instance, I want
reviews of Arthur Schnitzler's
works available to people on the web.
--
I do things to help others or try to change them.
--
I do things because I like it that other people like and appreciate what I do.
--
I do things because I like it that people think well of me.
--
I do things to escape any boredom.
--
I do things to help myself figure out the world
--
I do things because it is my habit to work.
-- I do
things to escape loneliness, thus working so much I create conditions for
loneliness!!
-- I do
things because I seem to be committed to doing them by my past actions and
others are dependent on my doing them.
--
I do things to challenge others.
--
I do things to amuse myself.
And I'm sure I could go on and on.
Many things I do probably have ALL
these motives mixed up in them in ways that no rational tools can reasonably separate
them out and identify them. Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of self-deception is
valuable in this regard.
Some
Thoughts by Richard: Perhaps
what Bob means by the term ‘motive’ may not be what I mean by the term
‘motivational factors. However the fact that motives or motivational factors
can be identified is what I would mean by rational tools, and looking at his
list, I find it useful to relate them to the intrinsic-extrinsic dimension.
That a people might be mistaken about motivational factors seems like a reason
for care rather than a reason for not trying to understand them better.
My
Brief Response to Bob: The
intrinsic-extrinsic of motivation is a purely conceptual distinction, and such
distinctions involve no paraceptual claims, not even claims about utility.
However I would not make such a distinction if I did not at least find it
personally useful. That the conceptual nets I use are of limited utility in
dealing with complex paraceptual states of affairs is not something that
bothers me.
Bob’s
Next Email: Richard, I would
certainly agree that any analysis which aids one to understand something more
clearly is useful to that person. I was assuming some desire to communicate
that distinction to others. When ordinary language is used with ordinary words
which appear to make claims about motives and use the term "motive" a
fairly straight forward word, then it would seem that invites misunderstanding
to say the least.
Is the distinction merely something
private in such a way that if read by another it doesn't matter it tends to
mislead one to think one may be talking about the world and not about a purely
conception universe? It puzzles me.
I'm further puzzled why the use of
such language and seeming descriptions of the external world of work would be more
attractive in the language of free work and eco work rather than in something
that appears to be very close to the same thing, especially if motives don't
really matter as paid work and non-paid work which has the advantage of being a
logical disjunction and of being less mysterious that language which plays on
the normal terms of the world.
My
Second Reply to Bob: You
asked if I could clarify. Probably not. What I am trying to do with conceptual
studies is so unlike traditional academic endeavors that it may not be possible
to convey my perspective except to persons already having a fairly unusual
epistemic orientation (note I said orientation: not theory or belief or system
or anything else that might have truth connotations not of a purely conceptual
nature). I am writing primarily for what I believe is a very small audience,
namely to persons who might already have a compatible orientation. Your
sentence below indicates you are not in this primary audience, altho this
statements puzzles me because the paper on free-work and eco-work focuses on
ordinary conceptual study rather than on conceptual philosophy.
Perhaps I am so
wedded to my existential concern with uncovering the world that conceptual
philosophy just is beyond me.
I do have a secondary audience in
mind, namely those who can at least tolerate the perspective needed for
conceptual study to understand some short papers written from this perspective.
Of course to do so, an initial understanding of this perspective is necessary.
This may be easier to acquire for those not already used to the kind of
perspectives found in the academic world (outside of mathematics). I have tried
to explain the nature and purpose of conceptual study in A Personal
Approach to Conceptual Philosophy. However I had hoped some incidental brief statements about the nature
and purpose of would make enough of this perspective apparent so a reader would
be able to understand the perspective well enough to glean the main ideas
without the kind of puzzlements you have expressed. Perhaps this is not a
sufficient prerequisite for these papers. After all I would not recommend a
paper on boolean lattices for someone who only had an algorithmic perspective
on ordinary algebra.
Altho your orientation may not
incline you to take interest much in what I am attempting, your comments have
helped me think about certain matters. So I will respond further to some of
your comments. You referred to my earlier statements.
The
intrinsic-extrinsic of motivation is a purely conceptual distinction, and such
distinction involve no paraceptual claims, not even claims about utility.
