For some 30 years or so, there is going on all over the world a discussion on what is called the problem of leisure time, of recreation time. And I myself, as some of you may know, I'm somewhat involved in that discussion. Now the situation is still this, whoever is speaking of leisure today within the Western world, he is defending himself from the beginning. He is from the beginning in a defensive position. That means that he is putting up resistance against a counter power that he is, which at first sight at least, is considered to be the stronger one.

[01:08]

And things are getting more complicated still by the fact that this counterpart is not someone else. And it is not somewhere else. It is within himself or ourselves. It is an inner debate and an inward conflict. And there is still another complication. If he who is defending leisure, if he would be asked what leisure to him precisely means, it is very likely that his answer will not be very clear. Now, I think this is simply the situation from which we have to start.

[02:12]

And since this is so, it seems to be the best to begin with a description or with the attempt of a description of that counter-power. which everybody has to face, everybody who tries to stand up for leisure. Well, who is that counterpart? We say it is the overvaluation of work and labor. Now, work is a rather many-faced concept. It can have several different meanings, at last three different meanings, and I would like to speak of all three of them. Somebody may say, for instance, by work I mean any kind of activity, activity in a very large sense.

[03:17]

But another one could come and say, no, when I speak of work, I do not mean activity in I mean hard activity. I mean effort, exertion, trouble, toil. Though this is a different idea of what work is like. And still a third one could come and maintain the decisive element of the concept of work is social function. I speak of work only if there is a useful activity, or better, an activity which is a social service of social usefulness and utility, contribution to the common need.

[04:20]

That's which I would call work. These are three rather different concepts. To put it briefly, work as activity, work as toil and effort, and work as social function. And if I would be asked, which one of these concepts do you mean when you speak of the overvaluation of work, then my answer would be, I mean all three of them. There really exists, in my opinion, an overvaluation of activity as such, and there exists also an overvaluation of strain and toil of the difficult as such.

[05:22]

And there exists finally an overvaluation and even an absolute valuation of utility and social function. And I think we should first speak of each of these points. So point one, overvaluation of activity. Now what is wrong here? What is precisely, what is it that is wrong here? When does valuation change to overvaluation? There is certainly much right in the valuation of activity, but when does it become overvaluation? I should say the valuation of activity becomes overvaluation in the very moment in which you no longer would be able to receive something, just to receive it, to be simply receptive, to let things happen.

[06:37]

Our German poet Goethe spoke of a certain unconditional activity which must, as he says, end in bankruptcy. And I think this kind of bankruptcy is not quite beyond the range of our contemporary experience. Now, every false idea usually has its own insanity form. Sometimes it is expressed in such a way that you would speak of an insanity, madness form, formulation in which its absurdity openly comes to light. Now, the madness form of the overvaluation of activity sounds like this. I am quoting. Every action has some meaning, even a crime, but to be passive is always senseless.

[07:47]

Now this is a statement which is reported in Hermann Rauschening's conversations with Hitler. Hermann Rauschening was formerly the president of the senate of the city of Danzig, and now he is here in this country somewhere as a farmer. Now this is obviously madness, the madness form of the overvaluation of activity. But I would say milder forms of that same madness are very much in use among us. In order to see that, we have to have only a side look at a very characteristic concept which is well known to all of us. I mean the concept of intellectual work, geistige Arbeit, and of intellectual worker, brain worker.

[08:58]

This is a relatively new word, at least, maybe also concept, which came into usage only, let's say, 180 years ago, around that, 200 years ago. This concept, too, is based on an overvaluation of activity. The concept intellectual work has also many faces, and that is included also something else, but there is included this of which we are speaking now, the overvaluation of activity too. It is based, this concept, on the conviction that man's intellectual cognition is nothing but activity.

[10:04]

exclusively activity. And the question is whether this is true. What happens when we are looking at a rose or into a human face or at a landscape outside the window of our car or outside the window of a train Of course, we are awake, we are active, but this activity means nothing but receiving. It means opening our eyes and the reality which we see enters into us, so to speak, without calling on our part for any active effort. There is no effort needed to get that reality before our eyes.

[11:11]

Of course, there could be in the same compartment of the train, let's say, there could be also sitting beside me another man who is observing very actively and very keenly the same landscape, let's say, that is a military expert. He is looking at that same landscape as a possible battleground. What to do here with tanks or with artillery? So he's looking at that same landscape in quite a different way. But this I wouldn't call looking. That is observing. That is active observation. So what I mean here is just this opening the eyes and then let the landscape or whatever it is, let it go into your soul, into your eyes without... and there is no activity in the strict sense necessary.

