[German] Josef Pieper: “Leisure: The Basis of Culture”

[German]Josef Pieper: “Leisure—the Basis of Culture.” Liu Senyao trans., Xinxing Press2005.

I often have the feeling of being mischievously—though benevolently—teased by fate: people, classes, books, and so on keep crossing my path at one奇妙 moment or another. As far as books are concerned, it is often just when a set of ideas has taken shape in my mind that a book appears before me that seems as if I myself had written it.

Friends who heard me talk about my philosophical views at Xindao yesterday afternoon will probably feel quite亲切 when they see some of the quotations below, as if they were simply repeating what I said yesterday. But this book was indeed one I casually picked up and browsed through this morning.

On the cover of this book it is once again trumpeted as “one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century.” Similar to An Invitation to Ethics, this kind of praise does seem somewhat over the top, but likewise, it is indeed one of the most recommendable books on my shelf.

Still, after all, given the author’s line of thought and style of language, plus the fact that the translation does not seem very fluent, the prose of this book does feel somewhat distant and stiff compared with what I would say myself. But then again, I have no standing at all; the same point, once spoken through a book that is said to be an important philosophical work, does seem to carry a bit more weight, doesn’t it?

Page35……leisure thus seems to become……devoid of rhythm, and also devoid of reason—in fact, it has already become a synonym for idleness and laziness. Yet the attitude toward life in the High Middle Ages was exactly the opposite: one falls into laziness or idleness precisely because one lacks leisure, because one lacks the ability to attain leisure; ceaselessly working for the sake of work itself has, in truth, no other cause than laziness. Hard as it may be to believe,……

Page36We modern people tend to see lazy behavior as “the root of all evil,” but the ancients did not explain it that way. From the ancient conception of action, laziness has a special meaning: a person abandons the responsibilities that come with his own dignity; he does not want to become what God wants him to be—in other words, he does not want to become his own true self. Kierkegaard once said that laziness is a kind of “weak despair”……

Page97……just as one cannot love a person “for this and that” or “for doing this and that.”

Page107~108 “Spirit”……is the manifestation of some original and basic trait: the capacity to enter into relation with the totality of existing things. Spirit, then, means apower of relation, so boundless and so broadly inclusive that it encompasses the entire field of relations to which it refers, and far surpasses the boundaries of its own environment.////—In my own words: through the capacity of “love,” human beings, by means of the (communicative) activity of establishing (and maintaining) relations with others (the world and other people), are able continually to transcend their own limitations.

Page117~118The meaning of philosophical reflection is: to experience how the environment formed by the pressing needs of everyday life becomes movable, even must be shaken.……We experience this shaking; this is the meaning of philosophical action.……

Page122 When we engage in philosophical reflection, that is, when through philosophical action we transcend the everyday world of work, there is no need for us to turn our heads in another direction, no need to take our eyes off the things of the world of work—in other words, no need to detach ourselves from all the concrete and utilitarian affairs in the world of work—we do not need to look elsewhere in order to grasp the essence of the cosmos.

Page123 Indeed, what lies before our eyes, what our hands can touch, is precisely a tangible world that the philosopher is gazing at, but he explores this world and everything in it in a special way;……What philosophical questions concern is “this” or “that” that appears before our eyes, not anything “outside the world,” nor anything in “another world”—in short, not any other world beyond the world of everyday experience. But philosophical questions ask: in the ultimate sense, after careful analysis, what is “this”?……

Page124 ……This is the beginning of philosophy: the experience of wonder.

Page127 We may say that searching for the extraordinary and the unusual in the ordinary and the commonplace—that is, searching for wonder—is the beginning of philosophy. In Aristotle’s and Thomas’s view, philosophical action and poetic creation are, so to speak, in perfect accord: both the philosopher and the poet are concerned with “wonder,” with its causes and its deepening. Goethe wrote a short poem at the age of 70, titled Vermächtnis (“Legacy”), in which one line reads: “I exist for wonder.” When Goethe was 80, he said this in his Conversations with Eckermann: “The highest thing human beings can hope for is wonder.”

