7 - Meaningful Wage Labour as a Human Condition:

Summary

Informed by the everlasting concern with what a good life is and how it can be achieved by the individual in a society, the field of Humanities have a rich tradition in discussing different domains of meaningfulness, including meaningful life and work. This chapter discusses a variety of humanist contributions to meaningful waged work. An integral feature of Humanist accounts is the understanding that what constitutes humanity is people’s drive to endow their relations, interests, abilities and desires with meaning. As this chapter will showcase, contributions in this field differ in terms of what drives people’s search for meaning, what the experience of meaningfulness consists of, if essential requirements exist before meaningfulness can be experienced or if one domain of meaningfulness trumps others. Discussing further whether the experience of meaningfulness as self-realisation and transcendence is possible in relations and activities that are in part determined by others, the chapter investigates the relationship between freedom, structure and agency.