Published
in Vital Speeches, LXVIII(June 1, 2002), 508-12. Lecture delivered at Northern Virginia
Community College, April 11, 2002.
AWHAT SAY YOU OF THE PEACOCK=S TAIL?@
Of Things For
Their Own Sakes: Leisure, Sport, And Beauty
I.
Let me begin
by recalling and citing three basic propositions that serve to set the tone and
content for what I want to
maintain here:
1) AFor six days you shall work, but
on the seventh day you shall rest....@
B Exodus, 34:21.
2) AThere are branches of learning and
education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in
intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas
these kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary
and exist for the sake of other things.@
B Aristotle, Politics,
1338a10-12.
3) AHe (an old friend) once maintained
the paradox, that there is no beauty but in utility. >Sir, said I (Johnson), what say you to the
peacock=s tail, which is one of the most beautiful objects in nature, but would
have as much utility if its feathers were all of one colour?=@
B Boswell=s Life of Johnson, II, 459.
In the three
citations that I have chosen to begin these remarks, such words are found as Arest,@ Awork,@ Aleisure,@ Aintellectual activity,@ things Afor their own sake,@ Athings necessary,@ Abusiness,@ Autility,@ and Abeauty.@
In the sub-title, I also included the term, Asport,@ which is derived from Aristotle
and Plato and is intellectually related, though with distinctions, to the terms
leisure, relaxation, work, and rest.
Two of these words, Awork@ and Arest,@ in particular, have revelational
origins, though they are also found in the classical authors. Some writers, like Hannah Arendt, in The
Human Condition, even want to distinguish between Awork@ and Alabor,@ on the grounds that work refers
to making things, while labor refers to bodily functions as when we speak of a
woman in labor when bearing a child.[1]
Moreover,
these terms, with the experiences they represent, bear some intelligible
relation to each other. An order exists
among them. Saint Thomas says at the
beginning of his Commentary on Aristotle=s Metaphysics, something he repeats at the
beginning of his Commentary on the Ethics, that sapientis est
ordinare B it is the nature of the wise man
to order things. Indeed, the whole
philosophical function is, as Robert Sokolowski has remarked, precisely to
distinguish things one from another and so put them into order, to see how they
are related in being.[2] All these terms stand in the light of an
orderly philosophic understanding of
man, his purpose in the world, and his ultimate meaning. Let us see if we cannot spell out together
the various senses or meanings of these words, the experience on which they are
grounded, and on their inter-relationships.
This clarification is, I think, intrinsically fascinating B a word that itself has origins in Greek and
Latin cultic experience, that which is interesting in itself, for its own sake.
Initially,
I will approach my topic through sports or play. Aristotle contrasts the term sport or play with the term theorein
or contemplation. He finds that the
best way to begin to understand what we mean by the awesome word,
contemplation, is to commence with the more familiar experience of sport, which
he assumes to be familiar to us. And
his emphasis is, surprisingly, not so much in playing the sport as it is
watching the game being played before us
-- not that Aristotle or the Greeks had anything against playing a
sport. The Greeks, after all, did
invent the Olympic games. The spectator
experience is not unrelated to the similar beholding of a tragedy or comedy in
a Greek amphitheater. Aristotle calls a
game, a sport, something that exists Afor its own sake.@
It is this latter phrase, Afor its own sake,@ that relates it to contemplation,
which he considers to be our highest, most delightful, and most profound
act. It is also what makes us free
through knowing what is.
Aristotle
notices that sport and contemplation differ in that contemplation, as he puts
it, is more Aserious,@ or, perhaps better, beholds a higher object or drama. He recognizes, however, that games are also
played Afor their own sakes,@ but they are human constructions or
events. Neither games nor human life
itself Aneed@ exist, even when either does exist.
That is, neither games nor human life cause themselves to be what they
are. As anyone knows who understands
the rules of, say, bridge or soccer, the regulations are too intricately
contrived to be merely accidental. Even
a chance game like craps or dice has rules.
Yet, as I like to say, watching a good game is the closest that the
average man ever comes to pure contemplation.
What does this mean? It means
that there is a certain hush, a certain absorption in watching a good game, as
in watching a play or listening to a concert.
During the performance of such games or plays, no one hardly breathes or munches on pop corn, as Aristotle said,
so enthralled is he in what passes before him..
