Josef Pieper (1904–1997)

An excellent example of conservative critical thinking--shows both its strengths (genuine willingness to attack both sides of the Cold War era; close attention to lived experience; no knee-jerk rejection of the past) and its weaknesses (unwilling to take the final step and reject that which causes the phenomena it so wonderfully criticizes).

The problem with Pieper argument should have been clear to him: you cannot say that leisure is identical with worship; and that 'worship is either show more something 'given'... or it does not exist at all,'; and that 'no one need expect a genuine religious worship... to arise on purely human foundations,'; and then argue that the decline in leisure is lamentable. If it's not up to us, we can't lament it. The alternative, of course, is that the decline in leisure/worship is caused by very humanly founded things like economic demands, and that the best way to encourage worship is to make worship an actual intellectual possibility for people. Aristotle was right, the good life requires leisure/worship. Aristotle meant that the only people who could 'worship' were 'free' of economic necessity. Conclusion: increase the number of people free of economic necessity, and you'll make worship more possible for more people. That's pretty easy to do. Pieper doesn't mention the possibility, because of that fear of human foundations.

The greatest intellectual shame of the twentieth century, and continuing into this one, is that people like Pieper never read people like Marcuse (and so never thought 'oh, hey, perhaps we can get what we want with a stronger social welfare state!', and that people who read Marcuse never read people like Pieper (and so never thought 'oh, hey! Perhaps just bonking everyone isn't the solution to our problems!'). If they could have corrected each other, we might have avoided a few potholes on our road to liberation/sanctification. show less

This book is A Lot. It's basically a Christian philosopher arguing for the value of Tao, that is, work-transcending leisure.

The upshot is that Josef Pieper warns us of turning all our life into work, which would be Bad. Two caveats: The "us" he is trying to convice are influential Germans after the war, who are undertaking the rebuilding of society. In the most part this work served to argue strongly in favour of keeping Sundays special. And: Pieper is a German Catholic philosopher from a show more Jesuitic tradition. That's not a bad thing (and at least the Jesuitic tradition makes sure his work is readable and entertainingly spirited), but it influences the presentation and backdrop.

If you're going to read this book, I hope you don't like Kant (or are really secure in your attraction), because it opens with a wonderful thrashing of Kantian values, especially his tendency to only accept actions as virtuous if they are no fun. Virtue is no fun and philosophy has to be work to ✨count✨. Pieper (who is at least adjacent to neo-scholastic tradition) counters with a medieval distinction between *ratio* (abstract, focused, logical) and *intellectus* (effortless intellectual intuition). It's the basis of two different perceptions of humans: Kant assumes we suck, so we need to work against our nature to become good. Aquin (and with him, Pieper) assumes that we're pretty alright, and we just need to work to find the good versions of our impulses.

Then he goes into a disturbing trend: Increasingly, everything including intellectual effort is labeled as "work", whereas before the difference between work and not-work followed pretty much the border between the *artes liberales* – art, culture, music, philosophy etc – and the *artes serviles* - mechanical arts, manual labour, architecture, anything tied directly to a purpose. In his opinion, this comes with a cataclysmic cost. If everything turns into work, then

- there's always a demand that you could (and therefore, should) work right now.
- every action is under scrutiny to be useful, productive, functional.
- you will be bound by a latent anxiety to be productive.
- because humans still look for meaning everywhere, people will try to infuse their regular labour with deep meaning. And if you look at the presentation of working culture, that's definitely happening! "Why do you want to work here?" - "To pay the bills.", said nobody.
- you can't have any philosophy, no academia, no deep introspection for its own sake, because those are not work, don't exist to serve a purpose (even though, of course, they help and improve things as a consequence).
- you will be tempted to perform the motions of deeper actions, but as long as you do them to some *purpose*, you fundamentally misuse them. Meditation can calm you down and improve your life and your performance in many ways, but if you meditate to become more productive, you are not meditating.
- you will try to get breathing room by taking breaks, but no matter if a break is ten minutes or five weeks long, it's still a **break from work**, and so only exists within the framework of work, and won't help you on a fundamental level.

