Index
Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Pieper, Joseph)
We shall see each other again.
Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye.
The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility one might almost say, of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? “It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty. And therefore, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether—it would be more meritorious still.”
And in the same way, the essence of knowledge does not consist in the effort for which it calls, but in grasping existing things and in unveiling reality. Moreover, just as the highest form of virtue knows nothing of “difficulty”, so too the highest form of knowledge comes to man like a gift—the sudden illumination, a stroke of genius, true contemplation; it comes effortlessly and without trouble. On one occasion St. Thomas speaks of contemplation and play in the same breath: “because of the leisure that goes with contemplation” the divine wisdom itself, Holy Scripture says, is “always at play, playing through the whole world”(
man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.
The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves; the servile arts are those which have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.
Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world.
Aquinas writes, “that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation”
Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being “busy”, but letting things happen.
Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean “dumbness” or “noiselessness”; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to “answer” to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.
Furthermore, there is also a certain serenity in leisure. That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from our recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course; and there is something about it which Konrad Weiss, the poet, called “confidence in the fragmentariness of life and history.”
leisure appears (secondly) in its character as an attitude of contemplative “celebration”,
Leisure is possible only on the premise that man consents to his own true nature and abides in concord with the meaning of the universe
Leisure draws its vitality from affirmation. It is not the same as non-activity, nor is it identical with tranquility; it is not even the same as inward tranquility. Rather, it is like the tranquil silence of lovers, which draws its strength from concord.
A break in one’s work, whether of an hour, a day or a week, is still part of the world of work. It is a link in the chain of utilitarian functions. The pause is made for the sake of work and in order to work, and a man is not only refreshed from work but for work.
The soul of leisure, it can be said, lies in “celebration”.
its ultimate justification derive from its roots in divine worship.
“Temple” means (as may be seen from the original sense of the word): that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or for habitation. And this plot of land is transferred to the estate of the gods, it is neither lived on, nor cultivated. And similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days, a limited time, specially marked off—and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends. Every seventh day is such a period of time. It is the “festival time”, and it arises in this way and no other.
There is in fact no room in the world of “total labor” either for divine worship, or for a feast: because the “worker’s” world, the world of “labor” rests solely upon the principle of rational utilization.
sacrifice mean? It means a voluntary offering freely given. It definitely does not involve utility; it is in fact absolutely antithetic to utility. Thus, the act of worship creates a store of real wealth that cannot be consumed by the workaday world.
The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost.
The opening question, What does philosophizing mean? is certainly philosophical.
But like all philosophical questions, it cannot be answered with complete finality.
because you think you are doing something when you are really doing nothing.
serves no purpose whatsoever beyond itself and its own end or that it can never be used apart from its own end. Philosophy is not functional knowledge but, as Newman said, “the knowledge of a gentleman”;9 not a useful knowledge, but a “free” knowledge. Freedom, here, means that philosophical knowledge is not legitimized by its usefulness or usableness, or by virtue of its social function, or with reference to the “common need”. This is the selfsame sense in which “freedom” was used in the phrase “artes liberales”, the liberal arts—in contradistinction to the “artes serviles”, the servile arts which, as Aquinas says, are “ordered to the satisfaction of a need through activity.”
“freedom” being understood to mean “not being at the disposal of external aims and ends”. The different branches of science are “free” in this sense, provided only that they are pursued philosophically and in so far as they share the freedom of philosophy. “Knowledge is free”, writes Newman, “in the truest sense, as soon as and in so far as it is philosophical.”
Whenever we look at being philosophically, we discourse purely “theoretically” about it, in a manner, that is to say, untouched in any way whatsoever by practical considerations, by the desire to change it; and it is in this sense that philosophy is said to be above any and every “purpose”.
transcends the world of work.
“What do they not see, who see him who sees all things?”
Aqhinas = San Tommaso d’Aquino, citazione presa da ‘commento alle sentenze di Pietro Lombardo’ o ‘Somma Teologica’
That, then, is the first point: the world is a field of relations. To have a world is to be the center, the coordinator, of a field of relations. The second point is: the higher the order of a being, the more embracing and wider its power of establishing relations—the greater the field of relations within its power. This may also be expressed by saying that the higher a being stands in the order of reality, in the hierarchic order of being, the wider and deeper its world.
And “surroundings”, even “surroundings” which could “in themselves” be apprehended, do not yet constitute a “world”. Though this view was far from generally held until Jacob von Uexküll, the
That would explain why so many insects feign death. If their motionless form simply does not exist in the field of vision of their enemies, then by shamming death they drop out of that world with absolute certainty and cannot be found even though searched for.
human world “cannot claim to be any more real than the animal’s world”;4 man, then, is limited by his environment in exactly the same way as an animal, that is to say, he is limited to a selected environment assembled, as it were, by natural selection and biological necessity; he is incapable of apprehending anything and, even though searching for it, of finding anything outside his environment—like the crow that cannot find a motionless grasshopper. (The question does arise, however, as to how a creature limited to its own environment and imprisoned so effectively within it could study the theory of environment.)
anima est quodammodo omnia, the soul is in a certain sense all things, the all.
