Leisure in Aristotle's Political Thought

polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 35 (2018) 356-373 brill.com/polis Leisure in Aristotle’s Political Thought Jacob T. Snyder Michigan State University, 220 Trowbridge Rd, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA [email protected] Abstract The concept of leisure found in Aristotle’s corpus is both elusive and challenging. It eludes categorization into our current understandings of work and play while at the same time challenging those very conceptions. Here, I attempt to come to grips with Aristotelian leisure by (1) demonstrating its centrality in Aristotle’s thought, (2) explaining leisure as primarily a ‘way of being’ rather than merely the absence of occupation or one of several preconditions to the virtues, and (3) exploring what leisure might mean to liberal democracy. As a ‘way of being’, Aristotelian leisure is more than an absence of work, but is a positive comportment that itself requires virtues, material means, and an education. Keywords leisure – Aristotle – political science Leisure is a challenge to contemporary liberal democratic life. As Tocqueville assessed, the democratic citizen views labor as a ‘necessary, natural, and respectable condition of humanity’.1 Notable contemporary thinkers on the subject of leisure, especially Pieper and Huizinga,2 are in agreement that leisure does operate as this kind of challenge. However, what is the nature of this challenge? The answer to this question depends upon a definition of leisure. 1 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 642. 2 J. Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, trans. G. Marsbary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), pp. 4-5; J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 191-213. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/20512996-12340172Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 08:33:14PM via free access Leisure in Aristotle’s Political Thought 357 In an attempt to better understand leisure’s challenge to liberalism, I look to Aristotle for help in answering this ‘what is it’ question. When looking to Aristotle, the challenge of leisure appears quite different than what those such as Pieper and Huizinga suggest. The challenge of leisure is not one of festivity and play in opposition to modern attachments to labor, but is even more thor- ough. Aristotle’s account of leisure, according to the interpretation I defend here, is better understood as a ‘way of being’ that transcends the dichotomy of work and play. Described in more detail below, I operationalize ‘way of being’ as follows: a positive comportment that, in the case of leisure, requires virtues, material means, and an education. These virtues and this education are different from those required of occupation. As such, Aristotelian leisure should be viewed as a different way of life, rather than one of several possible con- ditions between which we can move and shift. In this way, my account also differs from previous interpretations of Aristotelian leisure.3 Most commen- tators hold it to be a simple condition, understood primarily as the absence of labor. This condition is still important to Aristotle, according to the typical interpretation, because it is a precondition to the virtues. But this interpretation is incomplete. It is incomplete because leisure itself requires virtues and is best understood as an end of virtue rather than a means. Furthermore, leisure requires different virtues than those required for other ways of life. This understanding is also suggested by the language itself. The Greek word we translate as leisure is scholê. In sharp distinction to our own understanding, which views leisure as the absence of work, the Greeks saw work (ascholia) as the absence of leisure. If we take the language at face value, it seems the Greeks treated leisure as primary, with work understood as the absence of leisure, as opposed to our contemporary treatment of work being primary, with leisure being the absence of work. This further suggests, I think, that there is more to the Greek understanding of leisure than the mere absence of work – it is not a simple lack of activity.4 As to its role in Aristotle’s corpus, leisure is central 3 See especially J. L. Stocks, ‘ΣΧΟΛΗ’, The Classical Quarterly, 30 (1936), pp. 177-87; J. Marshall, ‘Aristotle and the Agrarians’, Review of Politics, 9 (1947), pp. 350-361; S. de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (Millwood, N.Y: Kraus International Publications, 1962); F. Solmsen, ‘Leisure and Play in Aristotle’s Ideal State’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 107 (1964), pp. 193-220; J. Owens, ‘Aristotle on Leisure’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 11 (1981), pp. 713- 723; R. Bartlett, ‘The “Realism” of Classical Political Science’, American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), pp. 393-95; P. Destrée, ‘Education, Leisure, and Politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics, ed. M. Deslauriers and P. Destrée (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 309. 