Those are good points and they have aged very very well, I think. It's especially interesting to mix these considerations with the discussions around emotional labour, and how that isn't generally seen as worthwhile or even real.

As somewhat of a side note, he introduces the word **acedia**, which was a fundamental sin before being abandoned in favour of sloth. Acedia is the feeling of numbness and despair, of desparately not wanting to be yourself, of being out of touch with who you are and what matters to you, of feeling restless. It's a common feeling in the reals of depression and burnout and has been described in detail by early Christians (think desert fathers).

As a solution, he argues that you need true leisure. He basically writes a love song to leisure, similar to 1 Cor 13 in style and content. True leisure will serve to truly transcend work, to break away from the concept. True leisure, he says, is effortless, an attitude of non-activity, of being calm and letting things happen. Of being receptive and contemplative instead of searching things out. Of being cheerful and trusting and open. Of having a light touch, a loose grip, of being in touch and tune with yourself and the world around you. It serves **not to improve yourself and your productivity so that you can be a better worker, but to allow you to stay human.**

The purest form of this, in his opinion, is not prayer or meditation or something otherworldly like that: It's celebrations, feasts, parties. Anything that joins people in a shared positive purpose. (Here, the fact that humans need more than just breaks in between work segues into a short "and therefore god exists", but if that's not your kind of thing, it's pretty easy to ignore.)

All in all: I don't agree with everything it says (actually, I disagree with half of it easily), but I disagree in interesting ways that made me think a lot about culture and work and spirituality. show less

Had you told me I could enjoy an interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus written by a German Neo-Thomistic philosopher noted for his sympathetic translation of C.S. Lewis, I would have been quite skeptical. Nevertheless, Pieper's Enthusiasm and Divine Madness is accessible and engaging, although hardly as profound as other approaches I have read to the same dialogue.

To his credit, Pieper is concerned to encourage readers to explore the real issues of the dialogue, and not merely to treat it as a show more textual artifact. He assumes throughout, of course, that those readers will be Christian, heterosexual, and probably male. In his treatment, he proceeds through Plato's text from start to finish, quoting seldom, but paraphrasing nearly its entirety.

The scene-setting and discussion of the earlier segments of the dialogue are especially good. Pieper is acutely conscious of how terribly funny so much of the repartee is. When it comes to discussing the frenzies, he dodges much of the matter of antique religion, evidently in an effort to keep the business "relevant" to the reader. In fact only the Muses are named out of the several deities in this section -- Dionysos, Apollo, and Aphrodite go unmentioned. (For a contrasting treatment that grounds its relevance in those three gods particularly, see Aleister Crowley's "Energized Enthusaism.") Likewise, his treatment of the closing myth of Thoth both elides the divine characters of Tammuz and Thoth, and embraces the most superficial reading of the paradoxes in this writing about talking about talking about writing. (The reader who seeks an extreme sport of interpretation for this section must look to "Plato's Pharmacy" in Derrida's Dissemination.)

So while I may have found some of Pieper's readings a bit shallow -- especially in his anxieties to make Plato palatable for Christians -- I still think he does a fine job of providing some context for the modern reader of the Phaedrus, and more importantly, throwing into relief the nature of the dilemmas addressed by the text. He intrudes very little of his own conclusions regarding the questions raised, even if he presumes a little too much about his readers. I suppose the presumptions were statistically warranted anyhow -- at least in the mid-20th century when he wrote this book. show less

This an elegantly written book that in short space gives insightful introductions to several major players in Medieval, Christian philosophy. The central thesis is that these philosophers set out to join in a synoptic vision the "truth" of Christian revelation and the "truth" of reason. Pieper sees this project as necessary whenever an individual accepts the "revelation". Personally, I think this project was doomed then and doomed now. And Pieper would not totally disagree that there is and show more was and inevitable tension. I see hints in his exposition of a polemic against some form of pragmatism/neo-pragmatism and he see dark threats of totalitarianism in abandoning the project. show less