Great Throughts Treasury

""The essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect." (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica). What is implicit in this sentence? This is implicit: the fulfillment of existence takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality; the whole energy of our being is ultimately directed toward attainment of insight. The perfectly happy person, the one whose thirst has been finally quenched, who has attained beatitude?this person is the one who sees. The happiness, the quenching, the perfection, consists in this seeing."

"Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure... Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself... but also he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness."

"A friend and a prudent friend can help to shape a friend's decision. He does so by virtue of that love which makes the friend's problem his own, the friend's ego his own (so that after all it is not entirely "from outside"). For by virtue of that oneness which love can establish he is able to visualize the concrete situation calling for decision, visualize it from, as it were, the actual center of responsibility. Therefore it is possible for a friend - only for a friend and only for a prudent friend - to help with counsel and direction to shape a friend's decision or, somewhat in the manner of a judge, help to reshape it."

"Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity... there is leisure as "non-activity"-an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet."

"A man who needs the unusual to make him wonder shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being. The itch for sensation, even though disguised in the mask of Boheme, is a sure indication of a bourgeois mind and a deadened sense of wonder."

"And as for the close connection between philosophy and poetry, we can refer to a little-known statement by Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics [I, 3]: the Philosopher is akin to the Poet in this, that both are concerned with the mirandum, the "wondrous," the astonishing, or whatever calls for astonishment or wonder. This statement is not that easy to fathom, since Thomas, like Aristotle, was a very sober thinker, completely opposed to any Romantic confusion of properly distinct realms. But on the basis of their common orientation towards the "wonderful" (the mirandum ? something not to be found in the world of work!) ? on this basis, then, of this common transcending-power, the philosophical act is related to the "wonderful," is in fact more closely related to it than to the exact, special sciences; to this point we shall return."

"All just order in the world is based on this, that man give man what is his due."

"Beauty is not so much a fulfillment as rather a promise. In other words, by absorbing beauty with the right disposition, we experience, not gratification, satisfaction, and enjoyment but the arousal of an expectation; we are oriented toward something not-yet-here. He who submits properly to the encounter with beauty will be given the sight and taste not of a fulfillment but of a promise--a promise that, in our bodily existence, can never be fulfilled. . . . Lovers and philosophers are connected by special ties, insofar as both erotic excitement and genuine philosophical quest trigger a momentum that, in this finite existence, can never be stilled. In an encounter with sensual beauty, if man opens up totally to the object of the encounter, a passion is born that, in the realm of the senses, which at first would seem to be the only adequate realm, can never be satisfied. The same holds true for the first moment of philosophical wonder (the wonder that arises from our contact with reality); a question arises that, in our finite world--which may mean, for example, with the tools of science--will also never receive an answer. The philosopher and the true lover--neither will find fulfillment except through a divine favor."

"Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good."

"Divine worship means the same thing where time is concerned, as the temple where space is concerned. "Temple" means... that a particular piece of ground is specially reserved, and marked off from the remainder of the land which is used either for agriculture or habitation... Similarly in divine worship a certain definite space of time is set aside from working hours and days... and like the space allotted to the temple, is not used, is withdrawn from all merely utilitarian ends."

"And in this, that philosophy begins in wonder [Plato, Theaetetus 155d], lies the, so to speak, non-bourgeois character of philosophy; for to feel astonishment and wonder is something non-bourgeois (if we can be allowed, for a moment, to use this all-too-easy terminology). For what does it mean to become bourgeois in the intellectual sense? More than anything else, it means that someone takes one's immediate surroundings (the world determined by the immediate purposes of life) so "tightly" and "densely," as if bearing an ultimate value, that the things of experience no longer become transparent. The greater, deeper, more real, and (at first) invisible world of essences is no longer even suspected to exist; the "wonder" is no longer there, it has no place to come from; the human being can no longer feel wonder. The commonplace mind, rendered deaf-mute, finds everything self-explanatory. But what really is self-explanatory? Is it self-explanatory, then, that we exist? Is it self-explanatory that there is such a thing as "seeing"? These are questions that someone who is locked into the daily world cannot ask; and that is so because such a person has not succeeded, as anyone whose senses (like a deaf person) are simply not functioning ? has not managed even for once to forget the immediate needs of life, whereas the one who experiences wonder is one who, astounded by the deeper aspect of the world, cannot hear the immediate demands of life ? if even for a moment, that moment when he gazes on the astounding vision of the world."

