Not all traditions are odious. One of my favorites is the author’s gratitude to those in their life who helped them accomplish their work.
But I get ahead of myself, which I often do.
My name is Daniel Hero. Yes, that’s my real name and has been since the age of five. I live in Oregon with my wife, Dr. Hero (I promise we’re not looking for a contract from Marvel studios) and our dog Kepler. We have one son. Needless to say, which therefore I must, without their love and support what I have done both here and elsewhere would not have been possible. Thank you, I know you both realize how very much I love you.
The problem with lists is that they tend to grow exponentially. If I started to list everyone who deserves the same amount of gratitude and love, well – let’s just say, the impossibility of that task is one of the reasons I wrote this book.
Yet. Yet, there are some notable thanks I feel compelled to single out.
First is to Rambler, thank you for being the hand that helped me through my own garden wall precisely when I needed it. I owe you a debt I can never repay, which means I certainly will. Next is to my teachers, both intended and not. It is no stretch to say I learned at least as much from unintended teachers than any I found at the head of a class or between the pages of a book. Few spring fully formed from their own brow but it is the job of the teacher to try to pass on the knack. To my parents, my first teachers: Thank you for the self sacrifice that is my life. Finally, to the well wishers in my life, without you, all this is meaningless.
Daniel Hero Expert Generalist-Aristotelian man of leisure Master of Arts in Pedagogy, George Fox University
Is it getting better? Or do you feel the same? Will it make it easier on you now? You got someone to blame
You say, one love, one life When it’s one need in the night One love, we get to share it Leaves you baby if you don’t care for it
Did I disappoint you? Or leave a bad taste in your mouth? You act like you never had love And you want me to go without
Well it’s too late tonight To drag the past out into the light We’re one but we’re not the same We get to carry each other, carry each other One!
Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus? To the lepers in your head
Did I ask too much? More than a lot You gave me nothin’ now it’s all I got We’re one but we’re not the same Well we hurt each other then we do it again
You say love is a temple, love a higher law Love is a temple, love the higher law You ask me to enter but then you make me crawl And I can’t be holdin’ on to what you got When all you got is hurt
One love, one blood One life, you got to do what you should One life, with each other Sisters, brothers
One life but we’re not the same We get to carry each other, carry each other One One
Do what you want, be what you are
Do what you want girl, but be what you are There ain’t no right or wrong way Just a play from the heart It ain’t a sign of weakness to give yourself away Because the strong give up and move on While the weak, the weak give up and stay
So do what you wanna do What you wanna do What you wanna do What you wanna do But be what you are Be what you are
Do what you wanna do What you wanna do What you wanna do What you wanna do But be what you are Be what you are
Do you believe in hot cars Leather bars, or movie stars Is that what’s real? Payin’ dues, in earth shoes, Chicago blues Is that how you feel? You can change You can change You can change You can change But you can’t conceal What’s deep inside you It’s your game, it’s your deal It’s your game, it’s your deal
Do what you wanna do What you wanna do What you wanna do What you wanna do But be what you are Be what you are
Hall and Oates, Bigger than both of us
Maybe
Maybe I can love you Maybe be your friend Maybe I can help you, your troubles to mend Maybe sing a song for you That’s what I know best to do Anything you want me to I’ll be Anything you want me to I’ll be
Maybe we’ll be strangers Till our dying day Maybe then we’ll understand what we had to say Maybe when we’ve closed the door On all that’s negative in thought Anyway you want it, it can be Anyway you want it, it can be
Lift your head now Tears you’ve shed Are all ignored
Take a hand and make a stand Against all wars
Are you dreaming Or just scheming, for reward
Life’s illusions are misleading It’s so good to be here breathing
Anyway you want it, it can be Anyway you want it, it can be
Lift your head now Tears you’ve shed Are all ignored
Take a hand and make a stand Against all wars
Are you dreaming Or just scheming, for reward
Life’s illusions are misleading It’s so good to be here breathing
Maybe I can love you Maybe be your friend Maybe I can help you, your troubles to mend Maybe sing a song for you That’s what I know best to do
Anything you want me to I’ll be Anything you want me to I’ll be
Dave Mason
Your Bright Baby Blues
I’m sitting down by the highway Down by that highway side Everybody’s going somewhere Riding just as fast as they can ride
I guess they’ve got a lot to do Before they can rest assured Their lives are justified Pray to God for me baby He can let me slide
‘Cause I’ve been up and down this highway Far as my eyes can see No matter how fast I run I can never seem to get away from me
No matter where I am I can’t help thinking I’m just a day away From where I want to be Now I’m running home, baby Like a river to the sea
Baby, if you can see me Out across this wilderness There’s just one thing I was hoping you might guess Baby you can free me All in the power of your sweet tenderness Yeah (yeah)
Well, I can see it in your eyes You’ve got those bright baby blues You don’t see what you’ve got to gain But you don’t like to lose
You watch yourself from the sidelines Like your life is a game you don’t mind playing To keep yourself amused I don’t mean to be cruel, baby But you’re looking confused
Baby if you can hear me Turn down your radio There’s just one thing I want you to know When you’ve been near me I’ve felt the love stirring in my soul Yeah (yeah) Yes I have
It’s so hard to come by That feeling of peace This friend of mine said: “Close your eyes, and try a few of these”
I thought I was flying like a bird So far above my sorrow But when I looked down I was standing on my knees Now I need someone to help me Someone to help me please
Baby, if you need me Like I know I need you There’s just one thing I’ll ask you to do Take my hand and lead me To the hole in your garden wall And pull me through Jackson Brown, The Pretender
Shades of Scarlett Conquering
Out of the fire like Catholic saints Comes Scarlett and her deep complaint Mimicking tenderness she sees In sentimental movies A celluloid rider comes to town Cinematic lovers sway Plantations and sweeping ballroom gowns Take her breath away
Out in the wind in crinolines Chasing the ghosts of Gable and Flynn Through stand-in boys and extra players Magnolias hopeful in her auburn hair She comes from a school of southern charm She likes to have things her way Any man in the world holding out his arm Would soon be made to pay
Friends have told her not so proud Neighbors trying to sleep and yelling, “not so loud” Lovers in anger, block of ice Harder and harder just to be nice
Given in the night to dark dreams From the dark things she feels She covers her eyes in the x-rated scenes Running from the reels
Beauty and madness to be praised ‘Cause it is not easy to be brave To walk around in so much need To carry the weight of all that greed Dressed in stolen clothes she stands Cast iron and frail With her impossibly gentle hands And her blood-red fingernails
Out of the fire and still smoldering She says, “a woman must have everything” Shades of Scarlett conquering She says, “a woman must have everything”
Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Take me to the Future
Hey I was walking down the street the other day You know when my head was aching And I heard some mother say she said I don’t know what’s wrong with all you kids today? And as the car hit her I said You’re too busy looking the other way I ain’t got no memory, I don’t feel no pain Take me to the future, there and back again There and back again I went to my sweet old baby gypsy lady She told me so she said I know the place where you is gonna go she said Some place across the ways and maybe do a show I said Thank you, merci, but I already know I ain’t got no memory, I don’t feel no pain Take me to the future, there and back again There and back again Too many busy people rushing down the street I said Their money shuffling to the hustling of their feet I said Well I just don’t dig it why these people never meet They got the movement, they just don’t got the beat I ain’t got no memory, I don’t feel no pain Take me to the future, there and back again There and back again I ain’t got feeling, I ain’t got no past Take me to the future, tie me to the mast (repeat) Sad Cafe, Facades
Dreamer
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer Well can you put your hands in your head, oh no! I said dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer Well can you put your hands in your head, oh no! I said “far out, what a day, a year, a life it is!” You know, well you know, you had it comin’ to you Now, there’s not a lot I can do
Dreamer, you stupid little dreamer So now you put your head in your hands, oh no
I said, “far out, what a day, a year, a life it is!” You know, well you know, you had it comin’ to you Now, there’s not a lot I can do
Work it out someday Oh ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma
(If I could see something) you can see anything you want, boy (If I could be someone) you can be anyone, celebrate, boy
(If I can do something) you can do something (If I could do anything) but can you do something out of this world?