Page130 When we feel wonder,……there must inevitably be a sense of loss, because when we experience wonder, things that used to be clear at a glance lose their concreteness and certainty, and their ultimate value naturally disappears along with that. Yet there is no denying that the feeling of wonder awakens in us a deeper and broader view of this world,far beyond the angle from which we habitually look at things in everyday life. The inner world of wonder is full of mystery, and the direction it governs is by no means to arouse doubt, but to recognize the incomprehensibility of existing things and their divine veil: existing things themselves are a mystery, but such mystery is by no means aimless, and it is by no means irrational or dark. The meaning of “mystery” is far broader; it at least signifies the inexplicability of the real world,whose radiance is immeasurable and never extinguished, indeed endless,and this is precisely where existing things make us feel wonder.

Page131 The person who feels wonder not only does not understand, he is even quite clear about his not understanding and his inability to understand; but this state of not understanding does not mean rejection,once a person feels wonder, a journey begins, groping forward continuously along wonder. He may break off for a moment, he may fall silent, but he will keep moving forward and groping ahead.

Page132 This connection between “not” and “is” reflects the inner hope of wonder, a structure of hope, and this is precisely the distinctive essence of the philosopher and of human existence. We are born “travelers”, we are always “on the road”, covered in dust, yet have “not yet” arrived there. Who would dare say that he already possesses everything that has meaning for him! Pascal once said: “We are not yet, but we hope to be.”

Page134 In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, through Diotima he says: “The gods do not engage in philosophical action, nor do the foolish, for it is harmful to ignorance.” “Then, Diotima, may I ask who the philosophers are? For philosophers are neither those who know nor those who do not know?” Then Diotima answered me: “Socrates, the matter is obvious, even a child would understand: philosophers are those who are in between.” It is this “being in between” that truly stands within the realm of the human: on the one hand because they do not know (not omniscient like God), and on the other hand because they are not dull. But they want to know; they are unwilling to bind themselves within the prison of everyday life, and of course they are even less willing to let themselves sink into ignorance, while still wanting to preserve a childlike tendency to wander freely—only those who harbor hope in their hearts can possibly do this.

Page138 Thus the exploration of the essence of things is precisely the point of philosophical questioning, but posing a question does not; mean that an answer can thereby be obtained. The main characteristic of philosophy is always to attempt to seek wisdom that it can never fully find,but this does not mean that the questions philosophy raises have no relation to its answers; we can only say that the wisdom philosophy seeks is something to be pursued with love, not something to be possessed.////—Those are my words again……I really am only reading this book today……

Page142 What has been said above is precisely the direction philosophy seeks to lead us: to understand the real world through the ultimate principle of unity, yet in terms of the essence of philosophy, to reach this goal one can only walk along the “road” toward the goal (with love, with exploration, with hope!), and in the end one still cannot arrive at the destination.What has been said above can be regarded as the two aspects involved in the ancient understanding and interpretation of philosophy.////—Love, exploration, hope……those three keywords……uh, this book really wasn’t written by me……

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Xindao

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Appendix to the translation preface: (There is a huge amount of “plagiarism” in the translation preface. Although this is a case of the translator paraphrasing the book’s contents within a book, no source is indicated, and not even quotation marks are added, so it is impossible to tell which parts are the translator’s own elaboration and which are the author’s original words. In fact, at least the commentary on the part about What Is Philosophizing? is almost entirely plagiarized!)

http://www.oao.com.cn/bbs/dispbbs.asp?boardid=33&id=522

Liu Senyao: “The Preface to the Translation of The Basis of Leisure Culture: The Pleasure of Philosophy”

—A book full of insights and wisdom

(Translation Preface)

Liu Senyao

Lay readers of philosophy have always regarded reading philosophy as a formidable task, always feeling that many philosophical ideas are full of abstruse learning that is impossible to get one’s bearings in—either philosophers’ long-winded, wandering monologues, or grand discussions of abstract principles with no connection to our actual lives. Is that really the case? Indeed, according to T.S. Eliot, he believed that the two-hundred-year history of Western philosophy since Kant had, under the influence of logical positivism and the natural sciences, gone off course and departed from the philosophical tradition of the West since the early Greek period—the great tradition that offers insight and wisdom concerning life.

