Leisure - The Basis of Culture Flashcards
Where the word “school” comes from
leisure in greek = skole
leisure in latin = scola, the english “school”
The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “leisure”
What the word “school” means
School means leisure
greek word for work
aschola
not at leisure. “work”
What is Ratio and what does it mean
ratio (reason)
associated with comprehension.
understanding humans do when trying to work things out (figure things out) with brain. comprehends. mental.
Ratio/Reason/Achievement: “human knowing consists essentially in the act of investigating,
articulating, joining, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, proving” (as well as
observation, measuring, counting, comparing/contrasting, defining/distinguishing, surveying,
experimenting, weighing, discursive, logical thought, abstraction, technical). To know is to work
(intellectual work). Unlike animals, we are able to think and not just respond. It is characterized
by the discipline in which you study such as marketing, entrepreneurship, finance, journalism
communication, education, biology, etc. This type of knowledge results into skills through the
learning of various techniques, developing skills, and utilizing formulas. It entails a certain
intensity that results in fatigue. Kant‟s definition of knowledge: human effort that earns
knowledge. For him, knowing “is activity, and nothing but activity” nothing but ratio. While
Pieper recogniz
What is Intellectus and what does it mean
Intellectus (faith)
associated with contemplation.
seeing things and just knowing and not having to really think about it. contemplate.
Intellectus/Faith/Receptivity: “Listening-in to the being of things” faith, intuition, simple
apprehension, contemplation, prayer, meditation, insight, grace, gift (leisure). Intellectus is the
spiritual or “superhuman” way of knowing, of seeing the whole (insight of the unity of
knowledge, unity of the person). No matter how perfected you become in your discipline, work
or ratio, there is something unsatisfying, something incomplete. Ratio can only take us so far in
what we can know. But this incompleteness of ratio is not simply grasped by further discursive
reasoning. It comes through a purely receptive (leisure) vision. It is received not acquired.
Hence, it is not work as we tend to understand work. It is a form of contemplation that is
characterized as a receptive act. This type of knowledge entails “humility” since what is said is
“I receive,” not “I achieve.” Here, the insight is that my knowledge is not my own. I cannot
look to myself as its source. It is this type of knowledge that moved Aquinas to silence and
where he came to the conclusion that his own work in comparison to this intellectus was “all
straw.” It is a kind of knowledge that brings the person to a profound sense of humility. While
rare, many people have an experience of the whole in their life, a momentary grasp where
“everything” makes sense. This kind of knowledge is a participation in a reality which I cannot
grasp, but rather it grasps me, where I do not possess truth, but truth possesses me.
World has become world of work and weve lost the archaic meaning of life and ….. now everything has to be concerned with time, economy, and money. wants people to refine leisure and find a wat not to be caught in world of work
….????????
liberal arts (((vs. servile arts)))
“Only those arts are called liberal or free which are concerned with knowledge.
The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves
The liberal arts receive an honorarium,
liberal arts dont serve a totalitarian purpose.
liberal arts things are true leisure. ex. reading novels you arent forced to read but read because you think itll give you some spiritual widening or something.
servile arts
those which are concerned with utilitarian ends that a re attailned through activity, however, are called servile.”
the servile arts are those whic h have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.
servile wo rk receives a wage.
servile arts have a purpose
What does it mean to be an educated person?
brought up/led up to point of perspective see things better from elevated perspective of world (know things).
Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. He is concerned with the true, the good and the beautiful insofaras these can be understood, loved and tasted respectively.
3 characteristics of leisure
- an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of “worker” in each and every one of the three aspects under which it was analyzed: work as activity, as toil, as social function.
- as an attitude of contemplative “celebration”, a word that, properly understood, goes to the very heart of what we mean by leisure.
- leisure stands opposed to the exclusive ideal of work qua social function.
Idea of leisure
.
Proletariat
The predominant anthropological understanding of the modern person is
increasingly the worker who is bounded by the process of work.
In my opinion everything must be done, on the one hand to obliterate a contrast of this kind between the classes, but on the other hand it is quite wrong, and indeed foolish, to attempt to achieve that aim by looking for social unity in what is the purely terminological reduction of the educated stratum to proletarian level, instead of the real abolition of the proletariat. Note the following: a) a proletarian and a poor man are not the same, and b)Proletarianism cannot obviously be overcome by mak ing everyone proletarian.
The proletarian is the man who is fettered to the process of work. To be fettered to work means to be bound to this vast utilitarian process in which our needs are satisfied, and, what is more, tied to such an extent that the life of the working ma n is wholly consumed in it. . . . .
The causes may be: the lack of property with life being lived on the exclusive basis of the person’s power to work. . . .or due to the coercion of a totalitarian state. . . .or by an inner impoverishment of the individual whose life is completely fille d by his work. . . . he can no longer act significantly outside his work, and perhaps can no longer even conceive of such a thing.
Worker, Banausos
banausos- the common working man.
means not only an uneduacted man, a man insensitive to poetry and art, and with no spiritual view of the word, but furthermore a man ho lives by manual labor as distinguished from the man who owns suffiecient property to dispose freely of his time.
a slave who doesnt get or have any interest in poetry or art - wants to overcome that
????
Characteristics of Proletarian
- a proletarian and a poor man are not the same. a man may be poor without being a proletarian. equally, a proletarian is not necessarily poor; a mechanic or a technican in a totalitarian work state is certainly a proletarian.
- the negative aspect of the notion “proletariat”, the thing to be got rid of, does not consist in the fact that it is a condition limited to a particular stratum of society; so that the negative aspect would disappear once all had become proletarians. “proletarianism” cannot obviously be overcome by making everyone proletarian.
- to be tied to the process of work may be ultimately due to the inner impoverishment of the individual: in this context everyone whose life is completely filled by his work (in the special sense of the word work) is a proletarian because his life has shrunk inwardly, and contracted, with the result that he can no longer act significantly outside his work, and perhaps can no longer even conceive of such a thing.
- the “Total work” state needs the spiritually impoverished, one-track mind of the “functionary”, and he, in his turn, is naturally inclined to find complete satisfaction in his “service” and thereby achieves the illusion of a life fulfilled, which he acknowledges and willingly accepts.