Take a dream on a sunday Take a life, take a holiday Take a lie, take a dreamer Dream, dream, dream, dream, dream, dream, dream, dream along Dreamer, dream and dream along C’mon and dream, dream along (come along) (C’mon and dream, dream along)
(C’mon and dream, dream along) na na na na na na na na Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer (c’mon and dream and dream along) Can you put your hands in your head, oh no! (c’mon and dream and dream along) I said dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer (c’mon and dream and dream along) Can you put your hands in your head, oh no! (oh, come on, oh, come on) Oh no
Supertramp, Crime of the century
Bargain
I’d gladly lose me to find you I’d gladly give up all I had To find you I’d suffer anything and be glad
I’d pay any price just to get you I’d work all my life and I will To win you I’d stand naked, stoned, and stabbed
I’d call that a bargain The best I ever had The best I ever had
I’d gladly lose me to find you I’d gladly give up all I got To catch you I’m gonna run and never stop
I’d pay any price just to win you Surrender my good life for bad To find you I’m gonna drown an unsung man
I’d call that a bargain The best I ever had The best I ever had
I sit looking ’round I look at my face in the mirror I know I’m worth nothing without you In life one and one don’t make two One and one make one And I’m looking for that free ride to me I’m looking for you
I’d gladly lose me to find you I’d gladly give up all I got To catch you I’m gonna run and never stop
I’d pay any price just to win you Surrender my good life for bad To find you I’m gonna drown an unsung man
I’d call that a bargain The best I ever had The best I ever had
Who, Who’s Next
White Rabbit
One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all Go ask Alice When she’s ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you’re going to fall Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar Has given you the call Call Alice When she was just small
When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low Go ask Alice I think she’ll know
When logic and proportion Have fallen sloppy dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen’s off with her head Remember what the dormouse said Feed your head Feed your head
Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow
Logic,n: A frequentative flutter of fitful flight forestalling the fateful fall. Hero’s Dictionary.
A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once. Pascal
The genius of both Newton and Einstein was not essentially about physics. Or math. Or the nature of light. All of the understanding gained in these fields are a consequence of their genius, not its cause.
They both observed a universal truth about observation itself. In Newton’s case, he observed that not only does the Earth pull the apple to itself but the apple also pulls the Earth to itself. Or to put it another way, gravity is an essential property of matter, to have one is to have the other. Einstein made a similar observation when he explained why there is no such thing as a special observer, or place to stand, in the universe by pointing out that regardless of where you stand, that is the center. (No matter where you go, there you are.) This fact is why light has a speed limit.
To have time is to have space, to have matter is to have energy.
They each made an observation about the inseparable nature of the universe.
It is a universal observation about observation itself that addresses the problem and at the same time solves the Achilles heel of Aristotelian logic, that is to say, the law of the excluded middle.
Instead of denying the existence of paradox, or eliminating infinity, I contend existence is the manifestation of paradox.
Paradox is fundamentally an observational problem, not a logical one. Once one observes the function of paradox, then its form becomes apparent, and what has form has pattern, because form is pattern and pattern is form.
Put another way, Russell’s paradox is re-solved by stating: the set of all sets is distinct by definition yet inseparable by nature. The result is a paradox. It is for this reason Russell abandoned his work on the unification of logic and mathematics.
I submit he succeeded, saw the obvious solution and immediately discounted it because of its obvious nature. Ironically, he was right for the wrong reason and wrong for the right reason. A pattern develops.
Fittingly, the problem begins with Aristotle and ends there. Only to begin again. Also interestingly, for someone who championed the golden mean, he left it out of his logic.
Logic requires it.
Picture a three legged stool. It is nothing fancy. A flat wooden circle attached to three legs which form a tripod. Now flip it over so the seat rests on the ground and the legs are now pointing skyward. Grab the middle leg and swing it over your head three times. Now place it back as you found it, seat side down. Ok, you didn’t need to swing it over your head, I happen to like practical jokes (this is important, we’ll get back to it), the important thing happened when you grabbed the middle leg.
Why? Because you had no choice but to pick the middle leg. In order to keep the tripod a tripod, all the legs are middle legs, the act of choosing makes it the middle. The middle is necessary, to choose it is to define it.
The law of the excluded middle is both true and not true. Both true and not true. It has to be because accepting this law forces us to contend with paradoxes. Which Aristotelian logic contends cannot exist.
Yet it does.
Paradox is the only function which accomplishes this.
Let me tell it like a story…
Long ago in our what is to come, that which is distinct by definition yet inseparable by nature observed itself, how it was distinct yet inseparable because there was nothing to compare itself with except itself. The only thing which could observe this is itself. One truly is the loneliest number. So one divided. In an act of self destruction that is in fact self sacrifice (the difference being love, say the mystics and I). In the only way possible, the way essential to itself. Paradox is the essential nature which runs the universe and infinity is the time in which it will take to do so.
Not so long after all.
Every electron in the universe shuffled in every combination. The ultimate chaos bound to the ultimate law. Or you can say it the other way ’round.
Or you can just say “Let there be light.”
God is a vacuous position because every role is the role of god. This is what Spinoza said. What William Blake said. What Meister Eckhart said. What the Buddhists say. What the Hindu say. What the Taoist says. What the Native American says, and the atheist. They are all right. And they are all wrong. Or to put it this way, they are all as right as they are wrong. The village barber is the village.
The role is vacant because she only fills it one person at a time. Constantly. Everywhere. She is the actress that is also the audience, the stage, the lights in the rafters, the slime mold in the producer’s refrigerator (two roles defined by the same organism) as well as the vacuum rapidly expanding.
The ultimate purloined letter.
As soon as the bearded man sits in the chair, the clean shaven barber shaves him. The now shaved man takes the razor from the barber and watches him leave. He is now the village barber and he waits for the bearded man. To be shaved is to become the barber. It is the act of shaving that creates the village barber, not the person who holds the razor, it requires role and action to be unified and in that unification is definition.
God’s nose knows no other.
One divides by zero by being equal to everything.
Nothing multiplied/divided by one is equal to paradox/infinity.
Euclid’s fourth common notion states that which coincides is equal.
