Leisure the Basis of Culture

One of the foundations of Western European culture is leisure.  The Greek word for leisure  schole, is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The name for the institutions of education and learning means "leisure".

The original meaning of the concept of "leisure" has practically been forgotten in today's leisure-less culture of "total work." We must confront the contradiction that rises from our overemphasis on the world of work. "One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one's work," quoted by Max Weber.

Aristotle: the sober, industrious realist, says  "We are not at-leisure in order to be at leisure." For the Greeks, "not-leisure" was the word for the world of everyday work; and not only to indicate its "hustle and bustle," but the work itself. The Greek language had only this negative term for it as did Latin neg-otium "not-leisure."

Aristotle's Politics (stating that the "pivot" around which everything turns is leisure3) shows that these notions were not considered extraordinary, but only self-evident: the Greeks would probably not have understood our maxims about "work for the sake of work".

The Christian concept of the "contemplative life" (the vita contemplativa) was built on the

Aristotelian concept of leisure. Further, the distinction between the "Liberal Arts" and the "Servile Arts" has its origin here. And what does it mean to say that some arts are "liberal"

or "free"? This is still in need of clarication

The real reason for mentioning it was to show how sharply the modern valuation of work and leisure diers from that of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The dierence is so great, in fact, that we can no longer understand with any immediacy just what the ancient and

medieval mind understood by the statement, "We are not-at-leisure in order to be at leisure."

In the following discussion, the word "worker" will not be used in the sense of a distinct kind of occupation, with the sociological and statistical sense of the "proletarian worker," although the ambiguity is not coincidental. "Worker" will be used in an anthropological

sense: as a general human ideal

An altered conception of the human being as such, and a new interpretation of the meaning of human existence as such, looms behind the new claims being made for "work" and the "worker.