[12:28]

But there is not much debate about this, about seeing with our bodily eyes. But it is much debating about the question whether something analogous is true for our mind, intellectual knowledge. Does there exist such a thing as a purely receptive attitude and approach of mind in which we are able to become aware of immaterial reality of truth? Is there such a thing as pure intellectual contemplation, to adopt the term of a famous controversy between Immanuel Kant and the Romantic philosophers? Intellectual contemplation, not only sensual,

[13:35]

contemplation. Kant himself and his modern followers very decidedly say, no, there is no such thing. Kant says, with our bodily eyes we see, we have this kind of contemplation, just looking at reality and then it comes into our sensual knowledge. And God has this kind of intuition, but man as an intellectual being in his intellectual activity, he doesn't have a thing like that. There is only activity. The ancients Because I do not mean, as I already said, I do not mean here the past ones, whose time is over.

[14:37]

I mean the great ones, the representative witnesses of human tradition. They said, yes, there exists also in intellectual knowledge such a thing as just opening your eyes and you get it. Kant says all human knowledge is realized and all human cognition, intellectual cognition, is realized exclusively in acts like comparing, examining, relating, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating, and so on, all of which are forms of active intellectual exertion. Man's intellectual cognition and knowledge is nothing but activity. Whereas the ancients said, the great Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, but also the great teachers of medieval Christendom, the ancients said there is in fact not only the discursive search of the ratio

[16:01]

But there is also the simplex intuitus, the simple intuition, the purely receptive look of the intellectus. There is not only thinking, but there is also contemplation and vision and intuition. Thinking means to be on the way to this discursive activity of search, Whereas vision, intuition, means that you are not on the way, you just see it, you have it, it is present to you. Whereas thinking could be even defined as the cognition or the attempt to know something which is absent. Now, it is quite understandable that the ideal of work must get a very weighty, even an almost absolute, prevalence once you accept this concept of intellectual work with all its implications.

[17:15]

This digression into the history of philosophy may show that our problems of today, especially the big problem of the totalitarian working society, which not, as I already said, which not necessarily presupposes political totalitarianism. I say that our problems today did not come about quite suddenly. And as a surprise, they have been in preparation long since in the European philosophy for more than 200 years. And if we have a look, take a look at the face of the worker.

[18:20]

Of course, I do not take worker here as defining a special occupation or a group, a social group in the sense of statistics. I do use the term worker here in a more, let's say, anthropological sense, as some German writers do, for instance, Ernst Jünger, Ernst Nikisch, They understand by this term, worker, a quite general human ideal, which, according to them, has already begun to mould the man of the centuries to come. So, once again, if we look at the worker into the face of modern man, which already is

[19:23]

formed and characterized by that overvaluation of activity, then we really see that this modern human face is marked by a distinguishing feature, by the distinguishing feature of tension and exertion. And I think it is really a distinguishing Mark. Distinguishing the modern face from the typical face, let's say, of our grandparents. They didn't look like that. Not yet. So far, point one. Overvaluation of activity. Now, point two. Overvaluation of difficulty and toil, of trouble and even of pain. At first sight, a very strange phenomenon, one should say.

[20:25]

But the issue is the very fundamental question of the criterion of the worth or worthlessness of human behavior in general. It is strange, I said, that something like this should exist at all, overvaluation of pain, overvaluation of difficulty. But I think it not only does exist, I think it is an element of just the most valuable persons and personalities of our time. Exactly this overvaluation of difficulty. I said the question is very basic. It's a very basic one. It's the question, what is the criterion of the value, the moral value also, of human behavior?

[21:36]

What does difficulty mean with regard to moral goodness? And I think it is not that far from our normal usual thinking. There is no difficulty, then it is not of much value. I should like to speak first of the answer of Immanuel Kant again. And I think his, the atmospherical influence, his atmospherical influence on modern consciousness is still very clearly perceivable. According to Kant, difficulty is an essential element of every moral act. Where there is no difficulty, there is no true morality. It belongs to the very concept of moral law to be contrary to man's natural inclination and to follow

[22:48]

our own inclination, that's of course easy. And therefore, according to this view, the more difficult a thing, the higher it is in the order of goodness. The contemporary poet Schiller, Friedrich Schiller, contemporary to Kant, He made a little satirical poem on this Kantian doctrine, and he named the name of Kant in the heading of that little poem. The poem goes like this. How willingly I would serve my friends, but, alas, I do so with pleasure, and so I am worried by the fact not to be virtuous in serving the friends.

[23:53]

Now this, I think, this hits exactly the weak point of that position. Hard work is what is good. Toil, difficulty, pain is what makes a human deed a good deed, a good doing. By the way, this is not a new view, not at all. It is almost a quotation, what I said, from an ancient philosopher, a companion of Plato, one of those who grouped themselves around Socrates. Antisthenes, the cynic, This idea did not succeed very much in antiquity, but it was well known all the time.