In
such cases, we are taken out of ourselves, as it were. We lose track of our own existence, except
our clear awareness of our heightened interest directed outside of
ourselves. We literally leave our
ordinary time and enter into the time and motion of the game being played
before us. We are immersed in the
ongoing drama of the game whose result we do not yet know, whose rules and
whose setting are fixed arbitrarily, yet finally. We must know and play according to rules we did not make. The winning or losing or both are likewise Aaccording to the rules.@
We may cheer or laugh or even weep during the game or drama, but we are
involved in something for its own sake, something we did not make. We are only indirectly, as it were,
concerned with ourselves. We can
reflect later that it is we ourselves who were watching this game, this
play. We remember that we were
there. We have found something that,
for a time, takes us outside of ourselves, that involves us in something
fascinating in itself. Whether this
experience be the final of the World Cup in Madrid, the Super Bowl in 1989, the
finals of the NCAA basketball tournament in Atlanta, or just some grammar
school county championship in softball, the essential experience is there for
us to reflect on. II.
If
we have this experience of beholding a great game even once in our lives, we
will be able to take the next step.
Play is like unto contemplation, not work or recreation. It is taken for granted that most people,
most of the time, spend most of their waking hours in what is called Awork.@
Work has two meanings. First it
can refer to what Aristotle calls, in Book 6 of his Ethics, Atechne,@ that is, art or craft, the making
of things that need not exist, useful things, beautiful things. Their form and shape result from human
purpose and human craft. We tend to
distinguish the fine and the practical arts or crafts. Fine arts are physical things B words, music, statues B
that have no use other than themselves.
At their highest, they approach the beautiful, the pulchrum, the
that which, when seen or heard, pleases because of what it is, because we see
the harmony of its inner form. Work in its normal sense of Agoing to work@ or Abusiness@ or heavy labor is a good
thing. It is not the highest thing, but
it is a good, human thing. Recreation
normally means the relaxation that we need to go back to work. Its end is related to our physical nature,
that it cannot continue to work without respite B even games have Atime outs.@
The purpose of work is the making of things we need, that we concoct for
our use or pleasure or even for our contemplation. There is nothing wrong with such activities, unless, of course,
we think this is all there is to them.
This is how Aristotle put the problem:
AAmusement is for the sake of relaxation, and relaxation is of necessity
sweet, for it is the remedy of the pain caused by toil (work): and intellectual
enjoyment is universally acknowledged to contain an element not only of the
noble but of the pleasant, for happiness is made up of both. All men agree that music is one of the
pleasantest things, whether with or without song...@ (Politics,
1339b15-21). Amusement is for the sake
of relaxation which, in turn, is for the sake of work -- and remember that in Book Four of his Ethics, Aristotle
says that there is a virtue, no less, of being properly amused. But work, though it is a good thing, is for
something else. We work, Aristotle
tells us, so that we might have leisure.
AWhat is this >leisure=?@ we ask ourselves. Is it not just another word for
relaxation? The whole political and
moral order exist, in Aristotle=s view, in order that we might have leisure,
the space for the highest things.
Josef
Pieper=s famous book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, remains
fundamental in understanding what goes on here.[3] Pieper immediately points out that the Greek
word for leisure (ςκoλη), the word from which significantly
we get the English word Aschool,@ is understood to be the opposite word to their word for Abusiness,@ which is simply the negative of
leisure, Aa-skolia.@ The Latin has the same
distinction B the word for leisure is otium,
while the word for business is its negative, neg-otium, the same word we
have for negotiate. So anyone who is in
business, who is Aworking,@ is not at leisure. One
hesitates to think of what the Greeks would make of our Abusiness schools,@ to them a veritable contradiction
in terms! The activities of leisure and those of business or work are
quite different, though they are both human acts and necessary in a complete
understanding of man. Our modern
priorities seem almost to be the opposite of those of the Greeks, the
significance of which goes back in early modernity to Descartes, Bacon, and Machiavelli,
to the replacement of the theoretical with the practical intellect as man=s highest function.
To
grasp these points more clearly, let us take a brief look at scripture. We will recall that the commandment tells us
to Akeep holy the Sabbath Day.@
Generally, this meant that we were not to work so that we might devote
ourselves to something higher, something requiring all our attention. Those of you who are Jewish will recall the
strictures that are considered necessary worthily to celebrate this day. Christians are admonished to abstain from Aservile@ work. Why was this? In part, it
had to do with the Genesis account of the days of creation. On the seventh day, the Lord Arested.@
The Sabbath was intended to imitate this example. The positive side of this commandment
implied that there was something more important than work or our ordinary
affairs, something to which we ought at regular times to turn our
attention. And this attention was to
something that we ourselves did not make but only discovered, something more
fascinating than our own affairs.