However I would not make such a distinction if I did not at least find it
personally useful. That the nets I use are of limited utility in dealing with
complex paraceptual states of affairs is not something that bothers me.
You replied:
I would certainly
agree that any analysis which aids one to understand something more clearly is
useful to that person. I was assuming some desire to communicate that
distinction to others. When ordinary language is used with ordinary words which
appear to make claims about motives and use the term "motive" a
fairly straight forward word, then it would seem that invites misunderstanding
to say the least.
Is the
distinction merely something private in such a way that if read by another it
doesn't matter it tends to mislead one to think one may be talking about the
world and not about a purely conception universe? It puzzles me.
I use the term ‘motivation’ rather
than ‘motive’. I am using the concept of motivation commonly used in
psychology, and perhaps I should have stressed this. The extrinsic-intrinsic
distinction is also standard, and the main reason I focus briefly on it is
because I use it to articulate the free-work and eco-work concepts. However
unlike an experimental psychologist who thinks "if it exist it exists in
some quantity, and if it exists in some quantity it can be measured"; in
making the distinction I make absolutely no use of the idea of measuring. In
fact I deliberately use the word ‘imagine’, and perhaps I should have indicated
that my little line segment for imagining is a heuristic device.
It also puzzles me when you talk of
words as making claims. I might use words to state a claim. However in saying
something like "The motivation for an act can be thought of in terms of
intrinsic and extrinsic components.", no paraceptual claim is involved. I
find it puzzling that what I think of as merely an indication of a commonly
used psychological distinction could be interpreted otherwise, especially in a
conceptual paper. I am willing to make the paraceptual claim that some
motivational psychologists find this an important and useful distinction, and
that they believe that this distinction is helpful in understanding human
behavior. I will neither make nor dispute the claim that the distinction it is
as important and useful as most of them think it is. Such claims are not
important to my purposes for this paper, altho the interest one has in the
paper might be affected by beliefs about such claims.
What is a purely conception
universe, or even a purely conceptual universe? I think in terms of conceptual
networks, not universes. Most nets are tools that can be used to talk or think
about what you call the world, and conceptual study of a net at may illustrate
its use because nets are acquired primarily using them. However purely
conceptual study can result in much more powerful nets. For example, a person
might acquire an initial understanding of a net the integers by using negative
numbers to think about liabilities. However to understand that the product of
two negative numbers is positive a person must focus on purely conceptual
considerations.
Furthermore I find conceptual study
useful even when I focus on concepts that I would not use in my own nets. I
often find other persons using nets that I find alien or too vague to be
useful. Conceptual study in which I formulate conceptual distinctions that
allow me to at least approximate what they are talking about can aid me
somewhat in trying to imagine what others may be thinking, and it may even help
me communicate with them. For example, I have needed to do this in regard to
the net many of students use for thinking about mathematics.
You further remarked:
I'm puzzled why
the use of such language and seeming descriptions of the external world of work
would be more attractive in the language of free work and eco work rather than
in something that appears to be very close to the same thing, especially if
motives don't really matter as paid work and non-paid work which has the
advantage of being a logical disjunction and of being less mysterious that
language which plays on the normal terms of the world.
Being attractive is not my goal. My
goal is to focus on two concepts for which that there are no commonly used
terms. This is one reason why I specifically use hyphenated words. I would not
use ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’ because these terms have connotations that are
contrary to the distinction I have in mind. I deliberately indicated that free-work
and eco-work, while in there extremes are mutually exclusive, they are clearly
are not mutually exhaustive. I tried to make it clear in the little league
coaching examples that non-paid work may or may not be free-work. Free means
free from extrinsic forces. There is no conceptual reason that work one is paid
to do cannot be free-work, altho I would make the paraceptual conjecture that
paid work tends to move towards being extrinsically motivated. I also tried to
make it clear that non-paid work can be eco-work, i.e. writing ones resume is a
minor example. Most important is the fact that motivation (not motives) is
central to the concepts I am trying to bring into focus. Altho the concept of
motivation I am using is essentially the same as that used in motivational
psychology, perhaps I should indicates its main conceptual features. I hesitate
because I am suspect that this might raise more questions than it answers.
