Posted on Brain Pickings “Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher’s Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism“:
” …In 1948 (…) German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) penned Leisure, the Basis of Culture(public library) — (…) triply timely today, in an age when we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.(…)
The Greek word for “leisure,” σχoλη, produced the Latin scola, which in turn gave us the English school (…)Pieper writes:
The original meaning of the concept of “leisure” has practically been forgotten in today’s leisure-less culture of “total work”: in order to win our way to a real understanding of leisure, we must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on that world of work.
(..) But the question is this: can the world of man be exhausted in being “the working world”? (…)
Echoing Kierkegaard’s terrific defense of idleness as spiritual nourishment, Pieper writes:
The code of life in the High Middle Ages [held] that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work’s-sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanaticism should take its rise form the absence of a will to accomplish something.” go to original post