[24:58]

It was present all the time in the European thinking, in the background. And there are some sayings and statements in medieval philosophy and theology which you don't understand if you don't know that there is in the background this counterpart already present. St. Thomas, for instance, knew it quite well and it gave him the occasion to express in his textbook for beginners the opposite opinion, the diametrically opposite opinion. He says, the essence of virtue does not consist in the difficult.

[26:00]

This is certainly polemically fair. Now, who is the adversary? If you don't know that there is this idea present and you don't understand this polemical tone. So, again, the essence of virtue does not consist in the difficult, but in what? In the good, he says. This implies that moral goodness is not necessarily connected with difficulty. Empirically, of course, empirically speaking, the good is normally difficult, more difficult than the bad. But to say that it belongs to the essence of a good moral act would mean to say that goodness would be against human nature.

[27:11]

So the great teachers of Christendom said many things about human virtue that not only Kant's followers but also modern Christians do not easily agree with. We hesitate to buy, so to speak. For instance, the following statement of Thomas Aquinas. It is a kind of test question. I would like to quote it and to stop on a certain point and ask how does it go on. So he says, moral virtue enables us, this is the beginning, but now how does it go on? Enables us to do what? To master our natural inclinations That sounds rather plausible, but it is not that way that it goes on with Thomas Aquinas.

[28:22]

This is the way in which Kant and his followers, and I think all this overvaluation of toil and strain and effort and difficulty would have put it. And I think all of us find it quite plausible and rather easy to understand it. But the statement of Thomas Aquinas goes on quite differently, in the following way. Moral virtue enables us to follow our natural inclination, and not to suppress it or not to master it, just to follow it. in the right way, of course. But these are two diametrically opposite ways to look at human morality. So the ancients say the highest moral activity may quite well be, and in fact is, characterized by effortlessness, by easiness,

[29:41]

It belongs to the very nature of that activity to be easy, just to the nature of the highest moral activity. Why? Because it belongs to the very nature of the highest moral acts to spring from love. And whatever we do for love, it's easy, as everybody knows. But I think even our notion of love, seems to be somewhat infected, so to speak, by this tendency to overvaluate hard work and the effort of doing something difficult. For instance, why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one's enemy as the greatest form of love? Why? Is it not because of its exceptional difficulty and because of its impossibility, one might even say?

[30:50]

And doesn't this mean then that difficulty is the kind of yardstick and measure of moral goodness? Again, I am quoting the answer of St. Thomas. It is not the difficulty of loving one's enemy that matters, when the essence of the merit even of doing so is concerned. Now, what then does matter? The only thing that matters is the perfection of love. And therefore, I'm quoting verbally, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether, no difficulty at all anymore, to love one's enemy. This would be more meritorious still. So that couldn't be said from the point of view of the overvaluation of difficulty.

[32:01]

In the same way, let us have again a side look at the concept of intellectual work. I said it is a many-faced concept, and there are many different elements in it. And one element is also the overvaluation of difficulty. But as to this concept, in the same way the ancients would say, the essence of intellectual cognition and knowledge does certainly not consist in the effort for which it calls, maybe. But the essence of cognition is just grasping reality, that things are seen as they really are. This is knowledge, and this is truth.

[33:07]

Truth is not something in the clouds. Truth just means that reality becomes visible to me, audible, penetrable, manifest to me. And the highest form, again, the highest form of cognition does not know anything of difficulty. It comes to man like a gift. The sudden illumination, a stroke of genius, true contemplation, all of them come about effortlessly and without any trouble and any strain and any difficulty. The ancient occasion is speak of contemplation and play. in the same breath. Now, this aspect too, this element of overvaluation of work, this extreme and highest value put upon the difficulty, simply because of its difficulty,

[34:26]

This aspect, too, has its equivalent in a particular trait and feature of the worker's face, that means of modern man's face, insofar as modern man is already stamped by this overvaluation of difficulty. And I would say again, it is a distinguishing mark of the modern human face. And by the way, a really, really respectable teacher, a really, I would even say, venerable mark of the contemporary human faith. I'm speaking here of the feature which means, of a feature which means readiness to suffer, preparedness for undergoing something difficult, something painful and grievous.

[35:33]

I think it belongs simply to the human faith of today. And I think it is a really venerable feature. But there has to be some criticism, again, too. This readiness to suffer seems to be something relationless, something in vacuo. And this makes a very decisive difference, I should say, from the Christian idea of sacrifice. Christian conception of sacrifice does not mean suffering for its own sake. It does not mean pain on behalf of pain. Its primary concern is not toil, not worry, not difficulty for their own sake, but salvation, fullness of being, fullness even of happiness.

