Resist calling your Art “work” or “just a hobby”
The corruption of artistic symbols in a world with no God
“Work is a curse,” Emil Cioran writes, “and modernity turned this curse into a fake blessing.” This aphorism raises at least a few questions. Is work increasingly turning into an absolute virtue everywhere on the planet, thanks to the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, North American cultural dominance? How do we define work? And what kind of civilization does an insatiable cult of work foster?
My goal with this essay is not to go full hippie and question whether the future of humanity would be better off without work; such an ideal is frail and vapid. What I’d like to discuss is what kind of collective attitude we need insofar as an order of higher spiritual values may emerge. Likewise, I’d like to reflect on the legitimate role work plays in this equation.
The French couldn’t help themselves: travailler—to work—comes from the Latin tripalium, which is a torture device. Work meant torture. But not just in France.1 The term “work” has historically almost always designated the lowest forms of human activity: lower in a spiritual sense, and furthermore in a social or political one. This is no longer the case.
“The tendency to converge every value and interest on the economic and productive plane is not perceived by Western man as an unprecedented aberration but instead as something normal and natural, and not as an eventual necessity, but as something that must be accepted, willed, developed, and praised.” — Julius Evola
What Evola touches on here is disturbing.2 He mentions the “economic plane” as part of an implicit order our present civilization is based on, thus the other plane modernity omits or barely considers is the spiritual plane. And what Cioran means through his aphorism is a clear inversion of values in terms of what humanity deems fundamental, as the economic plane no longer serves the spiritual plane, but vice versa, or worse, by wiping out the spiritual plane, our civilization is leaving us with no choice but to treat the economic plane as both the hammer and the altar. There’s thus no means to an end, no hierarchy, as we leverage the economic plane to simply serve and lionize the economic plane.
How do we define work, though? This is a difficult task; and I won’t accept the burden. But we can define what work surely isn’t. It’s illegitimate to label as “work” anything that’s performed by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Montesquieu, Erasmus, Thomas Hobbes, Richard Lovelace, Mircea Eliade, Umberto Eco, Sylvia Plath, Edith Stein, George Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Maria Rosetti, Mozart, Enescu, Andrea Bocelli, Van Gogh, or Henri Matisse. The word to be used is action: action, not work, is “what’s performed by the leader, the explorer, the ascetic, the pure scientist, the warrior, the artist, the diplomat, the theologian, the one who makes a law, the one who’s motivated by an elementary passion or guided by principles,” Evola writes.
Picture the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Even the Indo-European cultures. These civilizations, thanks to their vertical orientation, intended to bestow a character of action and art even upon work—study the corporations in the ancient world. Exactly the opposite is happening in the present economic civilization.
The economic factor exercises a hypnosis and a tyranny over us. What must be questioned is thus not the value of this or that economic system, but the value of the economy itself. Evola isn’t wrong: “We need an ideological detoxification and rectification of attitudes.”
We went from this…
1/ Spiritual plane: religion, creation, art, self-transcendence, personality, family, friendship, community, justice, a heroic attitude toward life
2/ Economic plane: technology, science, commerce, production, consumption, efficiency, productivity, material needs
To this…
1/ Economic plane: technology, science, commerce, production, consumption, efficiency, productivity, material needs
2/ Spiritual plane: religion, creation, art, self-transcendence, personality, family, friendship, community, justice, a heroic attitude toward life
And now to this…
1/ Economic plane: technology, science, commerce, production, consumption, efficiency, productivity, material needs
2) Spiritual plane:religion, creation, art, self-transcendence, personality, family, friendship, community, justice, a heroic attitude toward life
Take a look at our modern architecture. What plane does it serve? The spiritual or the economic plane? Is there any spiritual plane at all involved in the equation? What values can you extrapolate, other than scalability, efficiency, and mass-production? Be honest: Do you feel anything while looking at such structures? I do: I feel mediocrity yet alienation, a gross lack of inspiration, and no awe or respect for Nature.
“The most notorious thing about every modern building is the discrepancy between the immensity and complexity of the technical apparatus and the insignificance of the final product.” — Nicolás Dávila
Beauty in architecture died as soon as the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements vanished—which were perfect examples as to how the economic plane could very well serve (and thus be of lower priority than) the spiritual plane; as to how it’s indeed feasible to use modern materials and techniques to build electrifying structures that can elevate our consciousness.3
On an individual level, one way this hypnosis affects creatives is subtle yet powerful. Thanks to the economic plane, we’re “valuable” based on output, productivity, and profit. Hence, if creation doesn’t quickly lead to (easily) measurable results, you dismiss your “weird” interests and curiosities as distractions. This is why we barely see any generalists today, let alone polymaths, and young people choose to specialize early on in their careers—something our ancestors would find laughable. Specialization used to take place later—after you learned what you truly enjoy, what you’re great at, based on (plenty of) experience and trial-and-error tinkering—and could thus even boast the potential to create new fields. It’s impossible to innovate if you specialize in data analytics, financial risk modeling, or intellectual property rights in your 20s or even 30s.
Definitions: Passion, Meaning, Obsession
There are certain artistic symbols without which it’s impossible to build anything that stands the test of time: passion, meaning, and obsession. Yet how often do we take the time to define these with rigor and honesty, on our own terms? Or do we collectively settle for lazy intellectual shortcuts, blindly regurgitating today’s loose cultural definitions, which all lead to the same dull end: making money?
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