Does
that mean there was something wrong with Awork?@
Not as such, of course. Indeed,
work was conceived to be something in part Aimposed@ by the Fall B man is to work Aby the sweat of his brow.@
This suggests that there are two kinds of work B there is that natural activity of man that would have been present
even if there had been no Fall.
Presumably, men would have still been able to and have wanted to make
beautiful and useful things. Moreover,
even now, if we are engaged in making something, say a chair or even a house,
we become absorbed in it, not unlike in a game. The time passes; we actually enjoy the Awork@ involved and do not look on it as
a burden, just as athletes in fit condition do not notice the exhausting strain
on their bodies during a good game.
Another
kind of work exists that is a drudgery, something boringly repetitive that
slaves and businessmen did. They
attended to things that had to be done lest human life fall apart. Aristotle in a famous passage suggested that
if the statues of Daedalus could move by themselves, they could be constrained
to make cloth automatically, for instance, then we would not need slavery or
burdensome work. If we know the subsequent
history of the industrial revolution, there is something prophetic in this
remark of Aristotle. Much modern
technology is designed to relieve the Aburdensome@ side of the work that we need or
want so that we can devote ourselves to higher things.
III.
But
what I want, mainly, to do here is to see if I can make clear what is meant
when we say that something is Afor its own sake.@
Let me recall another passage from Aristotle, this time from his Rhetoric: ATo be learning something is the greatest of
pleasures not only to the philosopher but to the rest of mankind, however small
their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that
one is at the same time learning B gathering the meaning of
things....@ (Rhetoric, 1448b13-17).
Every human activity, including intellectual activity, has its own
pleasure intrinsic to it. What human
culture means essentially is to associate an activity with its proper
pleasure. But the pleasure follows the
act which act is what determines its own moral status. When we separate the due pleasure from an
act in which it belongs, we corrupt both.
Craft
activities, even though they begin in us and are carried through our minds to
our hands into the thing made, end in precisely the thing made. When we finish making something, the thing
remains, while we go away for the rest of our lives. In moral affairs, something rather is found that we Ado@ as opposed to Amake.@
We judge a person more by what he does than by what he makes or
says. Tell me what you get angry about
and I will tell you what you are. We
are not concerned with merely keeping alive.
Plato wrote in the Fourth Book of the Laws, AWe do not hold the common view
that a man=s highest good is to survive and simply continue to exist. His highest good is to become as virtuous as
possible and to continue to exist in that state as long as life lasts@ (707d). If you will, granted that we already are what we are, that is,
human beings and not turtles, we have a lifetime project with regard to
ourselves, to make ourselves not to be what it is to be men or human beings, as
we already are that, but to be good men, as Aristotle says.
What
does this mean? It means that I am
responsible for what I make myself to be.
My moral actions do not have a result only outside of me as craft
products do, but also in me. If, say, I
rob someone of a vast amount of money, and if I do not repair or repent of my
act, I now become within myself someone who has this character of disorder in
my soul. I am creating a habit in
myself that indicates how I will normally choose to act in similar
situations. I am defining what I mean by
my own happiness B in this case, presumably, someone
who thinks of money as his end.
But
the moral and political virtues, while real and worthy in themselves, things
that we ought to acquire and not their opposite vices, are not themselves what
we are ultimately for. This brings us
back to the notion of leisure and rational activity. The moral and political virtues exist also that we may know how
to live in leisure. They free us from
ourselves so that we might be able clearly and calmly see what is not
ourselves. If we get this order wrong,
we will never experience what this contemplation is, which is to know the
things that are for their own sakes.
What
do we do when all else, all the necessary things, are done? This is the question that the concept of
leisure poses to us. Aristotle says
that the purpose of a doctor is to restore us to health, but when we are
healthy, the doctor has nothing to say to us.
What are the activities of health, the things we do when we have done
the necessary things?
In
The Republic of Plato, there are a number of famous incidents in which
the young potential philosophers are listening to Socrates who will be speaking
familiarly and calmly to them.
