Here is the text of a short lecture I delivered at Wyoming Catholic College in the fall of 2020. The occasion was an All College Seminar on Josef Pieper’s lecture/essay “Leisure: the Basis of Culture” (more on that title below). My comments are directed to the WCC community in particular and geared toward discussion; accordingly, I introduce the work, provide an overview of the argument, and pose a number of questions that I don’t try to answer.
I publish it here primarily because Pieper is a relatively popular author—at least in the world of (Catholic) liberal arts education—and my lecture includes a somewhat detailed overview of his argument which others might find helpful. In addition, I am interested in reading Pieper in context—the context of philosophical modernity, of postwar Germany, of the mid-20th century and the Total World of Work in which we still live—and doing so with a view to the active life, and several of my comments here point toward that (still-aborning) project.
I refer to Pieper’s “Leisure” in discussing the contemporary neglect of the active life in this recent post.
The Philosophical Vision Statement of Wyoming Catholic College announces three purposes for liberal education. The first, immediate purpose is the cultivation in its students of the “human excellences that constitute perfection on the natural level”: the physical, moral, and intellectual virtues (PVS 17). The second, proximate purpose is “acculturation” to Western civilization, “to be reunited with our Western culture,” to reclaim our heritage and become “citizens of the West” (PVS 33). And the third, final purpose is preparation for “happiness,” “in this life” and “in the next.” “A Catholic liberal education produces the truly free man who […] can direct himself—with God’s grace—to his proper end,” to natural happiness and supernatural beatitude (PVS 34).
Josef Pieper’s Leisure is a great guide for helping us understand these three purposes of our common life here at the College. Pieper’s inquiry raises, and answers, questions about the real nature of man. Having learned from Pieper what is the nature of man, we may then see what is the perfection of man—what is man’s virtue. (Some idea of what man is, what a human being should be is implied by every program of education, and the adequacy, or inadequacy, of this foundational understanding of the human person goes a long way toward explaining the adequacy, or inadequacy, of a given program of education.) To show us what is man’s nature and man’s virtue, Pieper must recover the premodern vision of the human condition found above all in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas; in so doing, he goes a long way toward “reuniting” us with our Western heritage—or at least prepares us to reunite ourselves to it, by freeing us from the errors of the dominant view of our time. A liberal education is liberal in at least two senses: in freeing us from a life lived in error, and in freeing us for a life lived in truth. Pieper helps us in both respects. By freeing us from errors about human nature, he prepares us to be capable of happiness, both natural and supernatural, to be free for the good life on this earth and the blessed life in heaven.
In this essay, I will give an overview of Pieper’s essay, raising some questions along the way. But first, let me make two observations. The occasion for Pieper’s essay is very timely—yet it should remind us of our own time. Pieper is concerned with how to rebuild a culture that is in desperate need of restoration. It is the moment of founding or re-founding European culture after its immiseration that, Pieper says, calls for a recovery of the old idea of leisure. If we think that our culture needs to be restored or re-founded, then our timely concern is similar to his.
My second observation is about contemplation, production, and action. Pieper has a great deal to say about contemplation; he provides a defense of the contemplative life via its foundation, leisure. I take it that he does not restrict this term to the contemplative life of the religious; he includes the contemplation of the philosophers, the intellectual or philosophic life. Pieper defends contemplation and leisure against the dominant alternative of the age—the life of the worker. He does not mean someone who has a job, or works with his hands; he means the life of the functionary, the entirely utilitarian life. Pieper’s contrast, then, is between contemplation and work, the contemplative life versus the functional or productive life. By contrast, the great alternatives for Plato and Aristotle and Cicero were not contemplation versus production, but contemplation versus action, the life of thinking versus the life of doing (not making), the life of wisdom or the philosopher versus the life of politics or the citizen. For the classics, both of these ways of life, philosophy and politics, were understood as modes of leisure, or as ways of life appropriate for those who enjoy leisure.