Time coincides with space. Matter coincides with energy. Paradox coincides with infinity. Time is infinite. The Earth pulls the apple and the apple pulls the Earth. There is no special place to stand because it is all special.
A period, a straight line, a pendulum, a wave, and a circle all share an essential nature – their ending is their beginning and their beginning is their ending. They all have different speeds, forms, means of representation, but this is the thing which connects them.
How does this relate to the aforementioned practical joke?
The universe is the role of god playing the most practical of jokes on herself. You will eventually be doused by the bucket you set up. You are the spark of your own flame.
Is.
Not.
Is.
Not.
Is.
Not…tick. Tock. Tick. Tock….
There is no such thing as an uninvolved observer.
Universe; n. 1.The box you cannot look into before jumping. 2. The box you cannot climb out of. Hero’s Dictionary
Life is a pattern of immense complexity of the energy of the whole universe.
The reason why INTP’s occupy, and rightly so, the true neutral position is best seen when you display the alignment spectrum as a wheel. True neutral occupies the hub position because, like everything(?) in nature, form and function are intrinsically connected.
If you look at any of the other alignments on the wheel, each of them only touches 3 other alignments – lawful good, for example, rests sandwiched between lawful neutral on one side and neutral good on the other – the third connection is to the hub, the axle which connects it to the whole. All of the other alignments follow this structure except one (ok, INTJ’s as well).
This is what an INTPs form and function indicate. The circumference of true neutrals’ boundary (the only one that shares the shape of the whole, which is indeed significant) is defined by a portion of all the others. They, of all the MBTI types fully seek the notion of “distinct by definition yet inseparable by nature” (Thus why lawful neutral and lawful good and neutral good lie side by side, they share essential natures, all connected).
INTPs crave understanding, which in this particular example is the realization that as an INTP you occupy a vantage point to simultaneously experience and observe all the other “alignments.” It is in fact, not only who you are but what you do, form and function.
INTPs either intuitively grasp the whole and then seek to build an internally logical framework to “prove” it, or they intuitively grasp the importance of an internally logical framework and then constantly compare reality to it until they then grasp the whole. Since MBTI describes preference and not ability, there are some who are able to do both and then compare the results of those two approaches in order to form an ever superior whole.
This explains both the procrastination and ‘analysis paralysis’ that so often hamstrings the developing INTP mind – they by nature take things apart, examine them, attempt to recombine them in different ways with seemingly disparate aspects of something else (first by comparing it against itself, to see if the thing considered is itself logically consistent before attempting to combine it with something else); seemingly disparate until the connection of the ‘essential nature’ is observed, always with the underlying understanding that there is never enough information to make them truly comfortable. So they wait for more information and then recombine.
Perhaps an example is in order. Take love and hate. Often categorized as opposites, they are actually an instance of two things distinct by definition yet inseparable by nature. How so? Like good and evil they share an essential nature – we see this by noticing that love and hate both share their true opposite: indifference. If they share an opposition they must share an essential nature, in this case the opposite of indifference is attention. So let us compare, does the person in love and the person in hate share the quality of extreme attention? Do their behaviors coincide? The answers to these questions and others like them, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
If you’ve stuck with me so far you might be asking, “So what does an INTP’s search for understanding seek to achieve with that understanding?” Again, the answer lies with its position in the wheel. If you take that wheel and make it three dimensional then the first shape you achieve is a cone, with the hub position now occupying the highest point as well as the central point.
That’s it. That’s the aim. INTP’s seek the highest point that encompasses all other points.
They seek to include and transcend in order to achieve concordant opposition, or true balance. The observer who can not be moved is the one who occupies all points simultaneously. Just like the circumference of the circle which defines true neutral, INTPS are the circle that seeks to define everything so that they may define themselves. This must be a circle (or a spiral, which is merely(!) a circle in three dimensions) a form whose beginning is also its ending, an inside defined by what is outside, the function of paradox, which being the logician, every INTP must learn to solve.
An INTP that has achieved individuation (in my view both necessary and sufficient for enlightenment) is a rare (ok, to be fair, ANYONE who achieves individuation is a rarity) beautiful thing and the reason why so many wish to make the climb and spend some time with that magnificent bitch/glorious bastard absquatulating atop the mountain – the figure who does not move because she occupies all places from the highest most central point. This sentiment was best expressed by Baruch Spinoza – “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
If you’re a player of dungeons and dragons and you’ve followed my argument so far, especially if you’re an INTP who plays DnD, let me ask you a question, are you or are you not the dungeon master? (My son informs me this is an archaic term, Game Master is the current title sobriquet). If you’ve had multiple play groups, would you agree that the DM’s you’ve had the most fun with were more than likely INTPs (or INTJ)? Aren’t the best ones able to mix all the alignments without losing their core neutrality, which the game truly demands of that role?
If my musings are correct, these are rhetorical questions. One divides by zero by being equal to everything.
The following is a response to a series of questions posed by the site Classical Wisdom.
Does the Noble Lie Exist today? Can ANY falsehood be Noble? And does the pursuit of Truth mean we should uncloak disinformation, even if it’s for the ‘greater good’?
The answers to these questions bloom with the union of the words noble and lie. Typically, we take the word noble to mean possessing a quality of moral or ethical superiority, differentiated by what we mean when we say, “She made a noble effort” or, “The nobles of the realm demand the truth.” Once we agree on this first definition, the seed is sown. The moment we attach the word lie to the word noble we create a flower of contradiction, a word synonymous with paradox.
Avid readers of the classics do not fear paradox, regardless of Zeno of Citium, for as Heraclitus taught us: “The road up and the road down are the same.” It is here, in paradox, that the noble lie flourishes.
Simply put: Truth lies in paradox.
Well, a certain kind of truth anyway. Broadly speaking, I believe there are three kinds of truth: Absolute, relative, and paradoxical. Paradoxical truth is necessary for the resolution and perpetuation of absolute truth; relative truths are the effluvia generated by the interaction of absolute and paradoxical truth.
Essentially, I am suggesting that paradox is the bedrock which turns away the spade of reality. In Plato’s Ideal, I contend paradoxical truth is more fundamental than absolute truth. Why? Like a vacuum, Nature abhors absolutes. If one doubts this, attempt to measure the absolute position of an electron and its trajectory with equal precision. On the other hand, try and fish out your cellphone after you’ve whoopsied it into a black hole. It is in this spirit we ought take note of just how much vacuum there is in the universe for nature to truly abhor it (to say nothing of the number of black holes). It is perhaps more equitable to say that Nature loves absolutes with the same fervor in which she loathes a vacuum and she feels free to switch as necessary. In order to gain entry/escape from/with the absolute, paradox is required.
The noble lie is an example of enantiodromia in action. Appropriately, the word is ancient Greek, from enantios – opposite and dromos – running course. Here again, Heraclitus is the inspiration and founder (in the Western tradition) for what Nicholas of Cusa in Latin came to call coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of opposites. Perhaps nowhere else does the unity of opposites display itself more prominently than in the realm of politics.
