Customer Reviews

Leisure: The Basis of Culture

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I read this short book in one sitting and felt inspired at the end of each chapter. Pieper encourages us to escape the routine of our work life to contemplate the transcendental. Pieper's question, "what are we doing here and now?" gave me pause to think about my existence and purpose. Throughout the work, Pieper uses the metaphor of the "dome" that imprisons people into a life focused on work. While work is necessary to fulfill basic needs, modernity has made it into something that has stolen what it means to be human. Pieper begs us to throw open the window to seek the metaphysical divine and to engage in philosophical deliberation, which provides hope and wonder to an otherwise totalizing life.

This book is really two in one. The first "Leisure, The Basis of Culture" and "The Philosophical Act."
The first book starts with the premise that "the foundation of Western culture is leisure." Something not easily appreciated in our hectic life. Yet the end point of this leisure is not laziness but celebration. "The most festive festival it is possible to celebrate is divine worship." I never thought of liturgy as leisure before I read this book. Pieper makes a wonderful point that liturgy does not serve any pratical purpose. Rather liturgy carries us into another dimenension. "Carried away out of the straitness of the workaday world into the heart of the universe."
In the second book, Pieper asks the question. "What does philosophizing mean?" For Pieper it means to step outside our everday world, "to see the stars above the roof, to preserve our apprehension of the universality of things in the midst of the habits of daily life." Wonderful!

Pieper at his usual excellent self. He asks some insightful questions about our modern world, and about how we misunderstand the purpose of leisure, sloth, and Sabbath. The second half was not quite as striking, but still great.

If this were required reading for the entire body of teachers in the United States of America, really, sadly, there would probably be little to no positive effect. However, if teachers were somehow open to the deep roots of wisdom in this book, and somehow magically made literate in the sense that Joseph Pieper would mean it, then the transformation would appear to be miraculous.

I am afraid that there are so many variations of distractions and diversions in America today that general reading of this book is a highly impractical wish. However, for that semi-rare Catholic intellectual whose feet are firmly grounded in the Great Western Tradition, this book is a precious gift. A clear guide to a recovery of what our leisure time ought to entail and how this was the original building blocks of culture and civilization is a fresh shower of common sense in this modern desert of the driest drought of scientistic modernism.

Do not let this book pass you by! Joseph Pieper is a crystal clear Thomist philosopher who writes plainly about difficult philosophical concepts and makes them available to us less gifted leisurists. It is slow reading but well worth the effort to propel you on to an effective and necessary use of your leisure time.

These two short essays ask rather difficult questions and point to cultural origins with great accuracy. Does anyone today ask the same questions? These essays were composed right after the war, with Germany in ruins, yet they sound very fresh and contemporary. Could they or would they be written today and is anyone interested, are larger questions which thought-provoking works such as these elicit.