INSIDE THE COCOON OF WORK ITSELF!

Work, in its pre-supposition has duality inscribed in it. First portion has the Action which naively can be ascribed to the doer. Second Portion is the consequence which is the inevitable death that the action must die. Let us dive into a philosophical deconstruction of work. Before that, I must admit a great work can be done on the historicity of nature of work and its effects on humans. 

What are our primary motivations to act? Here, my paradigm of asking this question is deliberately naive, and not to follow any already done work on it. We already know Psychoanalytic paradigm where we have sexual instincts, dominating instincts and other types of Instincts. Also, a sociological or may be a spiritual dimension might give us an answer but let us deliberately be stupid here. 

Work seems to be coming from two prime motivations in two completely distinct cases: One, the work which brings a subjective consequence, a joy a certain instant gratification the moment its begun. You like doing research and you start reading a research paper, instantly you feel good, you betrayed someone you respected and there, the moment you began doing it, instant regret. Here the moment where the action ends and the consequences began, has no distinct and clear boundaries. And it varies to person to person. Subjective consequence is what drives scientists, artists and other folks to do what they wish to. It also pays the bad doers instantly as regret. Also, it is a narcissistic pleasure of Psychopaths and sociopaths that they get murdering someone. This subjective consequence can also be explained as intrinsic effect within cause, that is the effect is inscribed within the act itself. Smoking cigarettes, instant consequence. 

Then we have works of necessity. Works with Objective consequences. Work we do because we cannot not do it. Work which are necessary due to any possible reason. But wait a minute, how smoking cigarettes has no necessity inscribed to it. Objective in the sense that it is done as cause inscribed in effect, that is, it is done by the doer with obvious and clear motive that what will be the consequence. a student wasting time writing blogs, he knows he might fail an exam he is preparing for. But the subjective consequence of the zeal to write is compelling him to ignore the objective consequences. 

Many a times, Objective consequences are ignored in lieu of Subjective ones. Many a times, the Subjective consequences are ignored by people to give way to Objective and necessary ones. Now, let us talk about a rupture of this work metric. I call it the Causal rupture. 

Generally, Human mind is cartesian in reasoning. You work because you like it. You work because you want money. Everything has a reason and rationale attached. But Something which we learn from orientalist spiritual discourse of Bhagwat Geeta and the specific discourse of Nishkaam Karmayoga is that a rupture of this Cartesian mind might take place where the doer does without any sub-conscious or conscious attempt to gaze the effects or aftereffects of the deeds. This rupture is a rupture of causal mind of the modern man. 

Modern human, in wake of capitalism or otherwise as well, developed a causal link to the world. In doing so, he was acting natural. But the spirit couldn't take it. The spirit was alien to the causal link and hence, bearing consequence was so damn difficult for him. He objected the causal link and wanted particular consequences over others.  This was described by Slavoj Zizek in the Introduction to his book, Less than Nothing, 

"In Schelling, the ultimate figure of Evil is not Spirit as opposed to Nature, but Spirit directly materialized in Nature as un-natural, as a monstrous distortion of natural order, from evil spirits and vampires to monstrous products of technological manipulations (clones, etc.). Nature in itself is Good, in it, the evil-ground is by definition always subordinated to the Good: "at each stage of nature prior to the appearance of man the ground is subordinated to existence; in other words, the self-will of the particular is necessarily subordinated to the universal will of the whole."

Again in Heidegger, we find, 

 "The self-will of each individual animal is necessarily subordinated to the will of the species, which contributes to the harmony of the whole of nature".

And again in Zizek, 

"When, with the emergence of man, the ground of existence is allowed to operate on its own, egotistically asserting itself, this does not only mean that it asserts itself against divine love, the harmony of the whole, the universal (non-egotistic) will-it means that it asserts itself in the very form of its opposite: the horror of man is that, in it, Evil becomes radical: no longer simple egotistic evil, but Evil masked (appearing) as universality, as is exemplarily the case in political totalitarianism, in which a particular political agent presents itself as the direct embodiment of the universal Will and Freedom of humanity."

~The Indivisible Remainder, Slavoj Zizek, London: Verso Books 1996.

So, in this sense, in a particularly unique case of human mind, one escapes the causal link. My thesis is this is not some naive perceptive phenomenon which occurs in the head of the doer, some kind of self-hypnosis, but a sort of physical and psychological phenomena, which results when Man's Death Drive [todestrieb, see in Freud] takes over. Man forgets all his biological and genetic upbringing and conditioning, years and years of learnings from evolution encoded within the gene, which made the Gene the selfish gene, see in Richard Dawkins, and Walla! forgets all of it! This is sheer madness in the eyes of every philosopher, and hence rightfully, the death drive takes over the Libido. 

Effects of this Causal Rupture

Clearly, the world as such does not change. His relationship with things does not change. His features are unaffected. Relations among objects and desire changes. The Object cause of desire [objet petit a, See Jacques Lacan] ceases to act, ceases to exist for him it seems and he, seems quenched without consequences or rather with any consequences. This seems bizarre, but this is what God himself claims in Bhagwat Geeta. 

So, what conclusion I wanted to reach was that it is not subjective consequence that the Karma yogi [The one attained this rupture] desires, but precisely he jumps out of this matrix. He lives a life of an idiot who does work like some idiot, he does not know the desire of doing it, yet he does it. But permanent satisfaction does not leave him, that's for sure according to God. This took a spiritual turn but if we apply spiritual discourse to other fields of study like Psychoanalysis or philosophy, the coordinates of possibility might break down. This spiritual phenomenon might serve as an experimental field for Philosophical indeterminacies.