The important thing to remember about enantiodromia is that it is a process; its shape and pattern are recognizable. Its salient tenet is thus – when a thing reaches its extreme it transforms into its opposite. Few things are more extreme in collective human endeavor than an empire. Empires are patterns as well, a fact well known to Marcus Aurelius (the last of the “five good emperors”) – “Look back over the past, with its rising and falling empires, and you too can see the future.”
So can any falsehood be noble? Is it not true that great good often first passes through the arch of evil? Is its opposite, that great evil often first passes through the arch of good, also true? William Blake tells us we know when we have encountered a profound truth when its opposite is also true. Is this not the definition of paradoxical truth?
The noble lie is noble on the obverse and ignoble on the reverse. The curse of the noble lie is not knowing which side of the coin will show itself after the toss. Therefore, even if an empire (or country, state, city – hell, school board) chooses to employ it out of a sincere effort to serve “the greater good”, that greater good is only ever served half of the time. Such are the vagaries of human endeavor, every problem carries the seed of its solution and every solution carries the seed of the next problem.
It would be comforting to think we can do away with the noble lie but we cannot. We can, however, choose to use it only by extreme necessity.
Although the title of this essay is “Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education” and although it begins and ends with a consideration of liberal education, its main concern is with the distinction between labor and leisure. This is so because I have found it almost impossible, in my own thinking about the subject, to understand liberal education except in terms of what its end is. And the end of liberal education, it seems to me, lies in the use we make of our leisure, in the activities with which we occupy our leisure time.
In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should like to proceed in the following order: first, to make some approximations to a definition of liberal education in terms of leisure; second, to try to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of this definition by examining more closely the distinctions between work or labor, on the one hand (I shall use the words “work” and “labor” interchangeably), and leisure, on the other; and, third, to draw from this analysis some implications or consequences for the place of liberal education in an industrial democracy like ours.
Let me begin where anyone has to begin—with a tentative definition of education. Education is a practical activity. It is concerned with means to be employed or devised for the achievement of an end. The broadest definition with which no one, I think, can disagree is that education is a process which aims at the improvement or the betterment of men, in themselves and in relation to society. Few will quarrel with this definition because most people are willing to say that education is good; and its being good requires it to do something that is good for men. The definition says precisely this: that education improves men or makes them better.
All the quarrels that exist in educational philosophy exist because men have different conceptions of what the good life is, of what is good for man, of the conditions under which man is improved or bettered. Within that large area of controversy about education, there is one fundamental distinction to which I should like to call to your attention.
There seem to be two ways in which men can be bettered or improved: first, with respect to special functions or talents and, second, with respect to the capacities and functions that are common to all men. Let me explain. In civilized societies, and even in primitive societies, there is always a rudimentary, and often a very complex, division of labor. Society exists through a diversity of occupations, through different groups of men performing different functions. In addition to the division of labor and the consequent diversity of functions, there is the simple natural fact of individual differences. So one view of education is that which takes these individual and functional differences into consideration and says that men are made better by adjusting them to their occupations, by making them better carpenters or better dentists or better bricklayers, by improving them, in other words, in the direction of their own special talents.
The other view differs from this, in that it makes the primary aim of education the betterment of men not with respect to their differences but with respect to the similarities which all men have. According to this theory, if there are certain things that all men can do, or certain things that all men must do, it is with these that education is chiefly concerned.
This simple distinction leads us to differentiate between specialized education and general education. There is some ground for identifying specialized education with vocational education, largely because specialization has some reference to the division of labor and the diversity of occupations, and for identifying general education with liberal education because the efforts of general education are directed toward the liberal training of man as man.
There is still another way of differentiating education in terms of its ends. Aristotle often talks about the difference between the useful and the honorable. What he means by the “useful” and the “honorable” can sometimes be translated into extrinisic and intrinsic ends. An educational process has an intrinsic end if its result lies entirely within the person being educated, an excellence or perfection of his person, an improvement built right into his nature as a good habit is part of the nature of the person in whom a power is habituated. An extrinisic end of education, on the other hand, lies in the goodness of an operation, not as reflecting the goodness of the operator but rather the perfection of something else as a result of the operation being performed well.
Thus, for example, there can be two reasons for learning carpentry. One might wish to learn carpentry simply to acquire the skill or art of using tools to fabricate things out of wood, an art or skill that anyone is better for having. Or one might wish to learn carpentry in order to make good tables and chairs, not as works of art which reflect the excellence of the artist, but as commodities to sell. This distinction between the two reasons for learning carpentry is connected in my mind with the difference or distinction between liberal and vocational education. This carpentry is the same in both cases, but the first reason for learning carpentry is liberal, the second vocational.
All of this, I think, leads directly to the heart of the matter: that vocational training is training for work or labor; it is specialized rather than general; it is for an extrinsic end; and ultimately it is the education of slaves or workers. And from my point of view it makes no difference whether you say slaves or workers, for you mean that the worker is a man who does nothing but work—a state of affairs which has obtained by the way, during the whole industrial period, from its beginning almost to our day.
Liberal education is education for leisure; it is general in character; it is for an intrinsic and not an extrinsic end; and, as compared with vocational training, which is the education of slaves or workers, liberal education is the education of free men.
I would like, however, to add one basic qualification at this point. According to this definition or conception of liberal education, it is not restricted in any way to training in the liberal arts. We often too narrowly identify liberal education with those arts which are genuinely the liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, and logic and the mathematical disciplines—because that is one of the traditional meanings of liberal education. But, as I am using the term “liberal” here, in contradistinction to “vocational,” I am not confining liberal education to intellectual education or to the cultivation of the mind. On the contrary, as I am using the phrase, liberal education has three large departments, according to the division of human excellences or modes of perfection. Physical training, or gymnastics in the Platonic sense, if its aim is to produce a good coordination of the body, is liberal education. So also is moral training, if its aim is to produce moral perfections, good moral habits or virtues; and so also is intellectual training, if its aim is the production of good intellectual habits or virtues. All three are liberal as distinguished from vocational. This is not, in a sense, a deviation from the conception of liberal education as being only concerned only with the mind, for in all three of these the mind plays a role. All bodily skills are arts; all moral habits involve prudence; so the mind is not left out of the picture even when one is talking about moral and physical training.
After this purely preliminary statement, I should like to discuss the problem of what labor is, and what leisure is, and how these two things are related. For as understanding of these two terms becomes clearer, I think understanding of liberal education and of the problem of liberal education in our society will become clearer.
Let me begin by considering the parts of a human life—and by “the parts of a human life” I mean the division of the twenty-four hours of each day in the succession of days that make up the weeks, months, and years of our lives. The lives of all of us today are divided roughly into thirds. This was not always the case. The lives of the slaves of antiquity and, until recently, the wage slaves of our modern industrial society were divided into two parts, not three. We are, however, accustomed to think of our lives as having three parts.
One-third is sleep. I include with sleep—because they belong to the same category, and I shall use “sleep” as a symbol for all such things—eating (in so far as it is not liberal, in so far as it is quite apart from conversation, eating just to sustain the body); the acts of washing and cleansing the body; and even exercise, in so far as it is indispensable for physical fitness. These things are like sleep because they maintain the body as a biological mechanism.