[36:50]

this kind of ideal which is behind it, this kind of discipline. That's a favorite word of Ernst Jünger, for instance. And he says, discipline means whether they are soldiers, involved, or monks. Doesn't matter. Discipline means to remain in touch with pain, to hold that contact to pain. That's the meaning of discipline, he said. But that's a purely formalistic idea. There's no question for what pain, for what suffering. And I think here is the distinction and the difference, again, to the idea of sacrifice in the Christian sense.

[38:03]

Of course, there is not always, and I would say even there is never this kind of counting, what do I get? For what do I suffer? But there is a what, there is a for what. But here there is no object, no reason, really. It's merely a formalistic attitude, this kind of discipline. And I think there is again an insanity form, a madness form, of the overvaluation of difficulty. When I had published some 36 years ago now, in Nazi Germany, my little book on fortitude, in the last chapter of which I said that the representative figure of fortitude, the martyr, lives out of hope

[39:14]

One of the most read German novelists at that time, most read Ernst Wiechert, wrote me a letter, a very friendly letter, he made some compliments, but then he said, in your last chapter you destroy all what you said before. It is in contradiction to all I had said before, he says, on the greatness of fortitude. He says, and I'm quoting now more or less verbally, it would be much harder and much more difficult and therefore much greater to go into death without hope. Suddenly true. But this is apparently absurd, I mean. But nobody who started by saying that it is difficulty which makes goodness.

[40:24]

Nobody who is starting from that principle can avoid this absurd consequence. The Gulf that separates the modern idea of the worker from the Christian idea of man becomes manifest only once we ask for the deeper root of that overvaluation of difficulty and toil. Now, an adequate and full answer to that question is probably not possible, because it's too complicated. The whole thing is too complicated. But one element of it may be one element of that attitude of the overvaluation of difficulty.

[41:26]

One element may be that man refuses to receive anything as a gift. I wouldn't like to accept a gift from anybody, not even from God. I mistrust everything which is not brought about by your own labour and effort. I mistrust everything that is easy. The thing behind it could be this repudiation, this rejection to get something as a gift Now, there is not much talking necessary about the distinction, the difference.

[42:29]

Christian understanding of life is obviously based on the concept of grace, and we don't have to go here into theology of grace, but grace certainly means a gift, which never can be brought about nor gained nor merited by man himself." So far on point two. Overvaluation of effort, difficulty, pain, and so on. And now point three. Overvaluation of social utility and social function. The third meaning of the term work. And of course, here we enter a discussion which clearly is not just an abstract and purely theoretical discussion. But again, the issue is one of very fundamental principles, basic questions.

[43:38]

In order to see that, we should remember an old distinction, and maybe at first sight and even outmoded distinction, the distinction between artes liberales and artes serviles, free activity and servile or servile work. Now we pretend to understand quite well at least one member of this distinction, servile work. But what does this concept exactly mean? The answer, which usually is given, if you look into the textbooks or in the reference books, you get some different answers. That kind of work which in antiquity has been done by slaves, and therefore the names of our work,

[44:43]

So it is noisy work, or it's dirty work, and so on. This answer is not, I would say, not incorrect, but it does not hit the point. The point is different. The point is that this concept of servile or servile work cannot be understood at all unless you refer it explicitly to its twin concept. liberal activity, free activity, artes liberales. And the truth, I'm afraid, is that we do not really understand anymore what this free activity might mean. Now, the ancients understood by liberal art all forms of human activity which have their end not outside themselves, outside of themselves, but in themselves.

[45:47]

So, which are not in the strict sense of use, useful, serviceable. We already had to speak of that. This is even the definition of the useful, that its aim lies outside of what we are doing. We do what is useful not for its own sake, but for the sake of something else. This is nothing but the definition of the usefulness. So, serving useful work serves for something else. And therefrom the name. There's no contempt in that name and in that naming. There's no real reference to slaves. It is a work that serves for something else. But the idea behind the distinction is that there exist other human activities which do not serve for something else.

[47:05]

On the contrary, perhaps all other activities serve for them. And these are the artes liberales, the free activities. Now, I only have to translate this question of the right and the place of the non-useful, of the free activity. Translation would sound like this. Is there a sphere of human activity or even of human life which cannot possibly be brought into any meaningful relation to a five-year plan. Now, the answer given to this question by the worker, given from the point of view of the overvaluation of social utility, is quite clear.

[48:06]

No, there is no such thing. Man is entirely and essentially a worker, a functionary, even in his intellectual and spiritual activity. If you know anything about the totalitarian world behind the Iron Curtain, for instance, also the Nazi regime, then you know what the Five Years Plan means. What is really wrong and disastrous with the totalitarian five-year plan is not the attempt to bring about a balance of consumption and production. What is destructive here, what is fatal, is that those utility plans are considered to be the exclusive criterion of every human activity, not only of industry and economics, but of university life also, and of the individual use of leisure time too.