What, then, is the status of the active life in the classical sense—the life of moral action and political activity, of the citizens’s speeches and deeds—in Pieper’s scheme? Is he concerned with this way of life, and its dignity, if any? If it remains on the sidelines in his discussion, it that because he is unconcerned with it? Or, rather, is the very fact that Pieper, the partisan of leisure and contemplation and philosophy and worship, must wrestle with the “worker” or “functionary” rather than the politically active life, a sign of how badly unmoored we are from our premodern or natural foundations? Would a restoration of a proper understanding of leisure, and thus man, enable a restoration of a proper view of the active life, of politics, as somehow distinct from the productive and functional activity of the “total world of work”?
Let us turn to the text. The title of the book is Leisure, the Basis of Culture.1 That’s a bad translation, but it’s a felix culpa, a happy accident, because it sums up the main thesis of the work. Pieper provides a thesis statement in his preface: “Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship” (15). (That sentence would be a good place to start in the seminar—what does each of its terms mean, and what is Pieper’s argument for this statement in the work as a whole?) In any case, Pieper’s title in German was Muße und Kult, which translates as Leisure and Worship. (There’s a pun in German—Kult means “worship,” whereas Kultur means “culture.”) It’s helpful to keep both this accurate translation of the title, Leisure and Worship, as well as the thesis-statement-mistranslation of the title, Leisure the Basis of Culture, in mind. What does leisure have to do with worship, and vice-versa? And how, exactly, does Pieper establish that worship is the basis of culture?
The first three chapters go together. Chapters I–III contrast the modern notion of “the world of total work” and its ideal figure, “the worker,” with the premodern idea of leisure and the “philosophical and theological conception of man” on which it is based. Then, in Chapter IV, Pieper considers the practical challenges to leisure in today’s “world of total work.” Finally, in Chapter V, Pieper does three things: he argues that the fundamental justification of leisure is divine worship (the highest form of celebration); he denies that leisure can be restored through an appeal to humanism; and he acknowledges that culture ultimately cannot be restored by an act of human will but only by divine dispensation.
Let us look more closely at each chapter. In good scholastic fashion, Pieper begins Chapter I with an objection—that now is not the time to be concerned with leisure! This objection is especially sharp, given the context in which Pieper gave the lectures that became this book: the desperate, post-World War Two situation in western Germany. The Nazi regime has only recently been defeated; West Germany is not yet a country of its own, but is instead divided into British, French, and American military occupation zones; eastern Germany has traded the tyranny of Hitler’s Nazism for the tyranny of Stalinist Communism. Much of Europe was literally starving through the winter of 1946–47. Pieper gives his lecture on leisure the following summer.
But the objection, that now is not the time to be concerned with leisure, is always present. It is present in a thousand small ways in every student’s life; and it present in many larger ways in the various crises that confront us, year in and year out.2 And yet Pieper answers this objection quite forcefully. It might seem that now, when there is so much work to be done, that ‘leisure’ is superfluous. On the contrary: precisely because this is a moment of crisis—a moment in which the decision must be made, how shall we rebuild our house? In the Western tradition? Or on some other basis?—it is precisely this new beginning, this new foundation, that makes a defense of leisure necessary (19).
The alternative is clear. The recently-defeated Nazi regime, and the still-regnant Communist regimes to the east, each embodies the alternative foundation—that man is essentially a worker or a functionary. Whatever their differences, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union rested on a common view of man. These regimes were extreme and therefore clarifying examples of the modern misconception of nature and human nature. What is disturbing is that this misconception is not limited to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. On the contrary, popular opinion in Pieper’s time held that “one lives to work”—whereas Aristotle tells us “we are unleisurely in order to have leisure.” Not just the Nazis and Soviets, but all of common opinion, was under the influence of a new conception of human nature. (This surely includes the alternative socio-economic-political system to Nazism and Communism that was available to Germany, and Europe, and humanity in general, after World War Two: the liberal-democratic-capitalist West.) Here is a question: Is this still the case? Does common opinion today—the opinion of our culture at large, the opinion that, no matter how countercultural your upbringing may have been, you still inevitably encountered or even imbibed—do we today still live under this modern conception, the “worker” or “functionary” as the ideal type of man? Do we still see this idea ruling how we view time? How we view life? How we view meaning? How we view virtue? How we view human purpose? Do you notice this idea in the culture at large, in others, even in yourself?
