The problem with good and succinct philosophers is that they say too much, in too few words, all of which demand extensive unpacking. Josef Pieper is one such philosopher and I am not sure how to do justice to the 150-page omnibus I am about to review. Leisure: The Basis of Culture is a short book by modern standards. Published in 1948, it consists of two essays, “Leisure and Worship” and “The Philosophical Act”. In this review, Section I and II roughly talk about each of the two essays, while section III explores Pieper’s reliance on religion and theology as pre-conditions for both doing philosophy and being at leisure. My review does the book little justice, in part because I am left with the distinct feeling that Pieper would like his book contemplated not discussed (more on that later) and in part, because I have had to skip more of his musing than I would like.
Now and then I get the sense that we are working too much. Over the last few years my inbox has been flooded by articles about work-life balance, the great resignation, the terrible working hours kept by most workers, and the need for structured sabbaticals. My email has also been flooded by productivity hacks, self-optimization tips, time-management apps, and meditation apps—all of which are things that we are expected to 'work on.' I get reminded of Keynes’ prophecy that, due to economic growth, we’ll only be working 15 hour work-weeks. And then I wonder, if something went very very wrong along the way.
Josef Pieper, calls this the proletarianization. Unlike the sociologist, he doesn’t talk about the proletariat as a capital-less person who is on the bottom of the food chain and forced to sell his labor for sustenance and livelihood. Rather, he talks about it as
The proletarian is one who is “bound to the working-process”, regardless of whether or not she owns property. The proletarian is one “whose life is fully satisfied by the working-process itself because this space has been shrunken from within, and because meaningful action that is not work is no longer possible or even imaginable”. Pieper’s objection is thus metaphysical: to the idea that work is “the intrinsically meaningful realization of human existence”.
If Pieper is right and work has become a primary source of meaning and good, we should be compelled to do a lot of it regardless of how rich we are. However, reality suggests that’s not quite true.
Workers in richer countries work less than workers in poorer countries. Ergo, capital matters.
South-East Asian ‘tiger economies’ (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan), which underwent rapid economic growth through the 1960s to the present, stand out as outliers. But even then, with the exception of Singapore, they saw a decline of work hours in the face of economic growth.
This holds true for the other countries on the upper side of the trend (The United States, Myanmar, Ireland, Malaysia), except for China.
Finally, this relationship between GDP / GDP growth and working hours also means that, on average, the higher your productivity (in dollar terms), the less you work.
According to Pieper, the proletarian works for the sake of work, regardless of capital. The above suggests otherwise. We’re getting to that 15 hour work week, just slower than Keynes expected. And, when we can afford it, we work less.
However, I am not ready to dismiss Pieper just yet. After all, many factors may have contributed to lower working hours. For example, women entering the workforce would bring down the average since they typically work fewer hours. Countries with higher GDPs could have better and better enforced labor laws. Moreover, professional working hours don’t encapsulate the totality of work. For instance, the above doesn’t include domestic work or unpaid labor such as reproductive labor. In fact, for Pieper, work is a lot more than hours spent on economic activity or a job. ‘Work’ is best captured in Pieper’s explanation of the ‘work-a-day world’:
“The work-a-day world is the world of the working day, the world of usefulness, of purposeful action, of accomplishment, of the exercising of functions; it is the world of supply and demand, the world of hunger and the satisfaction of hunger. It is a world dominated by one goal: the realization of the "common utility"; it is the world of work, to the extent that work is synonymous with "useful activity" (a characteristic both of activity and effort). The process of working is the process of realizing the "common utility".”
Secondly, proletarianization has less to do with the amount we work and more to do with the importance of work in our lives. Work is (1) activity, (2) characterized by effort and (3) driven by common utility, and when we derive our meaning from work, we subordinate ourselves to the pursuit of this common utility in all aspects of our life. A proletarian “is inclined to see and embrace an ideal of a fulfilled life in the total "use" made of his "services””. If that doesn’t sound like you, a proletarian is inclined to see and embrace an ideal of a fulfilled life in having done something, somewhere, that has an impact. By extension, for the proletarian, work and its characteristics—activity, effort, common utility—are moral imperatives. They are ‘good’. Proletarianization is the dominance of this, for the lack of a better word, world-view.
What the proletarian does not acknowledge is that work is not exhaustive of human existence nor of what is ‘good’. What the proletarian does not know is leisure.