The motivation for an act X that a person P
might take
IS
The set of P’s personal aspects that tend to
mobiles X
There are some paraceptual
conjectures that I use in relation to motivation, and while these apply to
actions involving free-work and eco-work, they also apply to other kinds of
actions.
(1)
Whatever P understands about P’s motivation for X, further exploration can
enhance (or obscure) this understanding.
(2) P’s
ability to effectively make a variety of conceptual distinctions can be helpful
in relation to (1).
(3) P’s
understanding of particular actions can help P in understanding P’s behavioral
patterns.
(4) P’s
understanding of P’s behavioral patterns can be used by P to live more (or
less) effectively.
A
Remark That I Did Not Think to Make: Perhaps one reason that Bob sees so little point in thinking about
free-work and eco-work is that his own personal motivational factors for much
of his work does not fit in either category. In the reasons he listed in his
first response, many seemed to have strong extrinsic components without any
significant personal economic concerns. I also suspect that Bob is motivated to
a large extent by ethical or moral concerns. On the other hand I have almost
always been motivated in a different manner. Bob seems to find so much to do,
that I feel exhausted just reading about his activities., My motivation is much
more on personal ideals than on ideals for society or the world. Thus I am
puzzled by why I choose any the courses of action, and have asserted that I not
only cannot give sufficient reasons for my choices partially because some
choices are so basic that no set of reasons is sufficient to account for them.
There was a several year period in which I was so puzzled about what to do that
I merely detached and observed until all positive motivation disintegrated. It
was this experience that motivated me to shape a fairly radical net for doing
that helped me realize and endorse the fact that personal ideals were more
basic to me than ethical considerations.
An
Email From Octavia: Being
frustrated in my correspondence with Bob, I sent copies to the person whose
email had triggered my writing about free-work and eco-work. I asks Octavia for
any comments, and here is most of her reply.
Richard, I am really delighted with
the progress in your Free-Work and Eco-Work paper. I also found Bob's comments
both interesting and revealing.
I know my comments may seem random,
and they are; they are my scrawlings in the margins
of your words, as it were - and thus are additional to what I have already
said. When you are speaking about working with rock in Plattin, and you end,
"This does not account for the inner need I feel to get something
done," it caught my eye this time, altho this same statement was I think
in the original shorter version you sent. I felt at once in response to this,
"We humans are naturally producers and find pleasure in creating and/or
achieving results". The problem has always been that perverted "idle
hands do the Devil's work" ethic that so embodies the Calvinistic spur
digging into our sides at each moment. People naturally want to create, but as
you point out in your lawn-mowing episode, if you are from early childhood
being reminded that one must work for a living, the focus is immediately taken
off the process and onto the end.
Personal
Note: When I was very small
my father came for a rare and precious visit to my school. When he left he did
so with the excuse that he must return to his business. I asked him about this,
and about what my own "Work" might be, and he answered, "Tavie's work is play." This statement has I know been
a powerful and very subtle factor in thinking about my life's activity. Not
having to work for money has only furthered my idea that what I do is Play and
not Real Work, amongst other conclusions I can draw from this.
This leads me to your Free-Work
Ideals, letter C, in which fortunate category I reside :"Some peoples'
lives would be enriched if they could become primarily free-workers."
Having attempted to Work in the "real world", and having been made
thoroughly miserable by it, I know how blessed I am to have the option.
But then that brings us to Sense of
Worth. Finding ways to describe myself that ring true is something you know I
am experimenting with. What works in
Another thing that struck me on this
reading was your discussion about your resistance to assign grades to your
student's work. You have written about this before in other places and I was
impressed with it. I myself went to two non-graded schools (also unaccredited),
but did not think such a thing was possible at the college level until you
first told me about it. Since grading/judging is a form of valuing results instead
of effort the resistance you feel to grading is natural and consistent.
Finally, the Canon "Persons are
creators of worth and are too important to have their worth evaluated. If I was
to assign worth to persons, I would merely say that each person has infinite
personal worth." So beautiful, so powerful. The first time you sent this
to me I was so struck by it. We ought to print placards and every home, school
room, business, and place of worship hang one.
Octavia, perhaps playing and not
Working