Josef Pieper

One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial, today than it was when it first appeared fifty years ago. Pieper shows that the Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure -- a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. He maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture -- and ourselves. These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Josef Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of "work" as he predicts its destructive consequences.

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

Zeke Taylor

…it is “necessary for the perfection of the human community, that there be persons who devote themselves to the [use-less] life of contemplation.” (Thomas Aquinas)

 [sometimes translated as “idleness”] as a sin against the Third Commandment. So far from seeing in "idleness” the opposite of the "work-ethic," he understands it as a sin against the Sabbath, against "The soul's resting in God."

 …from idleness springs, so the old teaching goes, among other vices also those of Restlessness and Inability-for-Leisure…Idleness in the old sense, then, has so little in common with leisure, that it is the very inner disposition to non-leisure, that it is really "lack of leisure." There can only be leisure, when man is at one with himself, when he is in accord with his own being. 

, therefore, is "dis- agreement with oneself." Idleness and lack of leisure belong with each other; leisure is opposed to both. Leisure, then, as a condition of the soul - (and we must firmly keep to this assumption, since leisure is not necessarily present in all the external things like "breaks," "time off," "weekend," "vacation," and so on - it is a condition of the soul) - leisure is precisely the counterpoise to the image of the "worker," and we can now see how this pertains to all three aspects we have dealt with: work as activity, work as effort, work as social function. Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity, first of all, there is leisure as "non-activity" - an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.

Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself [whereas idleness is rooted in the denial of this harmony], but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness. In Hölderlin's poetic fragment, 

, are found the following three verses: "I stand in a peaceful meadow / as a beloved Elm tree, and as vines and bunches of grapes,/ the sweet play of life coils around me." And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when "he rested from all the works that He had made" that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1, 31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering parable or gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.

Mere time-killing and boredom gain ground, which are directly related to the absence of leisure, for only someone who has lost the spiritual power to be at leisure can be bored. And then Despair, the sister of Restlessness, rears its hideous head.

] “…for that is what is so bad about ignorance — that you think you know enough.”

With this, a claim was formulated that goes in principle beyond all human possibility: a claim which led Goethe to speak in an ironic manner about Hegel and other philosophers of his day as "these gentlemen who believe they can control God, the soul, and the world (and all the other things nobody can understand)."

[Pretty important insight for me as I have been unable to make sense of the Western/Thomistic idea of a key aspect of really knowing things is knowing the “why”, which in this context Pieper connects to God, but for me this clears up a genuine aspect of knowing a thing or things: the depth and beauty of its “why”, and having “wisdom”, “philosophy,” connect to this too.]

“…one is really wise, who knows the ultimate cause.” - Aquinas

“(‘cause’ being meant here not only in the sense of efficient cause but also in the sense of final cause, or purpose). Now, to know “the ultimate cause"— not the cause of something definite or specific but "in general," to know the ultimate cause of the sum total of all things — this means to know the why and the wherefore, the origin and goal, the basic structure and foundation, the meaning and the systematic order of reality as a whole, to know the "world" in its ultimate sense. Such a knowledge, however, in the sense of a comprehensive knowledge, could only be said to belong to the absolute spirit, or God. Only God understands the world "from a single point of view"; that is, by itself and in terms of its one, final cause. "He alone is wise, who knows the highest cause"— in such a sense, God alone is meant. 

So this is the goal, to which philosophy is directed: understanding of reality in terms of an ultimate principle of unity. But it is of the nature of philosophy, of course, to be only "on the way" (loving, searching, hoping) to this goal, and yet, it is in principle incapable of reaching this goal. Both aspects belong to the concept of philosophy, as understood and explicated by antiquity. With this, the crucial point is made: it is impossible, working within the concept of philosophy, and in a philosophical manner, to reach a rational interpretation of the world from knowledge of the "highest cause." It means that there is no such thing as a “closed system" of philosophy. A claim to have"a formula for the world" is by definition "un-philosophy" or "pseudo-philosophy"!

Leisure, the Basis of Culture quotes

Join the club