What is leisure? In modern parlance, leisure is the absence of work. Colloquially, to be at leisure is to not be working. Leisure is also often a means to work: a ‘break’, a stepping stone to more work or even a change in pace or respite meant to help you work better. However, leisure was not always understood as the absence of work, nor taken as a break taken for the sake of returning to work refreshed. Sometime in 300-350 BC Aristotle said “we work in order to be at leisure”. Aristotle’s statement literally translates into “We are not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure”, making leisure the positive and work the negation of it.
Pieper tries to recover the ‘original’ meaning of leisure. Leisure is not the absence of work. It is in fact the opposite of work. Where work is activity, leisure is non-activity. Where work is effortful, leisure is effortless. Where work serves a social function, leisure is subordinate to no purpose.
“Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity, first of all, there is leisure as "non-activity"— an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.
Second, against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit… [made possible when one] is in agreement with the world and its meaning….leisure lives on affirmation…
In the third place, leisure stands opposed to the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as social function… Leisure is not there for the sake of work, no matter how much new strength the one who resumes working may gain from it; leisure in our sense is not justified by providing bodily renewal or even mental refreshment to lend new vigor to further work - although it does indeed bring such things!
Secondly, like work, leisure is good. Because it stands in contrast to idleness or acedia. While idleness in the negative is understood as a lack of economic ambition, the meaning of acedia is more theological. Acedia can be understood as existential despair, a disagreement with oneself, “a sin against the Sabbath, against "The soul's resting in God””. Work on the other hand doesn’t necessarily have to be good. It can take on the additional character of idleness/acedia despite being a pursuit of common utility.
To summarize, this is sort of what Pieper is saying (the diagram is mine):
Pieper’s prime example of this proletarianization, this movement away from leisure and towards work, is the modern characterization of ‘intellectual enterprise’. According to Pieper, intellectual enterprise was previously considered a paradise of sorts but is now considered a domain of work. While, the very words for education and learning (the Latin scola, German schule, and English school) originate from the Greek word for leisure, Kant decried Romantic ideas of philosophy as involving ‘vision’ or ‘intuition’ and saw philosophy as a product of reasoning and ‘herculean labor’. And this transformation of the ‘intellectual’ into the ‘intellectual worker’ has certain assumptions built into it, the implications of which are far-reaching.
The transformation of the intellectual to the intellectual worker belies a “certain interpretation of the human knowing process”. If knowledge is entirely a product of work then there is no receptive element to it. However, according to Pieper this too is a fairly modern philosophical stance. Pieper questions:
“What happens when our eye sees a rose? What do we do when that happens? Our mind does something, to be sure, in the mere fact of taking in the object, grasping its color, its shape, and so on. We have to be awake and active. But all the same, it is a "relaxed" looking, so long as we are merely looking at it and not observing or studying it, counting or measuring its various features. Such observation would not be a "relaxed" action: it would be what Ernst Junger termed an "act of aggression." But simply looking at something, gazing at it, "taking it in," is merely to open our eyes to receive the things that present themselves to us, that come to us without any need for "effort" on our part to "possess" them.
There would scarcely be any dispute about this, if we were speaking about an act of sense perception.
But what about an act of knowing? When a human being considers something imperceptible to the senses, is there then such a thing as mere "looking"? Or, to use the scholastic technical terminology, is there such a thing as "intellectual vision"?
The ancient and medieval philosophers answered, "Yes." Modern philosophers have tended to say, "No."”
For Kant, the process of human knowing is only discursive: “the understanding cannot look upon anything”. For Pieper, there is necessarily a receptive element to human knowing: “there is something else in it, and something essential to it, that is not work.” He distinguishes between the two as ratio and intellectus, where ratio is discursive thought, while intellectus is the intellectual equivalent to the act of sense perception. Intellectus is merely looking, the taking in of the immaterial. For Pieper, something about knowledge (certain kinds of knowledge, more specifically philosophy) is like poetry. It comes to you.
This example is a cornerstone of Pieper’s book because, when Pieper says knowledge, he means certain kinds of knowledge, more specifically philosophy. For Pieper, both leisure and intellectus are pre-conditions for doing philosophy and his understanding of philosophy can be more or less derived from them. Philosophy, unlike the ‘special sciences’ , is a liberal art, subordinate to no purpose. In fact it is the most liberal of the arts. The special sciences are on the other side of the spectrum — they are servile arts. Pieper explains: it doesn’t make sense to ask the philosopher to do something the way you could ask a physicist, since as soon as the philosopher is asked to do something towards a specific end (e.g. changing people’s mind on a certain issue), he is reduced to a propagandist who is no more doing philosophy.