[49:14]

I remember when I was in Eastern Berlin, I bought a heap of periodicals for children. And there was, in one of those issues, was the result of a kind of contest among these young schoolboys. And the task, the given task was, how can I cooperate to the fulfillment of the five years plan in the Spirit of Stachanow. They had another name in Eastern Germany. Do you know what Stachanow means? It's for a worker. And I remember that a seven years old boy or so, if it really was, he is, I don't know.

[50:28]

Nobody knows. But I remember this housework, what he did on that subject on that theme. He told I was, I had to go to the bakery in order to buy a bread. When I came to the shop, I realized that I had forgotten the money. So if I would have been attentive, then I would have, I had to go back and to bring the money. So if I would have been attentive, then I would have saved time and force, I mean, just, you know, all this energy and maybe even material in order to bring about the five years plan and so on. Of course, this is ridiculous, but it is also, I think,

[51:30]

a very, very sad thing, because you see that the five-years plan is hammered into the brains of defenseless brains of children as just the criterion for everything. And I should say this kind of five-year plan thinking is the madness form of the overvaluation of social utility and social function. But again, it has to be added, milder forms of that madness are very common among us. So I have some doubts, for instance, whether we would give our assent to the following statement, which for the ancients was simply a matter of course. It is again a quotation from my venerated master, Thomas.

[52:34]

He says, it is necessary for the perfection of human society that there are human beings who devote their lives to contemplation. So, this is necessary, notabene, this is necessary not for the good of some individual, a special gift or a special temperament or inclination, there we would see not any problem. They may become Benedictines, no problem. But this is not the issue here. The statement means contemplative life is necessary for the perfection of human society as a whole. Human society is not sound, is not perfect, or perfect, if there is no contemplative life, if there is no place and space for contemplative life in it.

[53:42]

Now why should this be necessary? The ancients wouldn't have hesitated to answer that question. They would have said, because the truth about the whole of reality, the whole of existence, the sense of human life, because this absolutely unusable truth can be kept present and, so to speak, available within human society only by one thing, by contemplation. And I think nobody who is used to think in terms of intellectual work and brain worker and so on could have said that. Now this is the three-faced counterpart and counter-power against which leisure has to be defended.

[54:57]

For it is immediately obvious that from the viewpoint of the worker—so overvaluation of activity, overvaluation of toil and difficulty, overvaluation of social utility and social function—that from this point of view, leisure necessarily must appear as something wholly strange, without rhyme and reason. that there is simply no space for it anymore. How could possibly, for instance, how could be understood the statement of Aristotle, we work in order to have leisure? How could it be conceivable, explainable, that the word we use to designate the place where we teach originally means nothing but leisure.

[56:01]

School does not mean school, but leisure. Schoole. Of course, if you ask the students, they don't understand why this could be a place of leisure. But it is a place which is explicitly kept free from purposes, from practical purposes. May they be political, economical, military, and so on. Within the world of total work, leisure appears even as something downright unseemly, morally bad. That's another word for laziness, idleness, At this point, however, there must be said something rather surprising, namely that the ancients, especially the great masters of medieval Christendom, maintained precisely the opposite on this point.

[57:10]

Not only is leisure something different from sloth and idleness, it is, on the contrary, the lack of leisure that has to do with sloth. The restlessness of working for work's sake even comes from sloth, from a certain kind of idleness. That's what they say. And this indeed is a strange thought, not easily understandable for a modern Christian. We just don't know what it means. Now the crucial point, of course, is the meaning of idleness here, of sloth and slothfulness. The ancients are speaking here of sloth as included in the group of the seven capital sins.

[58:16]

I had still to learn that in the school, in the catechism And of course, I thought that it had to do with the all-too-well-known problem of homework. And I believe that my parents and my teachers, who confirmed me in this conviction, in this opinion, that in fact they were convinced, too, that this was the point. By the way, they would have been in a very good company. In his great and famous history of capitalism, the German historian of economics, Werner Sombart, a sociologist, he died some 20 years ago, Werner Sombart, he also says there, the concept ad sedia, that is the Latin name for this loathfulness, for this kind of idleness, the Latin name for that capital sin.

[59:33]

He says, this concept was one of the most basic concepts of the medieval economical ethics. Which is, frankly speaking, plain nonsense. Exactly the same nonsense as if homework would be meant. What does sloth really mean? Do you say sloth or sloth? Sloth. What does it really mean? Now I shall try to say it as simply as possible, without, I hope, without oversimplification. So there is a man who indeed says, I get off, I don't cooperate. So insofar, the name idleness, sloth, is quite to the point.

[60:42]

But the refusal his refusal to act does not at all mean the realm of economy, of industry, or homework. The level is quite different. This refusal goes far deeper. It means the innermost cell of existence itself. So this man says, I do not want to be what God wants me to be. I do not want to be a person, for instance. A person, in the strict sense, is a being which is not only able and called upon to make decisions, it is a being which cannot avoid to make decisions. decisions valid perhaps into eternity.