Sleep, then, is one-third; work or labor, one-third; and one-third is free time or spare time. I am defining the latter negatively now, as time not spent in sleep or work, time free from work or biological necessities. Now I say this threefold division of the parts of a day (and, therefore, of a human life) into sleep and the adjuncts of sleep, work or labor, and free or spare time is not entirely satisfactory. A further division is required. Free time, it is clear, may be used in two ways when it is not used, as some people use it, for sleep and other biological necessities. One of the two ways in which free time can be used is play—and by “play” I mean recreation, amusement, diversion, pastime, and, roughly, all ways of killing time. The other use of free or spare time I should like to denominate roughly for the moment—I will analyze it more carefully later—engagement in leisure activities. If you say, “What do you mean by leisure activities?” I answer, “Such things as thinking or learning, reading or writing, conversation or correspondence, love and acts of friendship, political activity, domestic activity, artistic and esthetic activity.” Just think of those list of things. They are not work, and they are not, or they seem not to be, play. Here is a group of activities which occupy time free from sleep and work and which are distinct from recreation or amusement. But the line of distinction is not clear, nor is the definition of the class of activities.
Before I push the analysis further, let me ask another question. Do these four things—sleep, work or labor, play, and leisure activities—exhaust the parts of a human life? I have two answers to the question. If you look at a human life on the purely natural plane, I think these consume all its time. But I think there is a fifth part of life not reducible to any of these four, though I cannot fully account for it on the purely natural plane. That fifth part I call “rest”. Now you might think that rest is identical with sleep, or with recreation by which one is “rested” from fatigue. But I do not mean that when I use the word. I mean by “rest” something that is quite distinct from sleep, an activity that is specifically human. No animal could possibly rest in the sense which I intend when I use the word. An animal sleeps. I mean rest in a sense quite distinct from play or recreation or refreshment, for all these things are for the sake of work, and rest is not for the sake of work at all.
The only way I can begin to convey what I mean by “rest” is to say the most obvious thing: that it is to be understood philosophically, as the opposite of motion. The easiest way to understand the connotation of the term “rest” is to consider the phrase “heavenly rest” and to ask whether there is any rest on earth. I think there is none because by “rest” I mean not merely a terminal activity, one which is done for its own sake, but also a nonrepetitive or an exhaustive activity, one that does not require repetition because it in itself exhausts the need for activity. But I must then add immediately that, as I understand rest, its meaning is supernatural. It is the sense in which God rested on the seventh day, the sense in which the commandments of God bid us observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy as a day of rest. It is in terms of this conception of rest that I distinguish between contemplation and thinking. Thinking, it seems to me, is a leisure activity; contemplation, an activity of rest. Accordingly, if rest exists at all in this earthly life, it exists only, I think, in religious activity, only in prayer and worship and in the contemplation practiced by religious orders. From this point of view, all human life is either work or rest. Everything I have subdivided into sleep, play, work, and leisure becomes work, as compared with rest, though there are distinctions on the natural plane that make work just one of four parts.
Leaving rest aside for a moment, let me see if I can explain the differences of work, play, and leisure activity. Certain criteria, which are often used to distinguish work, play, and leisure, fail, I think, to define these three things. For example, persons often use the criterion of pleasure and pain, somehow thinking of work as painful and play or leisure as pleasant. It is immediately apparent, I think, that this is incorrect. Play can be quite painful. What does one mean by speaking of a “grueling” match of tennis, if one does not mean that there is often physical pain in playing a long, fast tennis match? Work certainly can be pleasant. There is actual pleasure in a skilled performance, even if the performance is part of a laborious activity. And leisure activities, if I am right in thinking that learning is a typical leisure activity, certainly can be quite painful. Note, moreover, a very common phrase, one used in school, namely school work or home work. Though schoolwork and homework are study and are therefore a part of learning and belong to leisure activity, we call them “work.” Why? Because there is some pain involved? I think not. I think we call them “work,” as I shall try to show you subsequently, not because pain is involved in them but because we do them under some obligation, under some compulsion. This is the first indication that the meaning of “work” somehow involves the compulsory.
Fatigue is a second criterion that is often used to distinguish work, play, and leisure. All forms of activity which involve both the mind and the body call for sleep to wash away fatigue. Nor is it true to say that work is difficult and play and leisure are easy, for play and leisure activities can be difficult, too. Nor do I think that the Thomistic division of the good into the useful, the pleasant, and the virtuous will by itself (although I think it comes near to it) perfectly distinguish between work as the useful, play as the pleasant, and leisure as the virtuous. Unless those terms are more sharply restricted, I think one could regard work as pleasant or even virtuous in a sense; play as useful in so far it is recreative and performs a biological function; and leisure activities, although they may be intrinsically virtuous, as useful and pleasant. Let me therefore offer a criterion which I think will succeed in drawing the line between labor and leisure and will take care of play as well.
Though it may not perfectly account for play, I would like to propose that the distinction between labor or work, on the one hand, and leisure activities, on the other, is to be made in terms of what is biologically necessary or compulsory and what is rationally or humanly desirable or free. Let me see if I can explain this criterion by applying it. Labor, I say, is an economically necessary activity. It is something you do to produce the means of subsistence. It makes no difference at all whether the worker gets consumable goods immediately by his laboring activity or wages wherewith to buy consumable goods. Let us think of this for a moment in the following way. Let consumable goods—either direct consumables or money—be the compensation of the laborer; and, further, let us assume for the moment that no man gets his subsistence, in the form of either consumable goods or money, without labor. Then the definition of work or labor is: that activity which is required, is compulsory, for all men in order for them to live or subsist and which therefore must be extrinsically compensated, that is, the laborer must earn by his labor the means of his subsistence.
Let us test this. Men who have ample and secure means of subsistence have no need to labor. This is the historical meaning of the leisure class. Provide any man or group of men with ample and secure means of subsistence, and they will not work. I do not mean that they will not be active, that they will not be productive, that they will not be creative. But they will not work. They will not labor in the sense in which I tried to define that term sharply. Anything they will do will have to have for them some intrinsic compensation. Strictly, the word “compensation” is here wrongly used. The activities in which they engage will have to be intrinsically rewarding. What they do will somehow be done for its own sake, since they are provided with the means of subsistence.
Let us consider what I regard as the great experimental station for all thinking about man, namely, the Garden of Eden, peopled by men who have not sinned. Suppose the race of man had continued to live in the Garden of Eden. Not having sinned, man would not have inherited labor, disease, and death as punishments of sin. Man would have had no need to labor; he could have lived on the fruits of the trees and the grains of the earth. He would not have played, and neither would he have slept. In other words, life in the Garden of Eden would have consisted entirely of leisure activities. Because the body of sinless man would have been quite different from the human body as it is in the world, there would have been none of the peculiar divisions of life that exist in the world.
Leisure activities, in sharp distinction from labor or work, consist of those things that men do because they are desirable for their own sake. They are self-rewarding, not externally compensated, and they are freely engaged in. They may be morally necessary, but they are not biologically compulsory. You can see the trouble with this definition as soon as you say it. You may ask at once, What is play? Is not play self-rewarding? Is not play distinguished from labor by the negative distinction that it is something you do not have to do? Something that you freely choose to do?
