leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school”. The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “leisure”. “School” does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure.

Location 154

in order to gain a clear notion of leisure we must begin by setting aside the prejudice—our prejudice—that comes from overvaluing the sphere of work. In his well-known study of capitalism Max Weber1 quotes the saying, that “one does not work to live; one lives to work”, which nowadays no one has much difficulty in understanding: it expresses the current opinion. We even find some difficulty in grasping that it reverses the order of things and stands them on their head.

Location 158

The context of Aristotle’s words, and his other statement (in the Politics) to the effect that leisure is the center-point about which everything revolves,3 seems to indicate that he was saying something almost self-evident; and one can only suppose that the Greeks would not have understood our maxims about “work for work’s sake” at all. On the other hand it must be evident that we no longer understand their conception of leisure simply and directly.

Location 169

the Christian and Western conception of the contemplative life is closely linked to the Aristotelian notion of leisure. It is also to be observed that this is the source of the distinction between the artes liberales and the artes serviles, the liberal arts and servile work. And to the further objection that this distinction only interests historians, one might reply that everyone is familiar with at any rate one half of the distinction, from the fact that we still speak of “servile work” as unsuitable on Sundays and holidays. Though who nowadays stops to think that “servile work” and “liberal arts” are twin expressions, and form, one might almost say, the articulation of a joint, so that the one is hardly intelligible without the other? For it is barely possible to think of “servile work” with any degree of accuracy without delimiting the sense with reference to the “liberal arts”.

Location 175

The tremendous difference of point of view implied and our relative ignorance of the notion of leisure emerge more clearly if we examine the notion of work in its modern form, spreading, as it does, to cover and include the whole of human activity and even of human life; for then we shall realize to what an extent we tacitly acknowledge the claims that are made in the name of the “worker”.

Location 185

On the contrary, “worker” will be used in an anthropological sense; it implies a whole conception of “man”. Ernst Niekisch was using the word “worker” in this sense when he spoke of the “worker” as an “imperial figure”;4 and Ernst Jünger5 uses the same term to outline the ideal image that, according to him, has already begun to mold the man of the future.

Location 190

Intellectual activity used always to be considered a privileged sphere, and from the standpoint of the manual worker especially, appeared to be a sphere in which one did not need to work. Within that sphere, the province of philosophy and of philosophical culture seemed furthest from the world of work. But nowadays the whole field of intellectual activity, not excepting the province of philosophical culture, has been overwhelmed by the modern ideal of work and is at the mercy of its totalitarian claims.

Note: Not a realistic thing for mass interest; rich or mad “Knowledge work” [e]

Location 200

Kant, for example, held knowledge to be exclusively “discursive”: that is to say, the opposite of intuitive. “The reason cannot intuit anything.”2 His opinion on this point has quite recently been called “the most momentous dogmatic assumption of Kantian epistemology.”3 According to Kant man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating—all of which are forms of active intellectual effort. Knowledge, man’s spiritual, intellectual knowledge (such is Kant’s thesis) is activity, exclusively activity.

Location 220

Kant was bound to reach the view that knowing and philosophizing (philosophizing in particular, since it is furthest removed from purely physical awareness) must be regarded and understood as work. And lest there should be any doubt on the point he said so explicitly in an article written in 1796, against the romantic, contemplative and intuitive philosophy of Jacobi, Schlosser and Stolberg.

Location 225

The philosophers of antiquity thought otherwise on this matter—though of course their view is very far from offering grounds of justification for those who take the easy path. The Greeks—Aristotle no less than Plato—as well as the great medieval thinkers, held that not only physical, sensuous perception, but equally man’s spiritual and intellectual knowledge, included an element of pure, receptive contemplation, or as Heraclitus says, of “listening to the essence of things”.5

Location 234

Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The faculty of mind, man’s knowledge, is both these things in one, according to antiquity and the Middle Ages, simultaneously ratio and intellectus; and the process of knowing is the action of the two together. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives that which it sees.

Location 239

“Although the knowledge which is most characteristic of the human soul occurs in the mode of ratio, nevertheless there is in it a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings, of whom it is therefore said that they possess the faculty of spiritual vision.” That is how the matter is put by Aquinas in the Quaestiones disputate de veritate.6 It means to say that man participates in the angelic faculty of non-discursive vision, which is the capacity to apprehend the spiritual in the same manner that our eye apprehends light or our ear sound. Our knowledge in fact includes an element of non-activity, of purely receptive vision—though it is certainly not essentially human; it is, rather, the fulfillment of the highest promise in man, and thus, again, truly human (just as Aquinas calls the vita contemplativa “non proprie humana, sed superhumana”,7 not really human but superhuman, although it is the noblest mode of human life).

Location 250

Look at the “worker” and you will see that his face is marked by strain and tension, and these are even more pronounced in the case of the “intellectual worker”. These are the marks of that perpetual activity (exclusive of all else) of which Goethe remarked that “it ends in bankruptcy”.9 They are the revealing marks of the intellectual sclerosis that comes with not being able to receive or accept, of that hardening of the heart that refuses to suffer anything; and in their extreme form such tensions become vocal in the lunatic assertion “every action has some meaning, even a crime; but to be passive is always senseless.”10

Location 273

In Kant’s view, indeed, the fact that man’s natural bent is contrary to the moral law, belongs to the concept of moral law. It is normal and essential, on this view, that the good should be difficult, and that the effort of will required in forcing oneself to perform some action should become the yardstick of the moral good: the more difficult a thing, the higher it is in the order of goodness.

