An essay on Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture”
By Catherine Contonio.
The modern world no longer recognizes the Greeks’ concept of leisure. The Greeks, in turn, would no longer recognize the modern notion of work, which has spread to cover the whole of human activity. In Josef Pieper’s essay, “Leisure: the Basis of Culture,” he lays bare this fracture with antiquity. While he acknowledges that purely historical considerations are no basis for any obligation, ridding man of leisure warrants serious reflection as society hazards the disposition once seen as the means of ascent to contemplation, the pinnacle of human nature.
Work cannot be all that man is. However, due to a misconception of work and man’s relationship to it, a new definition of human nature has arisen: the ideal of the imperial worker. The imperial worker receives his identity from his conquests, allowing his labor to breach every aspect of his life, even scholarly frontiers. For the most part, academia currently represents the reduction of all intellectual endeavors to strained efforts.
Pieper cites Immanuel Kant’s exclusively discursive view of knowledge as a prime example of idealizing tense activity. Kant claims that knowledge is realized strictly through active effort, and instances of such effort include comparing, examining, and distinguishing. As a result, he views the Romantics as fraudulent philosophers because they “did no work.” While effort is not Kant’s sole requirement for assuring the validity of knowledge, human effort becomes a too-critical component in verifying the material truth of knowledge acquired.
Kant’s emphasis on effort in knowing sets the stage for Pieper’s distinction between ratio and intellectus, which challenges the sufficiency of reason alone in grasping Truth. Ratio is man’s power of discursive, logical thought, which Kant values most. Although ratio is necessary in the search for Truth, its counterpart, intellectus, has a more transcendent role. Intellectus is the intellect, the faculty capable of contemplation of Truth. The power of the mind encompasses both these faculties together, and ratio is accompanied and impregnated through intellectus conceiving by and of Truth.
The statement that “knowledge is work” reduces knowledge to mere ratio and idealizes the difficulty of human thought. But as Pieper points out, pursuing something difficult is not necessarily more meritorious. In fact, the only justification for the human struggle is hope for ease.
In contrast to Kant, Thomas Aquinas recognizes the weakness present in man’s natural inclination towards ease; yet rather than resist it, he counsels that man follow it. For such weakness becomes the very path by which he yields to the strength of Another. Opening the will in this way allows it to be helped towards and by a Will greater than one’s own. As he opens both his will and his mind in love, he is honored with the highest form of knowledge, bequeathed suddenly, necessarily, and undeservedly. But the undisturbed willingness to be disturbed by Truth alone is available only when man is at rest.
One can only fall asleep by letting himself go, and in the same way, only in silent and receptive moments of leisure, is the soul of man “visited by an awareness of what holds the world together.” In these moments, man consents to his own nature and abides in concord with the broader meaning of the universe. He enjoys his aided ascent to that small, yet spectacular seat carved into the armrest of the divine throne.
While discursive thought or ratio is properly human, the engagement of intellectus is considered beyond man. This means that through intellectus, man imitates the activity of a “pure spirit,” a class in which Aquinas places God and the angels. Man participates in divine thought, and becomes super-human, fulfilling that metamorphic, mystical portion of his nature: that part which indicates to him that he was created to be more than he is.
Contemplation occurs as ratio yields to intellectus, and one’s constitutive parts are aligned according to nature. Man actualizes his full potential as an entity meant to reach wholeness, open to what he is now, but also to eternal being, soaring to new heights without forgetting how he learned to fly. Pieper explains that while ratio used to be compared to time, intellectus was compared to eternity, or the eternal now. And thus, man counts the seconds until he can count no longer, for when he becomes so receptive to the eternal, he becomes eternal himself.
The absence of leisure signals the loss of humanity’s most transcendent activity. Whereas the servile arts—like carpentry or farming—are directed toward practical ends, and reason serves the intellect, contemplation exists for its own sake as the height of human action. Leisure, spent in pursuit of the liberal arts, has no purpose beyond knowing Truth.
Uselessness once ennobled the liberal arts, but is now why they are condemned in academia. And that they are useless is not even entirely correct, for although usefulness is not the end of the liberal arts, it is a necessary consequence. The liberal arts are the medieval curriculum of the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These subjects were not initially abandoned, but misled toward lesser purposes. But leisure bears no fruit to those who seek to use it, and so the liberal arts withered. In the same way, while it may be true that a man who says his nightly prayers sleeps more soundly, he could never pray to that end without compromising the very essence of prayer.
The highest form of human activity has been replaced with what appeared to be the more useful lower half. The imperial notion of work has conquered contemplation, and Pieper thus asks how society can resist what has already invaded every sphere of life. Recent discussions of proletarianism have helped initiate dialogue short of a resolution. This impasse, he argues, stems from a perspective too narrowly fixed on the proletarian worker, a view that deepens the divide between the learned and the laboring classes. Just as reducing intellectus to ratio disintegrates the whole person, reducing the educated stratum to the proletarian level reinforces the very rift it claims to resolve. Seeking social unity through a framework that is itself divisive is bound to fail.
We must appeal to a more transcendent worldview to resolve a problem rooted in the lower. True de-proletarianization does not mean rendering everyone proletarian; rather, this can only occur through elevating the proletarian level to the educated stratum.
Pieper identifies three “proletarian” spheres: the economic, marked by lack of property; the political, shaped by totalitarian control; and the spiritual, defined by an obsession with work that allows no latitude. Of these, Pieper is most concerned with the political and spiritual, as they tend to imperialize one another. Fearing that spiritual slavery to work adapts the individual to be easily absorbed into totalitarian systems, he calls for a “spiritual immunization” and a return to the fundamentals. Restoring divine worship, the time consecrated for mystical contemplation, counteracts a modern world that has abandoned intellectus for ratio, and emptied it of its meaning and end.
Pieper exposes the paradoxical negligence concealed behind the excessive rigor of ratio. This is acedia, the Greek term for a lack of care regarding what is most important. Today, acedia represents a state in which human actions remain idle to what man can become, settling for what he merely is.
But even this he cannot enjoy, for when a person is no longer at one with himself, and is nonetheless confronted with that divine goodness immanent in himself, he is overwhelmed with great sadness. And so, mankind is left with an inner striving, the metamorphic hint of the divine, but with mere human means of enacting such a transformation.
Pieper concludes his essay with a final, seemingly disquieting insight: leisure cannot be achieved when it is sought as a means to an end, even if that end is something as noble as the salvation of Western civilization. The ultimate root of leisure, divine worship, is beyond the reach of the human will. Though leisure requires willing openness to God’s grace, even that openness is itself a grace. The ease of ecstasy proves more difficult than the most violent exertion, for it is a gift not summoned, but bestowed. Pieper concludes that we are beholden to God to realize this transfiguration within society and our souls. The line that separates despair and hope is fine, and Pieper weaves this with seamless reverence.
If God’s words could be understood easily by human reason, they would not be considered wonderful beyond human expression.
— Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
Catherine Contonio is a student at the University of Dallas, pursuing a B.A. in Politics. She has served as a Political Studies Fellow at the Hudson Institute and has participated in the Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program. Her academic work has been recognized with the Hortensius Award for Philosophical Excellence.
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