I think we can get some light on how to sharpen the definition of leisure, and keep it distinct from play, by etymological considerations. I must confess to being genuinely fascinated by the background of the word “leisure.” The word which in Greek means “leisure” is scole. Notice that our English word “school” comes from scole.
Now the Greek word scole has two meanings, just as the English word “pasttime” has two meanings. In the dictionary the first meaning of “pasttime” refers to the time itself, to spare time. The second meaning of “pasttime” refers to what is done with such time, namely, play. It is this second meaning that we usually intend by our use of the word. So the first meaning of scole refers to the time; the second, to the content or use of the time. The first is leisure in the merely negative sense of the time free from labor, or spare time; but the second meaning, which appears very early in Greek literature, refers to what men should do with this time, namely, learn and discuss. It is the second meaning—what one does with time free from labor—which permits scole to become the root of the word “school.” This, it seems to me, throws a fascinating light on a phrase that was used frequently in my youth when boys of sixteen faced, with their parents, the question, “Shall I go to work or shall I go to school?” Making this a choice of opposites is quite right, because work is one thing and school is another. It is the difference between labor and leisure.
When we look for the Latin equivalent of the Greek word scole, more light is thrown on the subject. The first meaning, time free from work or labor, appears in the Latin word otium. Otium is the root of the word negotium, which means “negotiation” or “business.” Otium is the very opposite of negotium or “business”; it simply means time free from work. What is wonderful here is that the English word “otiose” is not a very complimentary word—it means “unemployed, idle, sterile, futile, useless.” The second meaning of scole is translated by the Latin schola. This again is a source of “school.” Finally, the first meaning of otium has a synonym in Latin, vacatio, from which we get the word “vacation” and also, interestingly enough, “vacancy.”
The English word “leisure” comes down a totally different line. It comes from the French loisir, and from the Latin licere; it has the root meaning of the permissible and the free. The Latin licere is also the root of “liberty” and “license,” in addition to “leisure.” I think it is extraordinary to see these three words related in that one Latin root.
In the light of this etymology, I think we can distinguish leisure from play as two quite different uses of free or spare time, that is not-working time. Play may be one of two things. It may be biologically useful like sleep, just as vacations and recreational activities are biologically useful. Just as sleep is a way of washing away fatigue, so a certain amount of play or vacation or recreation has the same kind of biological utility in the recuperation of the body. Play may be, however, something beyond this. Obviously, children do not play just to refresh themselves. And I often wonder whether this does not have a bearing on the role of play in adult life, that is, whether or not the role of play in adult life is not always a temporary regression to childhood.
One can admit, I think, that life involves two kinds of play: play for the sake of work, when it serves the same purpose as sleep, and play for its own sake. Sensual pleasure is admittedly a part of human life, but only in a limited quantity. Beyond that you have licentiousness; so, too, licentious play is a misuse of leisure.
Certainly, no quality attaches to useless play other than pleasure. I, for one, can see no perfection, no improvement, resulting from it. But leisure consists of those intrinsically good activities which are both self-rewarding and meaningful beyond themselves. They need not be confined to themselves. They can be both good things to do and good in their results, as, for example, political activities, the activities of a citizen, are both good in themselves and good in their results. This does not mean that leisure activities are never terminal, never without ends beyond themselves; it means only that they must be good in themselves, things worth doing even if there were no need for them to be done.
The results of leisure activity are two sorts of human excellence or perfection: those private excellences by which a man perfects his own nature and those public excellences which can be translated into the performance of his moral or political duty—the excellence of a man in relation to other men and to society. Hence I would define leisure activities as those activities desirable for their own sake (and so uncompensated and not compulsory) and also for the sake of the excellencies, private and public, to which they give rise.
Suppose I try now to do a little of what I have just suggested. Suppose we draw a line between economically or biologically useful activities and those which are morally or humanly good, what Aristotle calls the “honorable” or “noble” activities. What results from making this separation? We get a threefold division: from the biologically necessary, we get sleep, work, and play (in so far as these serve to recuperate the body or to remove fatigue); from the humanly, morally good, the noble or honorable, we get all leisure activities; and from the superfluous, the otiose, we again get play, but here we mean play as it consists entirely in killing or wasting time, however pleasant that may be.
We see, furthermore, that the very same activities can be either labor or leisure, according to the conditions under which they are performed. Let us take manual work again—for instance, carpentry. Manual work can be leisure if it is work done for the sake of the art that is involved and for the cultivation of an artist. It is labor if it is done for compensation. That example may be too obvious, but we can see the same thing in teaching or painting, composing music, or political action of any sort. Any one of these can be labor as well as leisure, if a person does it in order to earn his subsistence. For if, to begin with, one accepts the proposition that no man shall get food or clothing or shelter, no man shall get the means of subsistence, without earning them, then some activities which would otherwise be leisure must be done by some persons for compensation. This makes them no less intrinsically rewarding but gives them an additional character. This double character causes certain activities to be labor, looked at one way, and leisure, looked at another.
This accounts for the fact that in professors’ lives or statesmen’s lives the line between labor and leisure is almost impossible to draw. In the Protagoras, the Meno, and the Apology Socrates was horrified at the notion that anyone would take pay for teaching. That the Sophists took pay for teaching aroused a moral repugnance in Socrates. This is not a minor matter. It was the first time anyone had done so, and it raised a very serious moral problem. For the first time an essentially leisure activity, like teaching, was compensated.
Not only can the same activity be both leisure and work; but even play, or things that I would call play, can be work for some people. Professional football is work to those who play it. Think also of all the persons whose working lives are spent in the amusement business.
This leads to further interesting points about the kinds of work. I would like to abstract this discussion from the distinction between manual and mental work, and particularly mental work as preparatory for, or directed toward, manual work. Taking both manual and mental work into consideration together, I would like to make the distinction between productive and nonproductive labor. I would say that work or labor is productive when it is economically useful, that is, when it produces means of subsistence in one form or another.
Here it is proper for the mode of compensation to consist of wages (or, as they are called more politely, “salaries”), with some basis for what we call a fair wage in a relation of equivalence between the amount of labor and the product of labor. Nonproductive labors, on the other hand, are activities which may be called work only in the sense that they are compensated—such things as teaching, artistic creation, the professional work of medicine and law, and the activities of statesmen. Here it is wrong to use the words “wages” or “salary”; and it is interesting to note that the language contains other words. We speak of an “honorarium” or “fee”; but the word I like best is the word “living” in the sense in which a priest gets, not wages or a salary, but a living. He is given his subsistence. He has not earned it by production. He has done something which it is good to do, but he also has to live; and there is a sense in which he can be said to have “earned his living.” Here there can be no calculations of fair compensation. When one talks about fees or honoraria, the only thing one can talk about is the amount of time spent. Lawyers very often set their fees entirely in terms of time.