Location 289

Hard work, then, is what is good. That is not by any means a new view, and it was put forward by Antisthenes the Cynic,13 one of Plato’s companions among those who grouped themselves round Socrates. Antisthenes is one of those surprisingly modern figures that occur here and there, and it is he who left us the first sketch of the “worker”, or more accurately, perhaps, who represents that figure. Antisthenes is not only the author of the phrase just quoted about hard work; he is also responsible for making Hercules the human ideal, because he performed superhuman labors:14 an ideal that has retained (or has it reacquired it?) a certain force from the days of Erasmus 15 and Kant—who labeled philosophy with the heroic term “herculean”—down to those of Carlyle, the prophet of the religion of work: 16 You must work like Hercules. . . . Antisthenes the Cynic was a self-sufficient moralist, an autarchist, with no sense whatsoever of divine worship, even cracking Voltairian jokes about it;17 he was insensible to the Muses and only liked poetry when it served to express moral truths;18 and as for Eros, it evoked no reply in his heart: “Best of all”, he remarked, “I would like to exterminate Aphrodite.”19 A dry realist, he did not, of course, believe in immortality; the one thing that matters is to live “an upright life” in this world.20 It really looks as though all these traits had been gathered into one for the sake of providing an example in the abstract of the type “worker” pure and undefiled.

Location 296

In the Summa Theologica we find St. Thomas propounding a contrary opinion: “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.”21 “Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more meritorious; it must be more difficult in such a way that it is at the same time good in a yet higher way.”

Location 310

Aquinas says is that virtue makes us perfect by enabling us to follow our natural bent in the right way.23 In fact, he says, the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love.

Location 315

Moreover, just as the highest form of virtue knows nothing of “difficulty”, so too the highest form of knowledge comes to man like a gift—the sudden illumination, a stroke of genius, true contemplation; it comes effortlessly and without trouble. On one occasion St. Thomas speaks of contemplation and play in the same breath: “because of the leisure that goes with contemplation” the divine wisdom itself, Holy Scripture says, is “always at play, playing through the whole world”(Prov 8:30f.).25

Location 325

This aspect too of “intellectual work”—the exaggerated value which is put upon the “difficult” simply because it is difficult—becomes evident in the accentuation of a particular trait in the look of the “worker”: the fixed, mask-like readiness to suffer in vacuo, without relation to anything. It is the absence of any connection with reality or real values that is distinctive. And it is because this readiness to suffer (which has been called the heart of discipline, of whatever kind) 26 never asks the question “to what end” that it is utterly different from the Christian conception of sacrifice. The Christian conception of sacrifice is not concerned with the suffering involved qua suffering, it is not primarily concerned with the toil and the worry and with the difficulty, but with salvation, with the fullness of being, and thus ultimately with the fullness of happiness: “The end and the norm of discipline is happiness.”27

Location 334

man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refuses to have anything as a gift.

Location 342

the Christian understanding of life depends upon the existence of “Grace”; let us recall that the Holy Spirit of God is himself called a “gift”28 in a special sense; that the great teachers of Christianity say that the premise of God’s justice is his love;29 that everything gained and everything claimed follows upon something given, and comes after something gratuitous and unearned;

Location 343

is really meant is roughly this: like the wage-earner, the manual worker and the proletarian, the educated man, the scholar, too, is a worker, in fact an “intellectual worker”, and he, too, is harnessed to the social system and takes his place in the division of labor; he is allotted his place and his function among the workers; he is a functionary in the world of “total work”; he may be called a specialist, but he is a functionary. And that is what brings out the problem which really lies behind our question, in all its colors. That problem, it need hardly be said, is not just a theoretical one; it is the root problem with which we began our discussion: are we to build our house in the European tradition?

Location 356

What are the liberal arts? In his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas gives this definition: “Only those arts are called liberal or free which are concerned with knowledge; those which are concerned with utilitarian ends that are attained through activity, however, are called servile.”30 “I know well”, Newman says, “that knowledge may resolve itself into an art, and seminate in a mechanical process and in tangible fruit; but it may also fall back upon that Reason, which informs it, and resolve itself into Philosophy. For in one case it is called Useful Knowledge, in the other Liberal.”31 The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves; the servile arts are those which have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.

Location 362

Is there a sphere of human activity, one might even say of human existence, that does not need to be justified by inclusion in a five-year plan and its technical organization? Is there such a thing, or not? The inner meaning of the concepts “intellectual work” and “intellectual worker” points to the answer “No.” Man, from this point of view, is essentially a functionary, an official, even in the highest reaches of his activity.

Location 371

When, therefore, we discuss the place and justification of philosophy we are discussing no more nor less than the place and justification of the university, of academic education itself in the true sense—that is, the sense in which it differs fundamentally from mere professional training and goes beyond such training in principle. A functionary is trained. Training is defined as being concerned with some one side or aspect of man, with regard to some special subject. Education concerns the whole man; an educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world. Education concerns the whole man, man capax universi, capable of grasping the totality of existing things.

Location 385

can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence?

Location 393

worker’s world, as Ernst Jünger puts it, is “the denial of free scholarship and inquiry.”34 In a consistently planned “worker” State there is no room for philosophy because philosophy cannot serve other ends than its own or it ceases to be philosophy; nor can the sciences be carried on in a philosophical manner, which means to say that there can be no such thing as university (academic) education in the full sense of the word. And it is above all the expression “intellectual worker” that epigrammatically confirms the fact that this is impossible. And that is why it is so alarmingly symptomatic that ordinary usage, and even university custom, allows the term “intellectual worker” and sometimes permits “brain worker”.

Location 395

“I have never bothered or asked”, Goethe said to Friedrich Soret in 1830, “in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result.”35

Location 405

“It is necessary for the perfection of human society”, Aquinas writes, “that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation”36—nota bene, necessary not only for the good of the individual who so devotes himself, but for the good of human society. No one thinking in terms of “intellectual worker” could have said that.

Location 408