"None of the gods philosophizes," Plato has Diotima say in the Symposium: "nor do fools; for that is what is so bad about ignorance — that you think … - Josef Pieper

"None of the gods philosophizes," Plato has Diotima say in the Symposium: "nor do fools; for that is what is so bad about ignorance — that you think you know enough." "Who, then, O Diotima, I asked, are the philosophers, since they are neither those who know nor those who don't know?" Then she answered me: "It's so obvious, Socrates, that a child could understand: the philosophers are the ones in between." This "in-between" is the realm of the truly human. It is truly human, on the one hand, not to understand (as God), and on the other hand, not to become hardened; not to include oneself in the supposedly completely illuminated world of day-to-day life.

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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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We should consider for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life is based on the reality of "Grace"; let us also recall that the Holy Spirit Himself is called "Gift"; that the greatest Christian teachers have said that the Justice of God is based on Love; that something given, something free of all debt, something undeserved, something not-achieved - is presumed in everything achieved or laid claim to; that what is first is always something received — if we keep all this before our eyes, we can see the abyss that separates this other attitude from the inheritence of Christian Europe.

Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough.
It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" […] over mere function.

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To the virtue of temperance as the preserving and defending realization of man's inner order, the gift of beauty is particularly co-ordinated. Not only is temperance beautiful in itself, it also renders men beautiful. Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal. The beauty of temperance has a more spiritual, more austere, more virile aspect. It is of the essence of this beauty that it does not conflict with true virility, but rather has an affinity to it. Temperance, as the wellspring and premise of fortitude, is the virtue of mature manliness. The infantile disorder of intemperance, on the other hand, not only destroys beauty, it also makes man cowardly; intemperance more than any other thing renders man unable and unwilling to 'take heart' against the wounding power of evil in the world

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