I would like to make a second distinction—between servile and liberal work. I think it is difficult to draw the line between these two, except in extreme cases, because many kinds of labor or work are partly servile and partly liberal. But the extreme cases are quite clear; and it is important at least to recognize the mixed cases or the shadowy ones that lie between. By “servile work” I mean work done only because it is econonically necessary and done only for compensation—work that no one would do if the means of subsistence were otherwise provided. “Liberal work” is work or activity which, though sometimes done for compensation, would be done even if no compensation were involved, because the work itself is self-rewarding. In other words, liberal work contains, at its very heart, activities that are essentially leisure activities, things that would be done for their own sake, even though subsistence were otherwise secured. The consequence of this is that the man who is a liberal worker—a teacher, lawyer, statesman, or creative artist—may, and usually does, work many more hours than are required for his compensation. He does more than is necessary to do a fair job for the person who is compensating him, because he cannot determine the point at which his activity passes into strictly leisure activity, though some part of it earns his compensation. I think examples of the research scientist, the teacher, or the statesman make this perfectly clear.
Finally, in terms of these distinctions, there is at least the beginning of an order for the parts of life. It would seem to me that, by the very nature of the terms themselves, sleep and its adjunct activities and play as recreation must be for the sake of work; and work must be for the sake of leisure. Earning a living, in short, and keeping alive must be for the sake of living well. Many of the obvious disorders of human life result from improper understanding of the order of these parts—for example, sleeping for its own sake, which is at least neurotic and at worst suicidal; working as an end in itself, which is a complete perversion of human life; working for the sake of play, which is certainly a misconception of leisure; or free time as time to kill in pleasure seeking. Play for its own sake, in order to kill time or escape boredom, is as neurotic as sleep for its own sake. And perhaps I should add the error, which many of us make, of confusing leisure with rest. Among those who share this confusion are persons who think that Sunday is a day to be spent in aesthetic, speculative, or liberal activity or that going to the theater or a concert or indulging in some form of sport is the proper observance of the day. I am not trying to preach the doctrines of a strict Sabbatarian—that is not the purpose of this lecture—but, nevertheless, I keep asking myself, “What can be the meaning of the admonition ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy’?” A day of rest cannot be identified with a day of play; and a day of rest, just as clearly, I think, cannot be identified with a day of leisure, for leisure activities are not rest.
In terms of this very brief and sketchy analysis of the parts of life, and of these distinctions between work, play, and leisure activities, we now can see clearly the difference between vocational training and liberal education. Vocational training is learning for the sake of earning. I hope I step on nobody’s toes too hard when I say, as I must say, that therefore it is an absolute misuse of school to include any vocational training at all. School is a place of learning for the sake of learning, not for the sake of earning. It is as simple as that. Please understand that I do not mean vocational training can be totally dispensed with; I mean only that it should be done on the job. It should be done as preparatory to work; and as preparatory to work, it should be compensated. No one should have to take vocational training without compensation, because it is not self-rewarding. To include vocational training in school without compensation is to suppose that it is education, which it is not at all. In contrast to vocational training, liberal education is learning for its own sake or for the sake of further education. It is learning for the sake of all those self-rewarding activities which include the political, aesthetic, and speculative.
There are three further comments I should like to make on this distinction. First, professional education can be both vocational and liberal, because the kind of work for which it is the preliminary training is essentially liberal work. The work of a lawyer is liberal, not servile, work. In Greece free men who were citizens were all lawyers; there education for legal practice was liberal education. Professional education is vocational only in so far as this kind of leisure activity happens to be a way that some men, in our division of labor, earn their compensation.
Second, liberal education can involve work simply because we find it necessary to compel children to begin, and for some years to continue, their educations. Whenever you find an adult, a chronological adult, who thinks that learning or study is work, let me say that you have met a child. One sign that you are grown up, that you are no longer a child, is that you never regard any part of study or learning as work. As long as learning or study has anything compulsory about it, you are still in the condition of childhood. The mark of truly adult learning is that it is done with no thought of labor or work at all, with no sense of the compulsory. It is entirely voluntary. Liberal education at the adult level can, therefore, be superior to liberal education in school, where learning is identified with work.
Third, if schooling is equivalent to the proper use of leisure time in youth, then the proper use of leisure time in adult life should obviously include the continuation of schooling—without teachers, without compulsion, without assignments—the kind of learning that adults do outside school, the kind they do in conversations and discussions, in reading and study.
Finally, we may ask the place of liberal education in an industrial democracy. We can do this quickly by considering two basic errors or fallacies peculiar to our society: the first I would call the aristocratic error; the second, the industrial fallacy.
The aristocratic error is simply the error of dividing men into free men and slaves or workers, into a leisure class and a working class, instead of dividing the time of each human life into working time and leisure time. Karl Marx’s Capital and, quite apart from the theory of surplus value—Marx’s special notion of capitalist production—is filled with the horrible facts about the life of the laboring classes until almost our own day. We must face the fact that, until very recently, the working classes did nothing but sleep and work. When we realize that children started to work at the age of seven; that whole families worked—men, women, and children; that the hours of working time were often twelve and fourteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, then we realize that the distinction between the leisure class and the working class is something you and I can no longer appreciate because it has disappeared from our society. It does not exist in the world today, at least not in the United States. But, if we consider the past, in which workers were like slaves, the aristocratic error consisted in the division of mankind into two classes, a leisure class and a working class.
To correct this error, we must say not only that all men are free but also that all men must work for their subsistence (which is nothing but a democratic or socialist variant on the biblical admonition that man must eat by the sweat of his brow). You will see the educational consequences of this fallacy when you stop to think how little point there would have been in talking about liberal education for all men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when much more than half the population had no time for education. It would have been just as meaningless for them to have been given a liberal education, doomed as they were to lead lives of work and sleep.
The second fallacy arises from the fact that industrial production has created an abundance of leisure time for all. I do not mean that the working classes today have as much leisure time as the leisure classes of other centuries. I mean simply that more leisure exists today, per capita, than ever existed before. Though industrial production has produced this abundance of leisure, industrialism as such has made all men servants of productivity; and, when productivity itself is regarded as the highest good, leisure is debased to the level of play or idleness, which can be justified only as recreation. The man of leisure is regarded by industrialists, interested soley in productivity, as either a playboy or a dilettante. Leisure loses its meaning when industrial society reduces it to an incidental by-product of productivity.
If these two fallacies are corrected, we reach, I think, the obvious conclusion that in a rightly conceived industrial democracy, liberal education should be and can be for all men. It should be because they are all equal as persons, as citizens, from a democratic point of view. It can be because industrialism can emancipate all men from slavery and because workers in our day need not spend their entire lives earning their livings. Liberal education in the future of democracy should be and should do for all men what it once was and did for the few in the aristocracies of the past. It should be part of the lives of all men.
But I must be asked whether I have forgotten about individual differences. Even if all men are citizens, even if they are emancipated from the complete drudgery of labor, it still is not true that all men are equally endowed with talent or have an equal capacity to lead the good life. Let me give you an un-Aristotelian answer to this objection, because I cannot help feeling that Aristotle’s opinions on such matters were affected, to some extent at least, by the fact that he lived in a slave society.
The good or happy life is a life lived in the cultivation of virtue. Another way of saying this is that the good life or the happy life is concerned with leisure. The good life depends on labor, but it consists of leisure. Labor and all conditions that go with labor are the antecedent means of happiness. They are external goods, that is, wealth. Leisure activities are the ends for which wealth is the means. Leisure activities constitute not mere living but living well. They are what Aristotle calls “virtuous activities” or the “goods of the soul.”