[61:49]

That's certainly an uneasy thing, an uncanny thing. And this man says, no, no, no, I'm just a middle-class businessman or an innocent intellectual. I do my job. I want to have some harmless entertainment. but leave me alone with all these great ideas of personality and so on and then the Christians come and say you are not only a person you are the heir of the eternal kingdom he says let leave me alone with all that let me alone I don't care I will just have this my small place of activity, and that's all. But you simply cannot be left alone.

[62:53]

You cannot get off. You are a person, whether you wish it or not. So, sloth, atsedia, means exactly the same I was already speaking on that in the connection with the idea of a festival. It means the same as Kierkegaard's despair from weakness means. The despairing refusal to be oneself, he says. And I think it is absolutely understandable that this kind of despair does not allow man to stay in his own house, as Goethe puts it. He must dash off. And where?

[63:58]

For instance, into the restlessness of work for work's sake. So sloth and the incapacity for leisure they correspond with one another. But leisure is the opposite of idleness and sloth. So the real meaning of leisure, in fact, cannot be characterized more clearly than by opposing it to the ideal of the worker, which means to the overvaluation of work. and this in each and every one of the aspects I spoke of. Work as activity, work as toil and effort and difficulty and pain, and work as social function. So, in comparison, first, with the exclusive ideal of activity and activism, leisure is an attitude of non-activity.

[65:08]

of inward calm, of silence. Leisure means not being busy, but rather letting things happen. I am sure that I didn't give any occasion to the misunderstanding as if I would depreciate work. I mean, I'm speaking of the overvaluation of work. Of course, there has to be business and being busy and activity. There's no question about that. Then I said silence. I would say leisure is a form of that silence, which on its turn is the prerequisite for hearing. only the silent can hear. So leisure is a receptive attitude of mind.

[66:12]

The Book of Job says, God gives the poems in the night. Deus quiderit carmina in nocte. And one could dare say a man at leisure is not unlike a man asleep. And we should not forget that the popular saying, God sends his good gifts in sleep, is also a kind of quotation from the Bible. It is in this state of mind, of openness of the soul, that the great and imperishable insights and intuitions come to us in our moments of real leisure. insights that cannot be obtained by hard work alone. Maybe hard work is a precondition, but the precondition and the cause is something different.

[67:16]

Secondly, in comparison with the exclusive ideal of workers' toil, leisure has to be understood as a festive attitude. an attitude of celebration. And celebration clearly means the opposite of toy. I already said, leisure is possible only to a man at one with himself and also at one and in tune with the world. Now this same is also true for the celebration of a feast. To celebrate a feast does not a feast day does not mean anything but to live out man's fundamental accord with God and himself and with the world. And this accord, which does not at all mean any superficial optimism, we already spoke about that, this accord, I would say, is an indispensable presupposition of both.

[68:27]

leisure and the celebration of a feast. And in comparison, point three, with the exclusive ideal of work as social function, leisure is again the antithesis. Leisure means something altogether different from a mere break in one's work. The pause made this intermission last one hour or one day or three weeks of vacation. The mere intermission, the pause, is still part of the process of work. It is a link in that same chain. It is made for the sake of work and in order to keep man able to work. Of course, that's all right, that's necessary, but this is different from leisure.

[69:30]

The concept of leisure, by the way, the concept of recreation, too, belongs here. Recreation is an ambiguous concept. Recreation from work, but also for work. I said it is all right, it has to be there, but leisure is an altogether different matter. Different is no longer on the same plane. Leisure is not for the sake of work. The point of leisure is not to be a restorative, a pick-me-up only, though leisure certainly does give more than any recreation, so-called recreation, new strength physically and mentally and spiritually. But this is not the point. The point is, the achievement of leisure is not that the working man should function faultlessly and without breakdown, but that he, even while working, should continue to be a human being.

[70:47]

That is to say that man should not be entirely absorbed in this clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function. All functions are limited. And in all functions, professional functions, which are of course all right and necessary, but in all those functions we are concerned only with a part of the world and with a part of our own being. And the point of leisure is that man, even while working and serving and functioning, should continue to be capable of seeing life as a whole, and the whole of reality and himself as a being which is essentially related to the whole, Carpax Universi. Now, there is still one question open, one very important question.

[71:54]

It is a practical question. The problem, whether it is possible or likely to maintain and to defend or even to reconquer, maybe, the riot and claims of leisure, face to face with the claims of totalitarian working society, which more and more is invading every sphere of life. Is it going to be possible to save man from becoming workers and nothing else? If so, what has to be done? Now, you know the doctors are telling us long since how necessary leisure is for our health. If you don't have leisure, you simply fall ill.