"Can a lie be taken as communication? I tend to deny it. A lie is the opposite of communication. It means specifically to withhold the other's share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality."

"As an ethicist of independence, this Antisthenes had no feeling for cultic celebration, which he preferred attacking with "enlightened" wit; he was "a-musical" (a foe of the Muses: poetry only interested him for its moral content); he felt no responsiveness to Eros (he said he "would like to kill Aphrodite"); as a flat Realist, he had no belief in immortality (what really matters, he said, was to live rightly "on this earth"). This collection of character traits appears almost purposely designed to illustrate the very "type" of the modern "workaholic.""

"Each gratification points to the ultimate one, and that all happiness has some connection with eternal beatitude. Some connection, if only this: that every fulfillment this side of Heaven instantly reveals its inadequacy. It is immediately evident that such satisfactions are not enough; they are not what we have really sought; they cannot really satisfy us at all."

"Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow."

"Finally, it is no longer completely fantastic to think that a day may come when not the executioners alone will deny the inalienable rights of men, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice."

"Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good; and only from this stout-hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished."

"Happiness and joy are not the same. For what does the fervent craving for joy mean? It does not mean that we wish at any cost to experience the psychic state of being joyful. We want to have reason for joy, for an unceasing joy that fills us utterly, sweeps all before it, exceeds all measure."

"He who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day... needs to reorganize his life."

"Happiness... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity."

"Happiness is essentially a gift; we are not the forgers of our own felicity."

"He who knows does not feel wonder. It could not be said that God experiences wonder, for God knows in the most absolute and perfect way."

"Idleness, for the older code of behavior, meant especially this: that the human being had given up on the very responsibility that comes with his dignity... The metaphysical-theological concept of idleness means, then, that man finally does not agree with his own existence; that behind all his energetic activity, he is not at one with himself; that, as the Middle Ages expressed it, sadness has seized him in the face of the divine Goodness that lives within him."

"If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good -- which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward -- this man, and he alone, is truly brave."

"How does the philosophical question differ from the non-philosophical question? To philosophize means, we said, to direct one's view toward the totality of the world. So is that a philosophical question (and that alone) which has for its explicit and formal theme the sum-total of all existing things? No! What is peculiar and distinctive about a philosophical question is that it cannot be posed, considered, or answered (so far at least as an answer is possible) without "God and the world" also coming into consideration, that is, the whole of what exists."

"If God really became incarnate, and if His Incarnation can with justice compel man to change his life, then we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time. ... What happens in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist is something for which all religions of mankind have expressed longing, dimly sensed was coming, and as a rule even prefigured- the physical presence of the divine Logos made man, and the presence of his sacrificial death, in the midst of the congregation celebrating the mysteries."

"Here we must take account of one of St. Thomas's conceptual distinctions, which at first seems like unnecessary caviling. It is the distinction between uncreated and created happiness. We have here something which, while not at all obvious, is nevertheless fraught with consequences for our whole feeling about life. Namely, this: what does indeed make us happy is the infinite and uncreated richness of God; but participation in this, happiness itself, is entirely a creatural reality governed from within by our humanity; it is not something that descends overwhelmingly upon us from outside. That is, it is not only something that happens to us; we ourselves are intensely active participants in our own happiness. Beatitude - Thomas is saying - cannot possibly be conceived as a merely objective condition of sheer existence. It is not a mere quality, not pure passivity, not simply a feeling. It is something that takes place in the alert core of the mind... Happiness is an act and an activity of the soul."

"If knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing received in it? It is the mark of absolute activity (which Goethe said makes one bankrupt, in the end); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive; a stoniness of heart, that will not brook any resistance ? as expressed once, most radically, in the following terrifying statement: Every action makes sense, even criminal acts ? all passivity is senseless."

"If someone needs the "unusual" to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being. The hunger for the sensational, posing, as it may, in "bohemian garb," is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the true power of wonder, for a bourgeois-ized humanity."

"If to know is to work, then knowledge is the fruit of our own unaided effort and activity; then knowledge includes nothing which is not due to the effort of man, and there is nothing gratuitous about it, nothing inspired, nothing given about it."

"In leisure, there is... something of the serenity of "not-being-able-to-grasp," of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will."