Suddenly, Glaucon or Polemarchus or Simmias will stop him and say, AWhat did you say Socrates?@
They will suddenly hear something that they never heard before. This stopping, this turning around is
precisely what Socrates intended to happen.
Each of us, I think, needs this experience in our souls. This is indeed why we are here. Listen to how Plato describes this
experience, AThis isn=t, it seems, a matter of tossing a
coin, but of turning a soul from a day that is a kind of night to the true
day -- the ascent to what is, which we
say is true philosophy@ (521c). What we do in our
leisure is to waste our time on true philosophy.
IV.
The
human intellect is defined as that faculty by which we are capable of knowing
all things, all that is. It has
its own proper activity as well as the activity of ruling the other things in
us over which it has some control B our passions, our money, our
relationships. But does the intellect,
as such, have a purpose other than this activity of ruling our passions or
relationships? Or put it another way,
what is this activity, the exercise of which gives us the intense pleasure of
knowing? We do not want to know the
knowing, but to know what is not ourselves.
Indeed, we cannot even know ourselves unless we are in the very act of
knowing something that is not ourselves.
In this sense, what is not ourselves gives us ourselves to know. We know reflectively, that is, we never look
directly at our own knowing but indirectly we are aware of the fact that it is
we ourselves who are knowing what is not ourselves. In one sense, this is why it is all right to be a finite human
being.
What
is the very best thing, I ask in conclusion, that can happen to a young man or
woman during his years in college?
Earning a degree? I doubt it.
The very best thing that can happen to us is, as Socrates put it in The
Apology, Ato know that we do not know.@ And
this knowing that we do not know is a very active kind of a thing, it is
something that wakes us up, gives us a thirst, as it were, for being, for what
is. E. F. Schumacher, a young
German, studied at Oxford in the late 1940's.
He tells us in his A Guide for the Perplexed, of his sudden
realization that in what was probably the most famous university in the world,
few of the really important things were discussed. AAll through school and university I had been given maps of life and
knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most
cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to
the conduct of my life.@[4]
We are not educated simply by earning a degree. We may indeed have to learn most of the
important things by ourselves, though even here we need help, which is why,
among other things, we learn to read B read seriously, but with
pleasure.
Let
me conclude with two examples, one from my own experience, one from
Augustine. When Augustine was about
nineteen years old, as he tells us in his Confessions, he was a normal,
bright, dissolute young man. He lived
near the ancient city of Carthage.
Somehow, he came across a dialogue of the Roman philosopher, Cicero,
called the AHortensius.@ This dialogue is now
lost. But on reading it, Augustine was
so inflamed with the desire to be a philosopher that he gave up all else to
pursue this goal. It would be difficult
to exaggerate what a momentous turning in the history of the world happened
when the young Augustine read a book and decided to pursue the highest things.
When
I was nineteen, by no means of the stature of the young Augustine, about whom
at the time I had never heard, I was in the Army at Fort Belvoir. The war was just over, so we had in fact
pretty soft duty, with lots of time on our hands. We spent much of it, as young soldiers often do, in sports,
drinking, and running around. But
somehow, I knew that there were things that I should read. I recall going into the Post library, no
doubt a modest library, but still an organized library. What I remember of this scene, and what I
want to leave with you, is that I looked over this library, with its ordered
shelves with the usual divisions of history, novels, science, literature,
religion, and philosophy, and I did not know what to read. There is no more important experience a
young man or woman can have than this vivid realization that they do not know
what to read.
Samuel
Johnson asked, in the passage I cited in the beginning, AWhat say you of the peacock=s tail?@
I will leave you with this thought
B there are things that we ought to know for their own sake, just
because they are delightful, just because they are true. The peacock=s tail could fan him equally
efficiently or attract his mate if it were not beautiful. Aphorism #73A in Nietzsche=s Beyond Good and Evil
reads, AMany a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes B and calls it his pride.@[5]
Such pride destroys the whole point of beauty B quod visum, placet. Why
indeed are things beautiful, things that have no other purpose but to be
beautiful? This is what leisure is
about.
[1]Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959).
[2]Robert Sokolowski, AThe Method of Philosophy: Making
Decisions,@ The Review of Metaphysics, LI (March, 1998), 515-32.
[3]Josef Pieper, Leisure: The
Basis of Culture, trans. G. Malsbary (South Bend, IN.: St. Augustine=s Press, 1998).
[4]E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for
the Perplexed (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 1.
[5]Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, trans. R. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 73.