In Chapter II, Pieper investigates the origins of the new conception of human nature. It derives from our present view of work, exemplified by Weber’s idea that “one lives to work,” “the world of total work,” and phrases like “intellectual worker.” In Chapter II, Pieper identifies three claims of the current view, and denies each of them. In each denial, there is an implied, positive statement about an important topic: the nature of man, the nature of the universe, and the nature of politics and education.
(1) The first claim made by the new view of human nature is this: that human knowledge is exclusively attributable to discursive thought.
On the contrary, Pieper argues that knowledge is the fruit of both discursive thought (ratio) and pure, receptive contemplation (intellectus). It’s not one or the other, as we modern think; it is both. The “use of ratio” or discursive thought is real, hard work; the “vision of intellectus” is some kind of not-work. Pieper cites Kant and the Romantics, who err by going to opposite extremes: Kant overemphasized workmanlike discursive thought, the Romantics overemphasized effortless inspired vision. By contrast, the ancients and medievals rightly appreciated both aspects of the human mind. Pieper draws out of this an implied anthropology or account of human nature: humanity includes something superhuman, something divine. Man is man, but precisely because he is man, he is meant to be more than man. Not only Achilleus, son of Peleus, but all of us by being human are in some sense godlike.
(2) The second claim that Pieper confronts is that the effort required by knowledge is the criterion of truth. (There is a parallel moral claim here: the effort which right action requires is the criterion of moral virtue.)
On the contrary, Pieper argues that effort is the condition, not the cause, of knowledge. Knowledge is a seeing of the truth, just as virtue is a realization of the good. (Premodern epistemology is governed by an analogy to perception, whereas modern epistemology understands ‘knowing’ as akin to grasping; premodern moral philosophy argues that virtue is conformity to nature, the proper cultivation and perfection of human nature, whereas the modern view is that virtue is the manly overcoming of one’s natural impulses.) Here, Pieper draws out an implied cosmology or account of the nature of the universe, which itself points to a certain theology: the world is gratuitous, there is some fundamental ‘given-ness of things’; we are, just by virtue of being creatures in Creation, dependent upon grace.
(3) The third and final quarrel that Pieper has with the modern view of human nature is its mistaken notion that “intellectual work” is essentially in service to society. The “intellectual worker”—a phrase that sends shivers up and down Pieper’s good old-fashioned Aristotelian-Thomistic spine—is a functionary in the world of total work. The “intellectual worker” is a high-level worker in the collective project of conquering nature; “man … is essentially a functionary.”
On the contrary, “there [is] a sphere of human activity, one might even say of human existence, that does not need to be justified by inclusion in a five-year plan.” This brings with it a whole host of consequences: that the activity of the intellect takes us beyond the workaday world; that there is such a thing as the liberal arts; that philosophy is done for its own sake, not for the sake of its effects or use; that man is not essentially a functionary—man is essentially concerned with the universe as a whole; that education is more than training; that a true university or academy must be concerned with more than social utility. Contained in all this is an implied political philosophy and philosophy of education: the common good of society requires that some individuals “devote their lives to contemplation.”
Let me pause to ask a question about the first point. What, exactly, is the relation between ratio (the hard work of thinking) and intellectus (the passive receptivity of the mind)? How do they come together to form what we call “knowledge”? If one is superior to the other, why and on what grounds? Is one ordered to the other? Or are both ordered to a whole of which each forms a part? Are both necessary? Are both ‘leisurely,’ or is only one of them ‘leisurely’? What can we realistically expect about a program of education—a college curriculum, for example—in terms of a student’s day-to-day experience of ratio and intellectus?
In Chapter III, Pieper diagnoses “the worker” as suffering from what the medievals called acedia—a restlessness which may manifest itself in workaholism, the impulse to “not just stand there, do something!” Acedia is a sign that one is unable to accept the given-ness and goodness of the world, or even to accept what man is. Acedia is the source of despair and incapacity for leisure. It is the opposite condition of the soul to leisure. Pieper here defines leisure as “an attitude of mind, a condition in the soul” rooted in “man’s happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being.” He then gives a positive description of leisure in three points, responding to the three features of “the worker” discussed in chapter II.
(1) First, the total view of work understands itself as “an extreme tension of the powers of action.”
By contrast, leisure implies silence, serenity, and receptivity.
(2) Second, the total view of work understands itself as “toil.”