"In leisure ? not only there, but certainly there, if anywhere ? the truly human is rescued and preserved precisely because the area of the "just human" is left behind over and over again ? and this is not brought about through the application of extreme efforts but rather as with a kind of "moving away" (and this "moving" is of course more difficult than the extreme, active effort; it is "more difficult" because it is less at one's own disposal; the condition of utmost exertion is more easily to be realized than the condition of relaxation and detachment, even though the latter is effortless: this is the paradox that reigns over the attainment of leisure, which is at once a human and superhuman condition). As Aristotle said of it: "man cannot live this way insofar as he is man, but only insofar as something divine dwells in him." [Nichomachean Ethics X, 7 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."

"It pertains to the very nature of a philosophical question that its answer will not be a "perfectly rounded truth" (as Parmenides said it), grasped in the hand like an apple plucked from a tree."

"It is possible to pray in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world... then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it."

"It could even be said, perhaps, that this very opposition, this threat from the world of total work, is what characterizes the situation of philosophy today more than its own particular content. Philosophy increasingly adopts ? necessarily, it seems ? the character of the alien, of mere intellectual luxury, of that which seems ever more intolerable and unjustifiable, the more exclusively the demands of the daily world of work take over the world of man."

"In leisure... the truly human is rescued and preserved precisely because the area of the "just human" is left behind... [But] the condition of utmost exertion is more easily to be realized than the condition of relaxation and detachment, even though the latter is effortless: this is the paradox that reigns over the attainment of leisure, which is at once a human and super-human condition."

"In the effort to regain a space of true leisure, to bring about a fundamentally correct attitude and "exercise" of leisure, the real difficulty of this so-often despaired-of project consists in the fact that the ultimate root of leisure lies outside the range of our responsible, voluntary action. The fullest harmony with the world, to be precise, cannot come about on the basis of a voluntary decision. Above all, one cannot simply "make" it happen for some ulterior purpose. There are certain things which one cannot do "in order to..." do something else."

"Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. Such stillness is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul's power, as real, of responding to the real ? a co-respondence, eternally established in nature ? has not yet descended into words. Leisure is the disposition of perceptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion ? in the real."

"Leisure is not justified in making the functionary as "trouble-free" in operation as possible, with minimum "downtime," but rather in keeping the functionary human... and this means that the human being does not disappear into the parceled-out world of his limited work-a-day function, but instead remains capable of taking in the world as a whole, and thereby to realize himself as a being who is oriented toward the whole of existence. This is why the ability to be "at leisure" is one of the basic powers of the human soul. Like the gift of contemplative self-immersion in Being, and the ability to uplift one's spirits in festivity, the power to be at leisure is the power to step beyond the working world and win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work."

"Justice is a habit (habitus), whereby a man renders to each one his due with constant and perpetual will."

"It should now be clear that "wonder" and philosophizing are connected with each other in a more essential sense than may at first appear in the statement, "Philosophy begins in wonder." For wonder is not merely the beginning, in the sense of initium, the first stage or phase of philosophy. Rather, wonder is the beginning in the sense of the "principle" (principium), the abiding, ever-intrinsic origin of philosophizing. It is not true to say that the philosopher, insofar as he philosophizes, ever "emerges from his wonder" ? if he does depart from his state of wonder, he has ceased to philosophize."

"Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear....Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion ? in the real."

"Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go, who lets himself go, and "go under," almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go... The surge of new life that flows out to us when we give ourselves to the contemplation of a blossoming rose, a sleeping child, or of a divine mystery ? is this not like the surge of life that comes from deep, dreamless sleep?"

"Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process... Leisure is not there for the sake of work, no matter how much new strength the one who resumes working may gain from it; leisure in our sense is not justified by providing bodily renewal or even mental refreshment to lend new vigor to further work... Nobody who wants leisure merely for the sake of "refreshment" will experience its authentic fruit, the deep refreshment that comes from a deep sleep."

"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."

"Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process ? in just the same way as the "simple gaze" of intellectus does not consist in the "duration" (so to speak) of ratio's working-out process, but instead cuts through it at the perpendicular (the ancients compared the ratio with time, the intellectus with the "always now" of eternity)."

"Leisure stands opposed to the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as social function. The simple "break" from work ? the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer ? is part and parcel of daily working life. It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The "break" is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide "new strength" for "new work," as the word "refreshment" indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work."

"Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence."

"Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell."

"Leisure, then, is a condition of the soul ? (and we must firmly keep this assumption, since leisure is not necessarily present in all the external things like "breaks," "time off," "weekend," "vacation," and so on ? it is a condition of the soul) ? leisure is precisely the counterpoise to the image for the "worker.""