Leisure the Basis of Culture, Including The Philosophical Act (Josef Pieper, 1948)

First off, NO, I did not omit the colon or comma from the title. It all runs together, just like you see above. Second, "The Philosophical Act" is almost always bound together with the "main" essay. In fact, it is actually slightly longer, but I think "Leisure" is a more provocative essay. However, both should be read together, which is what I did.

As many reviews of this book say, this is a small book with big ideas. I know one post here (nor a 5-page paper) will do it justice. Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and a big fan of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, and more likely to quote from them than the Bible in his work. The "Leisure" essay was written in scenic postwar Germany and can be seen as his attempt to address the victorious Allies in what kind of society they were to impose on their vanquished foe. Pieper saw the rise of a "total work" culture in the twentieth century, devoid of leisure, and ultimately reducing the individual human being to a cog in a machine. Now leisure, in Pieper's thought, was not the same as idle time or a break from work. That kind of stuff was more the result of work, sort of the "space between", and not genuine leisure. Actual leisure was the time spent in contemplating one's place and role in the world. For Pieper, the most readily found way of doing this was through divine worship. The other essay, "The Philosophical Act", goes more in depth on this.

I'm reading the above and shaking my head. It just isn't easy to encapsulate it all in a paragraph. I think this was about the slowest 150 pages I've ever read, but that's not meant as a bad thing. It's just that the concepts are quite dense, and Pieper has struck a particular rich vein of thought. Ironically, the effort required to read it (and Pieper does not dismiss all work - for example the effort to learn a skill contributes to the joy of acquiring it), may mean those who could learn so much from this aren't going to invest in what is required to comprehend it.

Yes, this was "required reading" for my class and the final book of the year. However, I'm glad for the opportunity to have read it and I think about it frequently in what I do in my life. As you will see in the next post, fate had it that my required reading and free reading put mixed messages into my brain. More on that in just a tic...