Happiness so conceived is open to all men, when all men are both workers and free men. As regards both work and leisure, each man should do the best work and participate in the best sort of leisure activities of which he is capable, the highest for which his talents equip him. So conceived, happiness is the same for all men, though it differs in actual content, in degree of intensity, according to the individual differences of men.
It is clear, I think, that liberal education is absolutely necessary for human happiness, for living a good human life. The most prevalent of all human ills are these two: a man’s discontent with the work he does and the necessity of having to kill time. Both these ills can be, in part, cured by liberal education. Liberal schooling prepares for a life of learning and for the leisure activities of a whole lifetime. Adult liberal education is an indispensable part of the life of leisure, which is a life of learning.
As a final word, let me tell you the most infallible sign of the liberally educated man. Aristotle said that the mark of a happy man is also the sure sign that he is liberally educated, namely, that you never find him trying to kill time.
History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. ~James Baldwin
That’s how many people voted for the end of our grand experiment. Just four years ago, the thought that so many of my fellow citizens could be bamboozled by a third rate carnival barker made me double over in dismay.
Not this time. I knew there would be support for him but I did not think there would be 67 million* souls in this country that would vote for this catastrophe of a human being. I was prepared for it but the dismay remains.
Now begins the hard work of either obviating their numbers or deprogramming them, one knotted up psyche at a time. It’s tempting to focus on the latter and wash one’s hands of the former but I think it unlikely we can effectively or wisely ignore them.
What this country desperately needs is a frontier. A place the disaffected can go and start over. The irony of course is that there are no more frontiers left on this planet where a disaffected soul can readily start over again. I believe the technology exists for seasteading and I’m sure there would be many who would sign up for a moon colony – but these things are years away and in the meantime we will have to find a way to live with each other.
I mentioned in my previous entry a feeling of contentment, given these last few days, that feeling has evolved – I am not anxious per se, but I am aware I am not as detached about the outcome as I’ve striven to be, the stakes are simply too high to rise fully above. So much damage has been done the obvious next steps are enough to draw a weary sigh from those whose job it will be to clean it up.
It looks like sanity will prevail but only just, and not without a legal fight. I am encouraged that no acts of violence have been reported, hopefully this will remain the case.
How does one deprogram 67 million* people?
I don’t know but I suspect Fox News will have to be included in any solution.
It’s difficult right now to admit to the feeling of what I can only describe as sanguine contentment, if not, dare I say it, happiness. The audacity to feel positive about anything these days is almost a revolutionary act – one runs the risk of provoking the ire of those who aren’t, and to be fair, there is no shortage of reasons to rightly feel apocalyptic. I leave it to the reader to supply their own list, which I’m sure has plenty of overlap with my own.
I run an especially high risk, as my lifestyle is atypical, sheltered even by covid standards, and comfortable. By and large, both my needs and wants are more than adequately provided for, a position I am keenly aware of and do my best to deserve, no matter that I will always fall short. One of the ways I do this is by attempting to stay well informed of how everyone else experiences their lives and never forgetting the circumstances of my own life when I was not nearly as fortunate.
Because I come to my privileged life by way of marriage, I have received the side eye by relatives both near and distant; it’s a good thing I learned a very long time ago to ignore the opinions of most people, perhaps relatives most of all. I am, however, human – there are people whose opinion I very much value. I’ve learned to choose these people with care and then cultivate those relationships with even more care.
Not all of the people whose opinion I value are aware of how highly I hold them in esteem. These people I am especially careful about, which generally translates into an aloof distance on my part. Fortunately, the list of people who fall into this category is not large, a handful at best. About the same number as the people who do know how I feel about them.
Sometimes, I regret my truncated career in education – I think I would have formed some long lasting relationships, or at least made an indelible impression, on more than a few students. As much as I enjoy time alone, need it really, I also enjoyed the performative aspect of teaching, the dialectic between student and teacher. The classroom is one of the few places outside of my home where I feel comfortable, most of all as the student.
Because fate dictated otherwise, I was spared the frustrations of the modern educational system: the ever shifting state mandated pedagogy revolving around content that rarely changes, the lack of adequate supplies, the overloaded class sizes, to name only a few. I often wonder if I would have turned cynical and weary, or risen everyday to tilt at those windmills no matter how ostensibly futile the attempt. I like to think I would have found a way to drag the content I wanted into the classroom, no matter what the powers that be said.
What does all this have to do with feelings of sanguine contentment? Well, I bring all this up to point out first principles, that is to say, as much as life is planned even more of it is less so, or at least, not planned by you. Retracing past steps is a privilege afforded to those who live long enough to profit by it. For some people this results in despair. The only respite I have found when I felt this way is a stubborn trust in the river of time.
Things change. They must. They always do.
As they said so often in basic training – you never quit. You don’t get to stop. To surrender is the worst thing you can do. I am quite aware of the monstrous nature of those sentences. I do my best to avoid absolutes and I believe there is a time for surrendering, when the struggle makes things worse, not better. Yet, as a general principle, it is a good one to follow. I say this having failed at it many, many times, in multiple aspects of my life. To be able to see that in yourself is part of following the creed – one cannot learn from a mistake unexamined, which means being able to know you’ve made a mistake in the first place.
The knack of changing your mind, in unlearning a thing in order to relearn what is necessary, is priceless. I’ve tried and failed at this as often as I’ve succeeded, and miserably at times when it comes to other people, but learned much, if not slowly, in the process. The important thing to remember is that you can change your mind, followed immediately by you probably should more than you’re comfortable admitting. I like to think I prompted the practice in a few students I’ve had the privilege to teach but that may simply be hubris on my part. The compulsory nature of modern primary education has the mixed blessing of a guaranteed captive audience – preloaded with the expectation that learning will take place, even though evidence provides results as mixed as the blessing. I think we lose a vital something by making education compulsory past a certain age and not making education understood as something that never ends. The question becomes, are you the one choosing that education, or is it being chosen for you?
The best way, of course, is to make school a place people want to go, no matter what age you are. Instead of constructing large warehouses for the young and deeming that school, we ought to be instilling the notion that there is no place that is not school. The games we play, the movies we watch, the music we listen to, the relationships we cultivate and have forced upon us, are all classrooms, but nowhere is this more true than in the minds and characters we are all tasked with improving.
Sanguine contentment is a state of mind one can teach themselves into attaining. It is not a state of mind everyone is predisposed towards – it takes, well, I can only speak for me; I think there are more ways to achieve this than the one I found works for me. Some people seek it not at all. I’ve heard more than one professional comic say they dread contentment, they believe their pain is the wellspring of their humor and without it, the laughter dries up. Sanguine contentment cannot exist in a mind like that, it’s an act of self negation to seek it.
I know there are people who claim to be able to point the way to happiness. I am not here to join them or to point to one or more who I say got it right. That’s not the job of a teacher. The job of a teacher is to teach. Ah, that’s a nice tautology you have there, I hear you say, but what is it that YOU teach?
Whatever the student most needs to learn.
I am both student and teacher. (And so are you.)
Education is knowing when to teach and when to learn.
Sanguine contentment is to achieve both simultaneously.