Certainly, for most people, the greatest pleasure in reading philosophy is nothing more than the hope of gaining from philosophers insight and wisdom concerning the phenomena of life. The true vocation of philosophers is not to engage in abstract thinking about things and principles, nor to carry out deductive logical reasoning, and of course not to conduct structural analysis of language; philosophers must, like writers, interpret for us the great truths concerning the phenomena of human existence, point out the blind spots in our thinking and in our conduct, and thereby alleviate the suffering of our existence. Life is painful, isn’t it? Of course, many times they must even bring us a sense of “wonder” about the phenomena of existence, and then lead us into a “wonder” journey of discovering the truth of life, so that we may feel, as Woolf exclaims in Mrs. Dalloway: “Oh, how interesting it is to be alive!” Therefore, philosophers should bring us joy and serenity, not despair and confusion; put simply, that means insight and wisdom.

Josef Pieper, the famous twentieth-century German Catholic scholar, is precisely such a philosopher, and his 1947 book Leisure: The Basis of Culture brings us the very feeling of insight and wisdom described above. Frankly speaking, in terms of twentieth-century Western philosophy, this book cannot compare with Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution or Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in terms of great original invention, but the book’s greatest feature is not original invention, but rather the pointing out of a philosophical fact that once flourished in history but is now neglected: the idea of leisure. Pieper painstakingly adduces, from Plato and Aristotle in Greece to Thomas and others in the Middle Ages, the evidence that leisure was once the most precious philosophical concept for the ancients, and even the source and foundation of noble culture. Unfortunately, this idea has today been quietly eroded away by the ideology of work above all else. As work comes first, our world of existence has become vulgar and hollow, because we are too busy to have leisure to think about some serious questions of life, and have also become unwilling to reflect on how we are living in this world; apart from being busy with work, where is meaning to be found? Looking around, this seems to have become a numb world lacking depth and feeling. In the film The Matrix Revolutions, one character says that existence has no meaning; meaning is something humans make up. Exactly so—we want to use “leisure” to create the meaning of life.

So what is leisure? In Pieper’s view, leisure is a commonplace philosophy of life, an attitude toward living, but leisure is not rest, not entertainment, and of course not a synonym for laziness. The deeply rooted traditional notion of diligence tells us that work is sacred, a necessary means by which human beings stand in the world and survive; human civilization has been fashioned through the joint labor of the majority. Yet what we should not overlook is that human existence is not only for work; work is merely a means, while leisure is the end. Only with leisure can we fulfill higher ideals of life, and only then can we create richer and more perfect cultural fruits; therefore, leisure is the basis of culture.

In fact, Pieper’s book consists of two essays that are conceptually related to each other. The first was originally titled in German “Musse und Kult” (“Leisure and Worship”), and the second “Was heißt Philosophieren” (“What Does It Mean to Philosophize?”). The former mainly explains important facts in the history of Western philosophy concerning the concept of leisure, and at the end especially points out that the true source of leisure lies in the festival worship activities of the ancients, but the true spirit and meaning of such activities have been overlooked by modern people. The latter mainly interprets philosophical action as something made possible precisely by the proper use of leisure, because the central aim of leisure is to seek a tranquil life, from which philosophical thought arises; Pieper then goes a step further and points out that philosophy was nurtured by theology in its earliest days, and theology provided nourishment for philosophical thought.

When Pieper speaks of the concept of leisure, some of his claims are quite thought-provoking. For example, he believes that our knowledge of the world does not, as Kant said, come from inferential labor……but is simply acquired through “intellectual contemplation”; this undoubtedly overthrows Kant’s claim of two hundred years ago that “the understanding cannot see anything with its eyes.” He therefore believes that human cognition is a kind of activity, that is, an expression of a form of labor, and nothing else; he criticizes philosophies that emphasize vision and intuition as not being true philosophy, on the grounds that such philosophy is not “work.” But Pieper and philosophers of ancient Greece such as Plato and Aristotle, or even some great thinkers of the Middle Ages such as Thomas, did not think this way. They all agreed that whether sensory perception or intellectual cognition, both equally possess a highly receptive capacity for “seeing,” and both equally possess the ability to “listen” to the essence of things. And coincidentally, seeing and listening are precisely the two greatest characteristics of having leisure; we pursue leisure not for rest and entertainment, nor for doing nothing, but in order to remain in a state of “tranquility” and to see and hear this world.