Hence, Pieper’s entire argument so far is a set up to defend his profession (though he would hate the use of that term). It is to defend philosophy, or more specifically ‘genuine philosophy’. If he is trying to recover the ‘original’ meaning of leisure in the first essay, he is trying to recover the ‘original’ meaning of philosophy in the second essay.
By original Pieper means anything said by, to my count, four philosophers — Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas (and any etymologies rooted in Ancient Greek). And he largely argues against modern philosophers which include first and foremostly Kant, for whom knowledge is entirely discursive and a result of activity and effort and whose moral doctrine rests on it. But it also includes Descartes, who in Discourse on Method called to replace ‘theoretical philosophy’ with ‘practical philosophy’ and Hegel, who said that "Philosophy must begin with confusion, and depends on maintaining it; one must doubt everything, give up all one's preconceptions, in order to regain it all again through the creation of a concept.", that philosophy should be not oriented to the ‘love of knowing’ but ‘real knowing’. Hegel’s words serve as a great foil for Piepers characterization of Philosophy, in which philosophy is the love of knowing and an orientation towards the wonderful. It is an orientation towards wonder. And not only is philosophy impractical or insubordinate to purpose, its object (the world and its astounding complexities) is unattainable.
Now things start to get murky. You may have noticed that all four philosophers Pieper extensively quotes and favors are theists. And that the above arguments are beginning to sound like a reason vs faith argument. When I say Pieper’s entire argument is set up to defend his profession, I also mean to defend his other profession – for Pieper also daylights as a priest. And, in some ways, that’s what Pieper’s book arguments become. The arguments lead up to the idea that both philosophy and leisure rest on theology. But Pieper provides no extensive reasoning on these accounts.
Here Pieper begins by explaining that, if philosophy depends on leisure, leisure is found in festival. Festivals are prime examples of something that lies outside the work-a-day world: “It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" [doing leisure, scholen agein] over mere "function."
After which, the title of his essay (“Leisure and Worship”) starts making sense: “But if celebration and festival are the heart of leisure, then leisure would derive its innermost possibility and justification from the very source whence festival and celebration derive theirs. And this is worship.” Moreover, “there is no worship without the gods”.
Pieper distinguished between artificial festival and genuine festival which he also calls cultic festival (where cult = religious worship). There is a qualitative difference between the holiday or secular festivals like ‘Labor Day’ and cultic festivals:
“There is no worship "without the gods," whether it be mardi gras or a wedding. This is not intended to be a prescription; rather, it is necessarily so. The statement is made with certainty: a festival that does not get its life from worship, even though the connection in human consciousness be ever so small, is not to be found. To be sure, since the French Revolution, people have tried over and over to create artificial festivals without any connection with religious worship, or even against such worship, such as the "Brutus Festival" or "Labor Day," but they all demonstrate, through the forced and narrow character of their festivity, what religious worship provides to a festival; scarcely nothing could be experienced more clearly than that genuine festivity is only to be seen where there is still some living relationship with religious "cult." Clearer than the light of day is the difference between the living, rooted trees of genuine, cultic festival and our artificial festivals that resemble those "maypoles," cut at the roots, and carted here and there, to be planted for some de nite purpose. Of course, we may have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we are only at the dawn of an age of artificial festivals. Were we [in Germany] prepared for the possibility that the official forces, and especially the bearers of political power, would artificially create the appearance of the festive with so huge an expense in external arrangements? And that this seductive, scarcely detectable appearance of artificial "holidays'' would be so totally lacking in the essential quality, that true and ultimate harmony with the world?”
And, after this, he makes the statement that explains the title of his book: “Culture Lives on Worship”.
There are three questions here I am interested in. Firstly, is there a qualitative difference between religious and non-religious festival? I am generally inclined to believe Pieper when he says that religion and non-religious festivals are qualitatively different. This may be (a) because I am from India and we have a lot—and I mean a lot—of religious festivals and I believe I have experienced this qualitative difference. (b) Because I studied anthropology in college and anthropology makes all kinds of distinctions between festivals (e.g religious vs national festivals. I am sure there is some literature out there on the difference between religious and secular festivals). The qualitative difference is hard to explain and the closest I can come to it is by saying that religious festival or festivals in the religious tradition tend to have more layers or complexity (please don’t pick up arms just yet). And a good example of of this I can think of in popular culture is Stark Trek vs Dune (the book, I haven’t seen the movie). In my estimation, Star Trek is like modern architecture—a little too clean. And by this I mean it just has fewer elements. Fewer elements further apart, that seem to interact with each other less. Meanwhile, Dune is extremely complex. I’m not sure how Frank Herbert did the kind of world-building he did, but he does seem to have built a world that reflects the complexity of our world, the real world. It has many elements so densely packed together that they all interact with each other, creating phenomena that run outside the pages. (I a shall pause here, before I stop sounding like a ACT reader.)
