“Interest in the service of that which is disinterested.” Józef Tischner’s anthropologico-ethical project of work

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of Tischner’s last and little-known essays on the issues concerning work in the era of free market and the hegemony of the laws of economic calculation. In a discussion with Dominique Méda and André Gorz, Tischner diagnoses various threats to contemporary forms of work. Tischner criticizes above all the one-sided—that is, only objective—conception of today’s work. Referring to his own and original anthropologico-ethical project of work, the Polish scholar draws the reader’s attention to the need to promote the subjective model of work to be construed as interhuman dialogue. In work, thus construed, Tischner discerns a guarantee of the moral order of contemporary societies. His anthropological-ethical concept of work successfully inscribes itself in some of the models of work of the future, which are very much promoted today.