Medieval thinkers divided the human intellect, that is, the cognitive faculty, into two kinds: one called reason (ratio), and the other called intellect (intellectus). Reason is characterized by its skill in inferential thinking and abstract speculation, whereas intellect excels at manifesting the capacity for “simple seeing”; the former must work hard in order to achieve it, the latter needs only possess “leisure.” For the latter, truth lies before it like a landscape, laid out in full view. According to the ancients’ understanding, the cognitive power of the human soul did indeed include both reason and intellect; all acts of cognition depend on these two. We may say that in the process of inferential thinking, the piercing gaze of intellect follows closely along and penetrates through until the act of cognition is completed; such intuition is basically not active but passive, yet at the same time it is full of keen perceptive ability. This is precisely the chief feature of our soul’s activity and receptivity. The ultimate goal of our pursuit of leisure is precisely to hope that this ability can be brought into fullest play, thereby broadening our vision of things and enriching the content of our lives.

When Pieper speaks about the basic concepts of philosophy, he first raises the pair of opposed notions concerning human knowledge: “liberal arts” (artes liberales) and “servile arts” (artes serviles). Thomas, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, clarified this issue as follows: “Any art proposed for the cognitive purpose of knowledge is called a liberal art; any art proposed through action for utilitarian purposes is called a servile art.” Thus, the liberal arts are a mode of human activity whose meaning is held in reserve and not exposed, whereas the servile arts are a mode of human activity that contains an end, an end that must yield useful effects through actual action. The reason the liberal arts are “liberal” is chiefly because they do not involve the element of purpose; they do not exist under the constraints of social function or “work,” and are therefore free. When we say today that philosophy is a liberal art, it is precisely because philosophical reflection does not contain any utilitarian character; thus in a work-dominated world in which everything is judged by utility, philosophy is useless, and the notion of free inquiry does not exist. Yet with respect to the inquiry into understanding the meaning of existence, no discipline is more useful than philosophy, because philosophy points directly to the essence and core of all things.

The ancients believed that in the realm of human activity, “useless” forms certainly exist; the liberal arts too are one of them. The world not only has sciences of functional use, but also has what is called the “knowledge of gentlemen.” The Oxford scholar Newman (John Henry Newman,1801-1890) referred to the “liberal arts” in The Idea of a University in this way, deftly translating the ancient term into modern language; he called it “the knowledge of gentlemen,” by which he of course meant philosophy. What we should note is that just because something cannot be categorized as “useful” does not mean it must be deemed useless. Many ideas that appear useless on the surface are in fact the most useful of all; many advances in the history of human civilization have often been silently driven by ideas that seem useless on the surface. We must emphasize that leisure is precisely the greatest incubator of such “useless” ideas. Without leisure, human beings are forever slaves of work, trapped within a narrow world and unable to escape. Without leisure, people cannot possibly have intellectual activity, culture cannot come into being, and Thomas wrote a very fine line in his Commentary on the Sentences: “In order that human society may become more harmonious and perfect, some among us need to live a life of useless contemplation.”

In the second essay of this book, “What Does It Mean to Philosophize?”, Pieper proposes two brilliant and thought-provoking theses, which I think are worth mentioning here in particular. First, what kind of world is the human world? Second, what does philosophical reflection mean? As for the first thesis, the human world is an integrated reality; human beings live within it, face to face with the totality of existing things, that is, face to face with the cosmos, mutually keeping watch over one another—but on the condition that human beings must possess spirituality! Yet precisely because human beings possess spirituality, they must constantly face spiritual distress; most of the time they must therefore “live with great hardship.” Because of life’s pressing needs, such as work, people create for themselves a narrow world and confine themselves within it. But the spiritual essence of human beings is to pursue knowledge of things beyond their own roof, to cross the reliable range set by convention and the ordinary existing things of everyday life—to put it simply, to transcend one’s own narrow “environment” in order to enter another, broader “world.”