To the philosophers of the past—to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas—the concepts of “spirit” and “world” (in the sense of the whole of reality) are not only interrelated; their correspondence is complete. These philosophers not only held that “spirit is relatedness to the totality of existing things”, but also that all existing things are essentially related to spirit. Moreover, they formulated that relation in such precise terms that at first we scarcely dare to take them at their word. Not only, they said, is it of the nature of the spirit for its frame of reference to be the totality of existing things; but it is also of the nature of existing things for them to lie within spirit’s frame of reference. Furthermore, in the philosophical tradition of which I am speaking, it comes to the same thing whether I say, “Things have being” or whether I say, “Things exist in the spirit’s frame of reference.”
the world of a spiritual being is the totality of existing things; and their correspondence is so complete that it is both essential to spirit (spirit is the power of embracing the totality of being) and equally it is essential to things themselves (“to be” means “to be in relation to spirit”).
that the greater the capacity for relations the greater the dimensions of the coordinated field, until that field becomes (for spirit) “the” world.
the same time it is one of the characteristics of man, a corporeal and spiritual being, that it should be his spiritual soul which informs the physical and sensitive realms—to such a degree that taking food in man and animal are two utterly different things (quite apart from the fact that in the human sphere a “meal” may have a spiritual or even a religious character). It is so true that the spiritual soul informs the whole of man’s nature that even when a man “vegetates” it is ultimately only possible because he is spiritual—a cabbage can’t vegetate. Equally, when man shuts himself up in his environment, in the sphere defined and limited by his immediate needs, the degeneration that follows is only possible because spiritual degeneration is possible. The really human thing is to see the stars above the roof, to preserve our apprehension of the universality of things in the midst of the habits of daily life, and to see “the world” above and beyond our immediate environment.
Socrates and says that the teacher only induces the learner to remember “and to win knowledge from out of himself”; “there is no such thing as learning, one only remembers once again.”14 Yet another man comes along maintaining that we are all faced by or face the same reality: the teacher only points it out, the learner, the hearer, then sees it for himself.
The distinctive mark of a philosophical question is, then, that it brings out what constitutes the essence of spirit: convenire cum omni ente, in harmony with everything that is. One cannot ask a philosophical question or think philosophically without bringing the whole of being into play, the totality of existing things, “God and the world”.
to philosophize means to step beyond the sectional, partial environment of the workaday world into a position vis-à-vis de l’univers: a step that takes one into the open, for the heavens are not a roof over a man’s head—though one ought always to leave the door open behind one, for a man cannot live like that continuously.
To philosophize means to withdraw—not from the things of everyday life—but from the currently accepted meaning attached to them, or to question the value placed upon them. This does not, of course, take place by virtue of some decision to differentiate our attitude from that of others and to see things “differently”, but because, quite suddenly, things themselves assume a different aspect.
the beginning of philosophy is wonder.
“Theoria” is only possible in so far as man is not blind to the wonderful fact that things are. For our sense of wonder, in the philosophical meaning of the word, is not aroused by enormous, sensational things—though that is what a dulled sensibility requires to provoke it to a sort of ersatz experience of wonder. A man who needs the unusual to make him “wonder” shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being.
doubt is the beginning of philosophy.
The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery. It does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of the knowledge that being, qua being, is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is a mystery in the full sense of the word: neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable and dark. Rather, mystery means that a reality cannot be comprehended because its light is ever-flowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. And that is what the wonderer really experiences.
the Summa Theologica 7 wonder is defined as the desiderium sciendi, the longing for knowledge, an active desire for knowledge. Although to wonder means, as we have said, not to know, it does not mean that we are, in a kind of despair, resigned to ignorance.
“the really damaging thing about stupidity is its self-satisfaction.”
to wonder, to philosophize, means to hope!
Philosophy never claimed to be a superior form of knowledge but, on the contrary, a form of humility, and restrained, and conscious of this restraint and humility in relation to knowledge. The words philosopher and philosophy were coined, according to legend—and the legend is of great antiquity—by Pythagoras in explicit contrast to the words sophia and sophos: no man is wise, and no man “knows”;
is because of the ambivalent structure of philosophy, because “marveling” sets one on a road that never ends, because the structure of philosophy is that of hope, that to philosophize is so essentially human—and in a sense to philosophize means living a truly human life.