Name: Leisure
ISBN: 9781586172565

Leisure

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 more than fifty years ago. This edition also includes his work The Philosophical Act. Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and medieval Europeans, understood the great value and importance of leisure. He also 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. Pieper 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 non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture -- and ourselves.

What Hacker News says

lo_zamoyskiMay 2024

I would recommend Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Leisure” [0]. Leisure is not recreation. Indeed, the word “school” is derived from the Greek word for leisure, and the state of having to work was defined in terms of the lack of leisure, a negation of leisure. The leisure/work distinction is also reflected in the classical division of the liberal arts and the servile arts. (The liberal arts were what free men pursued, for the sake of wisdom, virtue, etc. The servile arts were for the sake of practical ends.) Work was understood as something you did for the sake of leisure (but again, not leisure as we understand it today which is at best recreation), not as work for work’s sake.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp...

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bobthechefDec 2021

Josef Pieper[0] has written about leisure at length. What we call "rest" today is largely either idleness or recreation and something meant only to "recharge us" so that we can continue to work. But this is ass-backwards and not leisure. Leisure is what we work for and this was reflected, among other things, in the medieval culture of religious feasts. Our modern culture is a work-centric culture, but the middle ages were more of a leisure-centric culture.

To better understand what leisure is, Pieper points to the etymological roots of words like "school" (from the Greek word for "leisure") and points to the distinction between the liberal arts and the servile arts (the former are superior to the latter and what the latter exist to enable). By definition, work is for the sake of something; you don't work for work's sake. Our culture either worships work for its own sake (an absurdity and largely a neurotic distraction from our own nihilism) or it terminates with a preoccupation with consumption and indulgence of various appetites. A culture frustrated by a false materialistic/mechanistic anthropology will produce this kind of vulgar ethos.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/767958.Leisure

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bobthechefSep 2021

Well, choice doesn't bless the act. Consent doesn't magically make something okay. There's the issue of neglect, both of other duties and your own health. This would be the line between work ethic and workaholism. Work ethic is healthy, motivated by the right desires and motives. Workaholism is excessive, possibly escapist.

Leisure, in the original sense (see Josef Pieper), is also necessary and increasing drowned out by work and recreation. All of these are good things, but they have their place.

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