(@readliberties.bsky.social)

If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar of capitalism, and the restaholics, whose highest ideal is slacking off and who seethe with resentment at those ruining the curve. Or so the two groups understand one another. Do we work in order to rest, or do we rest in order to work? Neither answer is very appealing. Working in order to rest sounds like a paraphrase of Freud’s death drive: as though, in an ideal world, we would just be sitting quietly, motionlessly, imitating corpses. Resting in order to work suggests the equally depressing thesis that the goal of a human life is to become a well-oiled cog in some kind of machine, a tool for the use of the leviathan called society. We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? Isn’t there a third state — one that we don’t need but freely choose? When I teach book ten of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I explain to the students that if they want to understand Aristotle’s concept of leisure — scholē — they need only look in the mirror. As students, they are leading scholastic lives, which is to say, lives of leisure. They balk at this: it might be true that the Greek word scholē is the source of the English “school,” but they cannot see how a lifestyle centered around grades and exams and being forced to read chapter after chapter of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics could count as leisurely. Like the workaholics and the restaholics, my students fail to leave room for a third possibility: when they deny that school is leisurely what they really mean to deny is that school is restful. And they are right about that, even on a capacious understanding of rest, one which extends well beyond sleep to include everything they classify under “self-care” — exercise, meditation, “me-time,” therapy, unplugging — as well as humor, games, trivial amusements or hobbies, vacations, and all those activities whose attraction lies in being “fun.” School is not like any of those things; it might sometimes happen to be calming or relaxing or amusing, but it is not that way essentially. But school is also not like work, not even if we have a capacious understanding of “work,” inclusive of training for work. We forget almost everything we learn in school, and even if we didn’t forget it, little of it would be useful to us in our jobs. Some people claim that school trains you in “analytical skills” or “critical thinking”; others say it instills the obedience and the conformity and the submission necessary for most modern jobs. If school does those things, it does them behind the scenes, while you are busy learning not how to be submissive or critical but how to understand calculus or economics or the causes of World War I. Just as playing video games would not be work even if it turned out that (unbeknownst to the players), it trained someone to have fighter pilot reflexes, school is not work even if you do end up with some abilities that are relevant for work. Aristotle is not stymied by our chicken-egg problem. Faced with the work-rest cycle, he sees a clear teleological winner: fun and relaxation are all for the sake of returning to work, and the reverse is simply not the case. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity. Aristotle chalks up our affinity for relaxation to the lamentable fact that mortal beings are incapable of continuous activity: we need to take breaks from doing what matters to us. A person who worked in order to relax would be getting the proper order of things backwards, like a person who cooks dinner in order to go grocery shopping again. We shop in order to cook, and not vice versa. Likewise, if we see a person working, then relaxing, then working, and so on, the charitable interpretation, says Aristotle, is to assume that she is relaxing in order to get back to work. Relaxing activities may, at times, feel more enjoyable than the work they relieve us from; nonetheless, proclaims Aristotle “no one would live for the sake of trivial amusements.” The point of life can’t lie in the breaks we take from it. But now consider work — and I am using the word broadly, as a catchall to describe both what happens in the office and also all the various forms of biological or social necessity that show up in our lives as problems needing to be solved. Getting young kids dressed in snow gear, deciding which chores to do in what order, maintaining a friendly face at a social gathering: those can all be forms of work. Work is activity that manages constraints and tradeoffs to pursue goals of social value — which means the story can’t end there. The question remains: what are we working for? The answer cannot be more work, because that simply postpones the question, much less rest, which is done for the sake of work. There must be a human activity that is done for its own sake, and this activity has got to serve as the teleological lynchpin of the whole system. Aristotle calls it “leisure,” or scholē. What is leisure? The phrase “leisure time” is familiar enough, as is ### Subscribe Now #### Start a Digital Subscription Now Only $5 a month for full access to the _Liberties'_ digital archive and all future issues online. Subscribe Now #### Subscribe to Print & Digital Get a discount with an annual print subscription and you'll receive four beautiful issues of _Liberties_ , a free archival issue, and full digital access. Subscribe Now #### Register for a Free Sample Just enter your email to read one essay per month and receive our weekly newsletter. Register Now https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/insearch-of-the-leisure-class/