humanities

Joseph Pieper, Leisure; The Basis of Culture and The Philosophical Act. Are you really living?

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Piping hot coffee and Pieper

Are you schlepping it on the day-to-day? grinding the 9 to 5? Or are you taking opportunities to experience beauty, to marvel, to wonder? It might be a simple, quick gesture such as looking at a cobweb, and marveling at its beauty, or taking a few deep breaths in the morning. If you are rushing through life to get more things done, you might be sacrificing your enjoyment of life.

Being Mediterranean, living in the US is a constant cultural shock. Despite my many years living here, I never got used to it. The go go go, work work work mentality is quickly exposed as this society’s Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant DNA. The first sign of this is when you notice that your colleagues at work do not take a coffee break mid-morning, they continue chugging from their Big Gulp gallon of coffee. You notice when you have not finished your meal at a restaurant and the waiter brings you the bill -kicking you out- with a courteous “Whenever you are ready” and you have not even ordered dessert!!

I had this discussion years ago with one of my students, when they mentioned a book they were reading for one of their classes: Joseph Pieper’s Leisure; The Basis of Culture. I just finished reading it.

Pieper condones the work for work mentality, the worker bee lifestyle. Writing in mid-20th C Germany, Pieper saw with concern the evolution of the labor trends at the time.

Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.

Joseph Pieper

Pieper does a great job of defining leisure as not being idle, and how philosophy, a sense of wonder, is the root of culture. He advocates for education in the Humanities, Classics, Philosophy. However, Pieper is careful to note that we must give meaning to leisure. While making work a religion is bad, so is being a sloth (his word!)

Pieper’s second essay is The Philosophical Act, which follows on the Leisure essay. Both essays weave the beautiful tapestry that is Humanism. Not only beauty but thought as well. In this essay, Pieper underlines the importance of wonder and of hope in our “philosophizing.”

This is a short and highly recommended read. It will help you understand what leisure and philosophy is -it is not that boring, scary stuff you read in old books!

Humanities, Caravaggio, and Artificial Intelligence.

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Am I the only one who is sick and tired and bored of AI? And this nightmare has only just begun? Yes, let’s eradicate Cancer and streamline flight traffic, and all that good stuff, but do you really need an AI generated picture of whatever nonsense you think of? and you certainly do not need it for that high school or college essay. Sorry.

This comes to mind because AI is already everywhere we look, but also because as every cloud has a silver lining, folks are hungry, thirsty for meaning. The solution? more Humanities, more arts, music, theatre, literature, more stories, more narrative.

Everybody has an opinion on AI. Some more positive, like Spanish writer Irene Vallejo, who thinks AI will “push” us towards the Humanities, and some more pessimistic, like French philosopher Éric Sadin who wisely explains that AI will not generate new jobs -at any rate not enough to cover those lost to AI.

So what does Caravaggio have to do with all this? Well, I was thinking about AI when I unexpectedly “bumped” into a brilliant Caravaggio at the Colecciones Reales recently (read about that here) and I was so deeply moved, that I understood how art and the humanities are the antidote to AI. A few days later I saw two more Caravaggios at the Prado, including a lost one which was in the attic of a Madrid family. I then basked in the memory of other Caravaggios I had recently seen: one in the Cathedral of Toledo, and a couple at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome. The evidence was evident: AI can “paint” just like a Caravaggio with the amazing 3D effect and the chiaroscuro, but it will never be a Caravaggio.

Caravaggio only painted about 60 to 105 paintings, and the story each one tells, the drama, the humanity, is moving. You can see where each painting is on this Wikipedia page.

So, if you are hungry, thirsty for meaning, for purpose, for humanity, find a Caravaggio near you and go enjoy it. If you can’t find one, you can read a good book, watch a good film, listen to a symphony, etc. You are welcome!