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Conditions of labour

Tobias Ossmark

The so called Was-ist-an-der-Zeit?-phone needs some handeling. Among all voices we might connect ourselves with, there is one, which, I believe, it is worthy listening to. It belongs to the almost forgotten english 19th century writer John Ruskin. In 1849, being 30 years old, he published his "Seven Lamps of Architecture". Though this is an literary masterpiece, it is also an overwhelming speech, which touches the breast of the present reader. One can, really, not overestimate the importance of such genuin individual texts. They reach far beyond all the widespread Schulwissen of our present age. In fact, what interests me is that Ruskins writes about architecture although he rather, indeed, delivers a subtle social theory or practical philosophy. Maybe his analysis of "labour" is the very central notion of all this. Quote:

”…it is one of the appointed conditions of labour of men that, in proportion of the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that, generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim and the less we disire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success.”

The analysis of labour might be considered as the capital theme of the 19th century, and it returns of course in Rudolf Steiner by multiple ways. As background-theme deserves also the slave-alike labour of early industrialization. The quote above is certainly somewhat platonic coloured. Nevertheless, there is something about it: the labour for others means simultaneously being congruent with a long span, a timespan. The sustainability of labour has no quantitative criterias, it rather is beeing carried by the durable perception, knowledge and self-possession of this potential span. And when science, understood as such labour, indeed, stretches itself to the elementary experienced timehorizons, it may also become the foundation of a shining, empirical and intersubjective edifice (= the dream of natural sciences). The very art of Ruskins writings belongs, in my view, to this science mostly yet undone.

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