[72:54]

Now, this diagnosis is no doubt correct, but if the therapeutic suggestion or request would be added. So you must have leisure in order to become or to remain healthy. Then I should say here it comes to light very clearly that the heart of the matter has not been understood at all. There are some things in life which by no means can be done in order to. You cannot love a human being in order to, for instance. Maybe you can get married in order to, as a Soviet spy in Germany some years ago did. In order to fulfill his function as a spy, he got married to that girl who was in charge of that business which he was demanded to investigate.

[74:12]

So that may be possible, but you cannot love a person in order to. there are orders of rank which cannot be reversed. However true it may be, for instance, what some psychotherapists say, Carl Gustav Jung, for instance, told that many times in his more private conversations, I think he also wrote it down somewhere, that He who is accustomed to say a prayer at night usually has less difficulty to go to sleep. Now, this disturbance of sleep is, I think, the most usual symptom for which men go to the psychotherapist.

[75:19]

So this may be true, but it is, of course, impossible to say, oh, you cannot sleep, there is an excellent method. You just have to pray. No, there are things which cannot be done or which can be done only if you consider them to be necessary, to be great, to be worthwhile. in themselves. Otherwise you don't do them at all. So if you pray and have in the background of your head this idea, then I can sleep, then you cannot pray really. You don't pray really. And leisure belongs exactly to that kind of thing. You cannot act leisure, as the Greeks said, you can act leisure only if you understand it as something meaningful in itself.

[76:28]

And you cannot have leisure in order to become or to remain healthy. Not even in order to save the Western civilization, I should say. And by the way, this is one of the reasons why the discussion on the problems of leisure time, which I mentioned in the beginning, will not easily come to an end. There is quite understandably something desperate in those discussions. That's quite understandable. But again, what can be done And what has to be done in order to save man from becoming mere functionaries and mere workers who only know of a pause, of an intermission, but not of leisure? Well, I don't have a push-button solution.

[77:35]

What I believe to be able to do is to carry on the diagnosis a bit further and deeper unto a point at which things may look even more hopeless, but possibly also something like a gleam of hope might become visible. If it is true that the soul of leisure is celebration, as I already said, In celebration, after all, the three elements of leisure, all of them, are connected. Calmness, non-activity, effortlessness, and exemption, for a while, from social function. So, once again, if celebration is the core of leisure, then leisure in the last resort can only be made possible upon the same basis as the celebration of a feast day.

[78:42]

And what is this basis? According to what the historians of culture and religion have brought to light, the basis of a feast is affirmation of the whole of world and life. I had already to speak on that. So whoever is unable to think and to say that au fond, at bottom, omne ens est bono, everything that exists is good, and that it is good to exist, he, whoever is unable to say that, not only say, think it, live it, he is at the same time and for the same reason unable to celebrate a feast day. how much money and how much free time he ever may have. As I already said, this affirmation must not be confounded with any cheap optimism.

[79:46]

It can be performed amid tears. And I quoted already Eric Peterson, who says the Christian martyr, the man who is about to be killed, or who is living in the concentration camp, or in the cell of death, not to say that his distinguishing mark would be, Eric Peterson said, not to say any word of blame against God's creation. He still says things and life are very good, Now there can be no more radical ascent to world and life than the praise of God. So here our subjects link together, festival and leisure and worship. The highest form of the affirmation of the world is divine worship.

[80:52]

And that's even true for the very worldly feast days. Mardi Gras, I said. And all this is true for leisure too. The possibility of leisure, the ultimate justification of leisure derived from its root in divine worship. This is not a mere conceptual abstraction. A day of rest in Rome, in ancient Rome, Greece, in the Bible, what does it mean? It means, to rest from work means that a certain amount of time is preserved and reserved for divine worship. Certain days, certain times are, as the ancient Romans put it, I already quoted that, that they are transferred to the exclusive property of the gods.

[82:13]

Now one negative thing is altogether clear. Separated from the sphere of divine worship, leisure is as impossible as the celebration of a feast day. and the difficulty to have leisure, to act leisure. This difficulty has not only to do with the difficulty to celebrate a feast day festively. No, I would say it is precisely one and the same difficulty. And this difficulty To celebrate feasts, feast days, I already said that it belongs already to our recurring experiences. Cut off from worship.

[83:21]

A feast day becomes impossible, but leisure becomes impossible too. it becomes just idleness, then. This is perhaps the alternative with which we are confronted. In human work, on the one side, and on the other side, the mere killing of time and pure boredom. Some American friends said, to be Now have we ever had in history so much leisure time as we have now? I said of course we have never had such an amount of free time but we never had so much occasion to kill of killing time and for boredom also That cannot be organized.