The thesis “what does philosophical reflection mean?” can be said to be intimately related to the previous thesis, because philosophical reflection means: to experience how the environment formed by the pressing needs of everyday life is shaken into motion.Shaken by what? Shaken by the external “world,” or rather by the ceaseless summons of the total world that reflects the eternal essence of things. We experience this shaking; this is the meaning of philosophical reflection. In short, philosophical reflection means stepping out of the world of work and then facing the cosmos head-on, directing one’s vision toward the totality of the world. But we must note that when we transcend the everyday world of work, there is no need to turn our heads in another direction, no need to take our eyes off the affairs of the world of work—in other words, no need to detach ourselves from all the concrete and utilitarian affairs in the world of work—we do not need to look elsewhere in order to grasp the essence of the cosmos. Therefore, philosophical questions, that is, when we engage in philosophical action to explore questions, are fundamentally still directed toward the everyday world before our eyes; only our posture and angle of seeing things become sharpened, and the world before us then suddenly becomes “transparent.” In this world, everything thereby appears to have a strange, unfamiliar, uncertain, and more profound appearance.

In short, to engage in philosophical reflection does not mean to abstract oneself from the things of the everyday world, but to look anew with different eyes at the affairs we all take for granted and the meanings and values they represent. But this does not mean that we should think in a deliberately novel or eccentric way; the main point is still to see things with a fresh vision. The actual situation is this: in everyday life, ordinary things are not in a special state of essence; we do not see their profound, true appearance and meaning. Therefore, in our everyday experience, the attention aroused by the things we encounter is often directed toward their inconspicuous parts—only by deeply entering into their inner experience does one begin to experience the beginning of philosophy: the experience of wonder.

Thomas put it well: philosophers, like poets, are both creating “the marvelous”. What is meant here by the marvelous is precisely the experience of “wonder.” A person bound by the narrow world of work (Pieper calls such a person a “bourgeois”) knows only how to cling to the “environment” of his existence in a firm and tightly bound way (a world limited by the goals of immediate life), and he regards such behavior as an ultimate value (for example, making money and accumulating wealth). He cannot see a broader world of essence that is more valuable; at that point he can no longer feel “wonder” at all, and his mind must become commonplace, vulgar, even numb and callous, he will regard all things as “self-evident,” because he can no longer make normal use of his senses, and can no longer experience the “wonder” of wonder. From another perspective, a person capable of experiencing wonder has, at that moment, sensed a deeper dimension of this world; at such a moment, he gazes at the wondrous image of this world, and thereby feels the marvelous fact of the essence of things’ existence. In short, we may say that searching for the extraordinary and unusual in the ordinary and commonplace—that is, searching for wonder—is the beginning of philosophy.

Goethe said this in his Conversations with Eckermann: the highest state human beings can aspire to is wonder. So what is wonder? Thomas, in the Summa Theologica, defines wonder as “a desire for knowledge”; in other words, it is an active attitude of longing to know. Because the human spirit longs to transcend, there arises the predicament of “not understanding” and “not rejecting,” but precisely because there is such a predicament, one becomes capable of experiencing wonder and thereby joy. Wonder and joy go hand in hand: wherever there is spiritual joy, wonder will inevitably appear, and vice versa—whoever can feel wonder must also be able to feel joy. When wonder brings joy, the soul becomes agitated in turn and begins to prepare itself to experience new, unheard-of things. On the other hand, when we truly feel wonder, we inevitably feel a sense of loss, because things that once seemed perfectly clear in our eyes lose their concreteness and certainty, and their ultimate value naturally disappears along with that. Yet at the same time, the feeling of wonder awakens in us a deeper and broader view of this world, far beyond the angle from which we ordinarily look at things. The inner world of wonder is full of mystery, and the direction it governs is by no means to arouse doubt, but to recognize the incomprehensibility of existing things and their divine veil: existing things themselves are a mystery, explaining the inexplicability of the real world; the radiance they cast is incomprehensible and never extinguished, and at the same time endless, and this is precisely where existing things make us feel wonder.

The more I reread this book by Pieper, the more I feel that it is indeed a book full of insights and wisdom. In a concise and lucid style, he points out life lessons we had long neglected: how to seek and make good use of leisure, and at the same time how to cultivate the habit of simple philosophical reflection. He simply tells us how to have leisure in everyday life, and then to experience the real moments in life. We do not need to be philosophers; as long as we can grasp leisure, we can attune ourselves to the truth of life: to keep experiencing wonder, then to hold fast to hope, to keep groping forward without stopping, and to walk directly toward the ultimate essence of philosophy: insight and wisdom.

Late autumn 2003 Department of Foreign Languages, Feng Chia University