We can begin, like the Scholastic masters, with an objection: videtur quod non … "It seems not to be true that ..." And this is the objection: a time… - Josef Pieper

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We can begin, like the Scholastic masters, with an objection: videtur quod non … "It seems not to be true that ..." And this is the objection: a time like the present [i.e., a few years after the Second World War, in Germany] seems, of all times, not to be a time to speak of leisure. […]
That is no small objection. But there is also a good answer to it. […]
For, when we consider the foundations of Western European culture (is it, perhaps, too rash to assume that our re-building will in fact be carried out in a "Western" spirit? Indeed, this and no other is the very assumption that is at issue today), one of these foundations is leisure. We can read it in the first chapter of Aristotle's Metaphysics. And the very history of the meaning of the word bears a similar message. The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The names for the institutions of education and learning mean "leisure."

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About Josef Pieper

Josef Pieper (4 May 1904 – 6 November 1997) was a German Catholic philosopher, at the forefront of the Neo-Thomistic wave in twentieth century philosophy.

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Leisure lives on affirmation. It […] includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.
The highest form of affirmation is the festival; and according to Karl Kerenyi, the historian of religion, to festival belong "peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once." The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning of the world, and an agreement with it, and in fact it means to live out and fulfil one's inclusion in the world, in an extraordinary manner, different from the everyday.
The festival is the origin of leisure, its inmost and ever-central source. And this festive character is what makes leisure not only "effortless" but the very opposite of effort or toil.

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