4 For another striking example of the importance of leisure to many of the ancients, consider Plutarch: In his praise of Lycurgus, Plutarch argues that the early Spartans, in contrast to Aristotle’s account of later Sparta, had and were capable of leisure spent in ‘rational Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political ThoughtDownloaded from35 (2018) Brill.com09/26/2021 356-373 08:33:14PM via free access 358 Snyder to both his political and ethical thinking.5 For instance, the virtues aimed at leisure are required for both the ideal regime and ideal life (1334a12-16).6 Even further, the ideal regime is created with the express purpose of cultivating and maintaining leisure.7 In order to make a case for Aristotelian leisure as a way of being, the argument unfolds in the following steps: first, a critical treatment of leisure understood as a precondition to the virtues; second, an explication of how material means and virtues are themselves required for leisure; and third, an account of leisure as an end in itself. 1 Leisure as a Precondition Why leisure is important to Aristotle’s corpus is clearer, immediately at least, than what leisure precisely is. The most widely understood meaning of Aristotelian leisure is as a means to attaining the virtues – whether those virtues are moral or intellectual. Here it is best described as a pre-condition. For instance, consider the following passage from Marshall: ‘Agriculture is a form of life that among all actual occupations, comes closest probably to the ideal, since the life of fruit gathering, hunting, and fishing – because of the refrac- tory character of actual nature – does not leave us enough time for the leisure required for the fuller life of man’.8 Leisure, understood here, is a particular form of emptiness. It is an empty vessel of time that is marked by the absence of work. Of course, leisure in this sense can remain important. As Marshall cor- rectly notes, leisure is necessary for the ‘fuller life of man’. It is a precondition, but a particularly important one. Without it, we can neither attain nor express the virtues that mark the higher aims and purposes of human life. We get a similar account in Destrée. For him, Aristotelian leisure is the ‘condition for the possibility of the exercise of those activities which implement the goods that are desired for their own sake’.9 Again, Destrée is correct to find this condition important, as it is the ‘fundamental principle’ of Aristotle’s ideal conversation’ on questions of the good. They were only able to achieve this because of their rejection of commerce. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives Volume 1, ed. A.H. Clough, trans. J. Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. 74-75. 5 See also Destrée, ‘Education, Leisure, and Politics’, p. 309. 6 A. Tessitore, ‘Making the City Safe for Philosophy: Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10’, The American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), pp. 1256-57. 7 See also Bartlett, ‘The “Realism” of Classical Political Science’, p. 392. 8 Marshall, ‘Aristotle and the Agrarians’, p. 354. 9 Destrée, ‘Education, Leisure, and Politics’, p. 309. Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political ThoughtDownloaded from35 (2018) Brill.com09/26/2021 356-373 08:33:14PM via free access Leisure in Aristotle’s Political Thought 359 regime. However, Aristotelian leisure remains a means to the higher goods, rather than itself being the end to which other means aim. It is equivalent to a kind of equipment. The ideal regime requires leisure in the same way it requires food and weapons. This account of Aristotelian leisure certainly captures part of its meaning. Beginning with moral virtue, we learn in Book VII that farmers are to be excluded from citizenship in the ideal regime. The reason for this is a ‘want of leisure both with a view to the creation of virtue and with a view toward political activities’ (1328b40-1329a3).10 Farmers are incapable of attaining many of the moral virtues because they seemingly do not have sufficient time away from their work. Moving to intellectual virtue, we see in the Metaphysics, for instance, that Aristotle finds the beginning of intellectual activity to cor- respond with the beginnings of leisure: ‘when all such arts had been built up, those among the kinds of knowledge directed at neither pleasure nor necessity were discovered, and first in those places where there was leisure. It is for this reason that the mathematical arts were first constructed in the neighborhood of Egypt, for there the tribe of priests was allowed to live in leisure’ (Metaphysics 981b21-25).11 Aristotle uses leisure in this instance as a precondition to math- ematics.

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