Thesis Prospectus: Human Industriousness and Belief System

Thesis Prospectus

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Religions are ubiquitous, and anxiety is also so. Beyond its ethnographical differences, the anxious feeling that human finds clueless is a kind of awe toward the grandeur against which one feels would be isolated and obliterated existentially. In another sense, it becomes cumulative desires that are not able to be satisfied. Such fears of existence often have a futuristic feature driven from the theoretical assumption of eternity, infinity, and continuity although any human events are like morceaux in fact. This coursework focuses on the social restorative function to this unquenchable thirst -- which is the ideal and tentative destination of every effort of the humankind. How can it be made possible? The Latin motto “Memento mori (Lat. Remember you must die.)” is a famous saying indeed, but it would be too a hasty express to the final answer. This thesis suggests, then, that labor has played a role in the setting goals as a positive expression for a moral, economic constitution, while the power of the systematic belief has, moreover, helped enforcing a constant rhythm of life. The course consists of three parts in total. In planning, first of all, to analyze human labor, it is necessary to determine what it is. One should be careful about the difference of the individual interpretation on labor due to the diversity of its types, but generally, it would not be wrong that it requires corporal and mental patience for a particular purpose. Labor is quite a versatile and well-abstract term describing human activities. Therefore, it is more constructive to seek out how human interprets labor rather than what labor is. Methodically, the student will consult the considerable amounts of primary sources in semiotics provided by C. S. Peirce, Umberto Eco, etc., to know how the human labor as a phenomenon has been symbolized and organized in its system and extract the essence of what kind of objective the laborers have had in labor. The thesis to be written in this course will, when reviewing history, exemplify that those might have historically been the divine (religious object), money (economic object), or more directly speaking, there might be an exact meaning (semantic object) of labor. These three objectives have different ontological forms, various influences on the laborers’ work ethic, and the different styles understood in a psychological dimension. In the category of the semiotic language of Peirce, the student will attempt to classify humans’ motivations for fulfilling their labor, and by this taxonomy of human motivation, he/she can handle objectively conceptual beliefs in this discussion and make headlines for the list of encyclopaedia of the function of each concept. At first glance, there seems to be two advantages for introducing semiotics for the inquiry of human labor. First, using the theory of sign, the student can candidly express the way of embodiment of vague ideas that laborers embrace toward their labors. Very often, the purpose of intensive labor is fictitious and non-natural. For instance, even when one works for daily nutritious meal, not everyone moves on to the actual behavior searching for food from the wilderness. In this case, the reason for working is not necessarily relevant to the purpose, and in fact, the objective of work varies and cannot be known uniformly. Second, the fact that the labor itself is a symbol is apt to be overlooked. As the sentence “What do you do?” indicates, the inquiry over the occupation may often inquire even a meaning of life; it can be a fundamental question to the human beings. However, it suggests the possibility, by analyzing the signification of the purpose of labor, that one can trace and objectify a practical understanding of human existence and social role. Secondly, the paper proposes that if labor is placed as a central concept of society, then will obtain a clearer view of why society in principle needs religion and economics (belief system), and why individuals rely on it. Therein, the student questions the teleology of the labor streamlined in an ideological mechanism and how it has been working since the modern economy appeared. As a matter of course, there is a need to worry that such motivation that urges people to work is nothing but a malicious ideology. Even the motive for writing of Karl Marx’s The Capital was to criticize that the system of capitalism affected tragic child workforces rather than to point out the benefits of human production. Through careful readings of Marx’s and other economic thinkers’ writings, the student will learn the purpose of economics at that origin and should understand that economics as a semiotic system resembles the structure of religion. The student should face the fact that both of the two seemingly completely different magisteria, in a fundamental dimension, have aimed to pursue normativity of life and some justice in society. Under that theme, through the concept of diligence, one can grasp that a personal and social

character or tendencies, an aesthetic subject, and an individual self-identity can be expressed toward society. Moreover, asking why many societies encourage labor rather than rational thought will be crucial in questioning the origin of society, and needless to say, labor has, in fact, long been a mythical source of the nation. Thirdly, the thesis argues that the labor creates a harmonious rhythm in society that unintentionally utter at the cooperation for the sake of reducing each other’s mental fatigue due to hysterical thinking of infinite and continuous aspects of their work. Now that the student has specified the object of industriousness in the earlier portions, there is no speculative and reliable basis for human labor capabilities, but rather, that fact that labor is a somewhat intuitive practice is also not negligible. Why on earth do humans work against uncertain existence? Why does the society declare immoral to the unemployment? Why do we find sufferings in inactivity? Is it possible to say that labor becomes able to recur to individual volitional actions, not social demands, when labor is abstracted to produce the rhythm of life? How does the labor affect the internal consciousness of time? Does the “responsibility” exist in workplace? This part presents a skeptical view on the institutionalized labor and the fiction of public interest, and then, an assumptive resolution, which is somewhat ‘musical and therapeutic’ to this social, hedonistic but neurotoxic opium, will be submitted. In many cases, as mentioned above, humans are seeking the fictitious “otherness” to believe in and contribute to reason for this irrationality. However, the inevitability of otherness is another tough question to ask. As empirically known, others’ existence or the fact that the labor is beneficial to others are inspiring elements for the working individuals. The term “otherness” replaces all of the criteria for considering labor’s price, namely, the God, money, meaning, etc., functioning as the beneficiary of the labor. Also, the futurity is a kind of otherness to the reality. Although “will” and “shall” are both auxiliary verbs indicating the future tense, their archaic uses are not equivalent; the modal verb “will” suggests the intention of the subject, while “shall” does that of other than the subject. The most difficult but important point of this discussion is to make the groundwork of the intent of the worker him or herself against these external entities (“otherness”). However, in intellection of the history of capitalism, the humankind has established a system that “accumulates” the human labor. Afterwards, every labor in human beings has been grounded on the futuristic, altruistic profits all the times. However, although we still can historically tell the current self as an accumulation of past experience based on this ideological ground, at the time of our understanding, we cannot say exactly we know that the labor in the past benefits the present self and that the labor is satisfying God, money, others, society. All in all, the human labor used to only be self-sufficient on the basis of thought, and in several ways it has hampered the rational thinking. The constant attempts of justification of labors have often utilized the logic of the external contribution, which brings about religions in places, ideologies in other locations, or sometimes, exclusivism in some localities. The purposes of this essay are, in conclusion, as follows: 1) Demystification of such fictional and intellectual institutions that causes paranoia and melancholia, 2) Reconsideration of the integration effect between society and individual under the philosophical construct of industry, 3) Presentation of hypotheses about analytical suggestions of the original purpose of labor, that is, a soulful pulsation of self-realization in harmony with the universe, or the absolute otherness. However, contrary to the expectation of voluntary labor, these three examinations of the belief systems that involve humans will return to asking why the social tradition is inevitable and should be respected rather. A belief system like religion, for example, shows the capacity and compositionality of the industry; i.e., it gives a meaning of labor to individuals through the existence of others. The paper may have a full of criticality on the present religion, economy, and even the social sciences, but this author’s definite intention is to be aware of the psychic automatism imagining the cornucopia (Lat. the infinite affluence) of human production and think that it is the only possible field of any belief systems such as capitalism and religion.