But does this complexity or qualitative difference necessarily depend on a belief in god? Or are there other characteristics of religion that can explain it? I believe it depends on non-god religious elements. I can think of at least two. One, is history. Religion has a longer history than secularism which also seems to result in religious festivals being more complex. (My assumption here is that more time means more elements.). The second is legibility. James C. Scott calls legibility the “central problem of statecraft” and the process of legibility undertaken by the state as one where “officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.” Ultimately, it is about reducing complexity so that something can be recorded, monitored, taxed, etc. We can apply the concept of legibility here to understand that because in some ways secular traditions like science are about making things legible while religious traditions are oriented towards things that remain illegible. It may be a stretch, but secular festivals may simply reflect tendencies towards legibility while religious festivals reflect their tendencies towards illegibility.
The second question I am interested in is whether God is necessary for leisure. Pieper argues in this order — leisure, therefore festival, therefore god. Prima facie, if (a) the qualitative difference between religious festivals and non-religious festivals that make leisure possible holds in the absence of a belief in god (i.e. can be explained on other characteristics typical of religion) and (b) leisure depends on this qualitative difference, then (c) we don’t need god for leisure. Of course, Pieper would cut through all this stuff by simply saying that leisure is a state of agreement with the world and self and that state can only be achieved when you have faith in something greater than human. I don’t know what to say to that. If I say, “Hey! That's not true. I feel in agreement with myself and the world while sitting by a stream, listening to the flow of water, etc.,” he’d say that sitting by the stream is being one with nature, something greater than human. If I say, “Hey! The psychological state of flow meets your criteria for leisure”, he’d say that that too is coming from something divine, that the intellectus in that state is a grace, a gift of god. And so forth.
Maybe the best argument against him would be that a belief in god can lead to work instead of leisure. And here, the best example is that of Max Weber. Early on in his book Pieper quotes Max Weber when fleshing out proletarianization: “we work in order to live, we live in order to work”. However, Weber is quoting from his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. His general idea is that protestantism is the root of the secular work ethic. Which begs the question, can’t the telos of work — common utility— also be religious and arise from the meaning of god? It’s really not cut and dry. And since leisure and culture are interlinked, neither is Pieper’s idea that culture lives on the worship of a god.
Finally, the third question I am interested in is regarding the book's first argument — that we are proletarianizing as a society. It's been more than half a century since Pieper published his book (it was published in 1948). And I can’t help but wonder—are we really proletarian? Are we inclined to see and embrace an ideal of a fulfilled life in the total "use" made of our "services”? Or in words that are less alienating, do we embrace an ideal of fulfilled life in having done something, somewhere, that has impact? I think we are smart enough to know when we’re fooling ourselves. We are smart enough to know that work (even in the more expansive way defined by Pieper, as opposed to a job) is not exhaustive of human existence. Whatever we believe about work, we only half believe. And here, I will leave you with something interesting I read recently regarding lore: “Lore is the story insiders tell themselves to manage their own psyches”. For many things lore isn’t very well managed or defined. Rather: “since it involves contemporary beliefs and behaviors, and exists in relatively similar forms around the developed world. Since it is so vast in scope and involves so many individuals and institutions, no one party has an ability to shape it decisively. So it exists and evolves in a relatively raw, unmanaged way”. The example in the blog post is about recycling behaviours, which covers “what posture do you adopt, what story do you tell yourself, and what do you actually do?”. With a little help, I’ve loosely adapted them to work behaviours.
Differing attitudes and perceptions about work:
This is what lore looks like. And it has within it
“an element of imaginative irony to all the postures. We are aware enough of uncertainties, ambiguities, and gaps in our knowledge that we are not entirely sure of ourselves, so there is some invention and kayfabe-like willed belief involved. A gap between felt and performed confidence.”
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All said, Leisure: The Basis of Culture is a a great book. It’s a great book because it asks hard questions. Questions we aren’t asking because we think they don’t have immediate utility. Questions we aren’t asking precisely because they are too hard to tackle and seem to go nowhere. Questions that are unsolvable (or only partially solvable). Questions which are the kind of questions philosophy, at least according to Pieper, is meant to ask. Recommended, if you have the patience.