[84:27]

I mean, this kind of leisure cannot be organized from outside. When I was 67 in Toronto at the university there, I got an invitation to speak on leisure in a group of people I didn't even know that they exist. Recreationists. I don't know what they have here. Recreationists. They are professionals in recreation. So they are officials of the cities, and so they are responsible for making facilities for leisure time. And when I talk about this concept of leisure in the same way I did here, the chairman of that group said, doctor, if you are right, then everything we are doing here is nonsense. No, I wouldn't say that, but if they believed, and some of them certainly did believe that, that there has to be only some organizational doings in order to get people at leisure.

[85:42]

So that's, of course, nonsense. You cannot save people from killing time and from boredom just by giving them some facilities, exterior facilities. Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire, noted in his secret journal, Journal intime, you must work, if not from taste, than at least from despair. Four, to reduce everything to a single truth, work is less boring than amusement. I think this is the real inner structure of the difficulty we are facing. Thus, if leisure and everything that comes from leisure, and this is much which comes from leisure only,

[86:49]

It is almost the whole of culture, if you understand culture to be everything that, without being merely useful, is an essential part of a full human life. So once again, if leisure cannot remain alive unless it is fed by the spring from worship, Then, especially at a time when the nature of culture is no longer even understood and when the world of work, totalitarian work, claims to include the whole field of human existence, then it is nothing but necessary and a necessary self-defense to go back to that deepest ground and that deepest basis and foundation. I should like to finish by emphasizing a point which I believe is rather important, namely the point that this view, all what I said, is not altogether an especially Christian or even Catholic view.

[88:02]

It is a human view. And we should not forget that secularism might possibly mean not only the loss of Christian, but also the loss of human values and insights. What is going on is apparently not only the de-Christianization, but also de-humanization. And I'm convinced that the insight that human culture depends for its very existence on leisure. And leisure, on its turn, is not possible unless it has a living link with worship. And this insight, as I believe, belongs to the great natural achievements of humanity and natural insights. It is Plato, the pre-Christian philosopher, who, in a magnificent mythical image, expresses the origin of fine arts in worship and the close connection, the identity almost, of worship and leisure.

[89:23]

In his great dialogue on the laws By the way, Plato as well as Aristotle, they spoke of leisure almost exclusively in a political context. They knew that leisure is an eminently political topic. So Plato asked the question whether there is or not a breathing time, a breaking spell for mankind, born to work, as he said. he says, born to work and labor. And his answer to his own question is this. Yes, there is one. The gods, he says, the gods laid down the succession of recurring feast days to restore man from their fatigue and gave them the muses as companions in their feast

[90:26]

so that nourishing themselves in festive intercourse with the gods, they should again stand upright and erect. The last words remind me of an old Russian saying, a pre-Bolshevist saying, work does not make man wealthy, but hunchbacked. That's of course The surface meaning is just a kind of joke, but behind the surface meaning, I would say, seems to be hidden the idea that man not only externally, outwardly, but also mentally, inwardly, can become a slave and hunchback by imprisoning himself in the close realm of totalitarian work.

[91:28]

Now Plato says, only in the celebration of divine worship and in festive intercourse with the gods man loses that shape of a slave. But also Aristotle, the other great Greek, even he who doesn't like too much mythical language and images, Aristotle too in his very calm and sober way of thinking, he is well aware of that same connection. Leisure has to do with the divine sphere. I already quoted his challenging and provoking statement, we work in order to have leisure. So quite in the neighborhood of that statement in the Nicomachean Ethics, in the neighborhood of that statement we find another one and I'm going to finish with that statement.

[92:37]

Aristotle says here, the life of leisure is not available to man in so far as he is man, but in so far only as something divine dwells within man. Thank you. It has not yet received certain tidings. On the other hand, whoever did receive them and accept them knows at the same time that the core and the source of festivity remains inviolably present in the midst of society, in the midst of history, in the midst of humanity, today as a thousand years ago.

[94:12]

It remains in the form of the praise given in ritual worship, which is literally performed at every hour of the day. And the festive occasion, pure and simple, the divine guarantee of the world and of human salvation, exists and remains true continuously. And from the basis of this conviction, The empirically patent unfestivity of the contemporary world appears as something not altogether hopeful. It is, however, a condition which is difficult to decipher, and above all a condition that is, so to speak, in suspense, a condition which involves and conceals and leaves open the extreme historical potentiality, among them the most radical celebration of the Anti-Festival.

[95:25]

The Christian, however, is convinced that no destructive action, no matter how thoroughgoing, even if it is fervently celebrated as a gruesome Anti-Festival, can ever corrode the substance of creation. Thus there always remains the festive occasion, the festive occasion. It remains in force forever undiminished and not even the complete success, quotation mark, of self-destruction on the part of the human race, not even the complete destruction of the earth, that's term Heidegger, Martin Heidegger.

[96:17]

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