Labor Day celebrates American workers. It should be a leisure weekend. But it’s also about going back to school and going back to work at the end of summer. In Athens, you can have your own leisure time (Scolo) It is not directed towards citizens’ lives, and there is a risk of being rejected. Idito– Someone who shuns the city’s common concerns. However, for the same Athenians, leisure was also a philosophical condition.
We are under constant pressure to be productive, connected and always “on.” Americans actually have more leisure time than ever, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. But 83% of us don’t spend it “relaxing or thinking about it.” Instead, we are at likes and retweet casinos. It was so overstimulating that it was impossible to relax and thought it was unnecessary. And why read books when there’s a great summary online?
The Greek word for leisure produced Latin Scolaand from there you will get the “school”. For the Greeks, leisure was a time to understand themselves in search of truth. Thought was free and not an obligation. Modern classics still call leisure the “foundation of culture.”
In Plato’s hands, the symposium – other drinking parties became a forum for philosophy. When wine was given, the conversation turned to freedom, virtue, and love. Not in the best schools of the ancient world, but in the earliest places where such ideas were expressed.
Aristotle called leisure “the goal of all human actions, the end where all actions are directed.” For him, happiness was not a pleasant mood, but a human prosperity and clear thinking. Leisure was the root of culture. It is a medium that allows you to live your life well.
The Romans spoke on the same register. leisure, Punchit was the ultimate good thing. It was the opposite formed by a negative prefix negotiation– Gainful work.
Later Christians treated leisure time as an integral part of their faith. The saying is generally attributed to the author’s patron, St. Francis de Sales. Pascal said, “All the problems with humans are caused by the inability of humans to sit quietly in their rooms alone.”
My original sense of leisure has been lost. Today’s culture of perfect work requires a recognition of performance: “Don’t just sit there, do something!” “Every world is a stage” and silence feel like you’ve forgotten your lines. Even leisure needs to be played.
Athens itself has enacted laws against neglect, which requires evidence of annual income. Leisure without citizens’ purpose is at risk of being labeled as failure. Iditoas the Athenians said. Today, the proof is different: consumption. The commercial spirit, whether it’s business or government, is not useful in leisure time unless it has expenditures. A good life will be something that the market sells and the economy needs it.
Leisure resists that spirit. It denies productivity and profits are the only means of value. If it is not worth it in itself, leisure will melt into more business. “Good” is another thing, and is only tolerated if the results are obtained.
At the height of the protests of the 1960s, acclaimed novelist Frederic Buechner went deep into a book about 12th century saints. “What am I doing about the misery of Priest K?” he asked his friend Yale Chaplain and activist William Sloan Coffin. “I should be doing something,” ffin shot back: “I sat on my ass and wrote.”
Many of us share Bookner’s doubts in the face of an overwhelming crisis about whether it is important for us to do anything. A talented musician, Coffin knew that without art, life would fall into the headlines and tragedy would be tragedy to the sight.
Long before them, Goethe gave the same lawyer. Asked later in life how he measured his influence, he replied:
“I didn’t ask how it would serve society. I was pleased to express what I perceived as good and true. It proved useful in a wide circle, but that wasn’t the purpose. It was the outcome.”
Leisure work is useless. It’s a job that gives you time back in life.
Notes and reading
Virginia Wolf, Interviews and reminiscences (“Tavistock Square”).
Aristotle, Politics viii.
Blaze Pascal, Pensh.
St. Francis de Sales, see Introducing a respectful life.
William Coffin – Personal conversation.
Conversation with Goethe: The Last Year of His Life – Johann Peter Eckerman.
addition
Leisure: Cultural Fundamentals -Josef Pieper (1952).
The richness of distraction – Marina Van Zuiren (Penguin Random House, 2018). 80 pages.
Richard, 74
The golden calf of intelligence
Approx. 2 + 2 = 5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
