Leisure is Essential to Right Action

Some thoughts on leisure from Roger Kimball.

One of the greatest casualties resulting from this policy of premature superannuation concerns the word "leisure," an idea that for the Greeks and for the doctors of the Church was inextricably bound up with the highest aspirations of humanity.

For Plato, for Aristotle, for Aquinas, we live most fully when we are most fully at leisure. In the Politics, Aristotle noted that "The first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end."

Leisure in the sense intended by Aristotle--the Greek word is schole, whence our word "school"--meant the opposite of "downtime." Leisure is not idleness, but activity undertaken for its own sake: philosophy, aesthetic delectation, and religious worship are models.

It is significant that in both Greek and Latin, the words for leisure--schole and otium--are positive while the corresponding terms for "busyness"--ascolia and negotium (whence our "negotiate")--are privative: not at leisure, i.e., busy, occupied, engaged. And for us? Of course, we still have the word "leisure." But it lives on in a pale, desiccated form, a shadow of its former self. Think for example of the phrase--and the odious object it names--"leisure suit": it goes quite far in epitomizing the unhappy fate of leisure in our society.

...What time could be of higher quality than leisure, understood as Aristotle understood it? (Cardinal Newman was right when he observed that, about many subjects, "to think correctly is to think like Aristotle.") But all such remedial gestures serve to underscore the extent to which our society has devoted itself to defeating genuine leisure, replacing it where possible with mere entertainment and disparaging efforts to preserve oases of leisure as the pernicious indulgence of an outmoded elite.