By contrast, leisure, an attitude of contemplative celebration, “is possible only on the premise that man consents to his own true nature and abides in concord with the meaning of the universe.” But the highest form of affirmation is the festival; thus, “the festival is the origin of leisure.”
(3) And third, the total view of work understands man as essentially a functionary.
By contrast, leisure is necessary for the preservation of our humanity—precisely, and paradoxically, because it is through leisure that we leave behind the specifically human.
This is the second time that we’ve come across the idea that somehow, to be human requires going beyond the human. What is Pieper getting at here? Now, I’m no theologian, so don’t quote me on this, but I suspect it’s connected to the fact that man is made in the image and likeness of God. In any case: what is it about human nature that requires that it somehow transcend its nature for it to fulfill its nature? How do we make sense of this? And then, what does this imply about how we should live—how we should study and learn—and about what makes for a truly human culture?
In Chapter IV, Pieper asserts that humanism—becoming cultured or liberally educated without any roots in the divine itself and the divine in man—is an inadequate response to “the world of total work.” Here again I have a question: what’s his argument for this? (The argument is continued in chapter V). Then, in his “Excursus on the Proletarian and Deproletarianization,” he examines the “social aspect of our problem,” recognizing the economic, political, and spiritual obstacles to an individual developing the capacity for, and actually enjoying, leisure. Totalitarian Marxism “aims at making all men into proletarians,” which is to say, functionaries and nothing but functionaries (“fettered to the process of work”). We might ask how not only Marxism, but other ideologies in our time do something similar—economic ideologies of limitless productivity, political ideologies that teach their adherents that ‘everything is political,’ and that they must never rest until ever wrong has been righted. Pieper says, instead, that the point must be to ensure that no one need be a proletarian. And he points to the Church as the institution that “makes the sphere of real leisure” available to all, regardless of their class, talents, or occupation.
Finally, in Chapter V, Pieper argues that leisure finds its highest expression in celebration and is ultimately founded on divine worship. Desperate times, such as Pieper’s—and perhaps our own—call for a return to worship, this “first and original source” of leisure. Pieper says that a restoration of culture, enabled by a return to leisure, ultimately depends not on human effort but on divine dispensation.
I will conclude with what may seem an inappropriately urgent question: what, then, is to be done? The recovery of a true culture, founded on leisure, ultimately depends on God. Very well. What shall we do? Or rather: what shall we do? I mean, what shall we do in addition to worshiping God faithfully and rightly, and placing this worship at the center of our lives and institutions and communities?
Perhaps I have just answered my own question. Still, I wonder what is to be done, what Pieper would say about the proper mode and scope and purpose of human action, as well as thinking, in addition to what he directly says about celebration and worship.
Let me return to the second, proximate purpose described in the Philosophical Vision Statement, our enculturation to the Western tradition, and our resulting duty to be good citizens of the present age, to become agents for the maintenance and restoration of culture. Pieper declared, on his first page, that “it is precisely a new beginning, a new foundation, that makes a defense of leisure necessary” (19). It is in the critical moment—the moment of re-founding a civilization, of restoring a culture—that we are most desperately need clarity about fundamental matters: about what man is, about what man is for. And that is what Pieper gives us in this work: clarity about what man is, and what man is for. We are made for leisure. We are made for worship. We are not made for toil and trouble, for “the workaday world,” but for the very highest of activities. Only a correct vision of what we are and what we are for can provide a sure foundation for a restored culture in the West—including a sure foundation for an enculturating education. Will a true recovery of leisure enable not only a restoration of festival and worship and philosophy, but also a restoration of rightly-ordered productive work? Will leisure somehow provide the proper ground for right speech, and deeds, and action? If so, how? It seems that all of these are necessary for a full life, for a flourishing culture, and for a vibrant West.
Leisure: the Basis of Culture, translated by Alexander Dru, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009.
As C.S. Lewis observed in his 1939 lecture, “Learning in War-Time”: “We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons.” And rightly so!
Wonderful - thank you.
"Will a true recovery of leisure enable not only a restoration of festival and worship and philosophy, but also a restoration of rightly-ordered productive work?"
That is a good question. When society can't even take off one day a week for worship and leisure (no work), how can it ever restore productive work. God rested on the seventh day. We never do.