Leisure, postmodern experience and care
In the previous section of this book – consisting of Chapters 2 through 5 – we explored several core themes from historical and current philosophical discussions, and applied them to leisure. The next section – Chapters 6 through 9 – will be dedicated to several important current and future themes from the leisure perspective, which we will explore with support from a philosophical perspective. The main focus will be on the possible role of leisure in a postmodern (or liquidly modern) context. One of the defining concepts in postmodern society is the experience. In Chapter 3 we have already explored the basic features of that concept; in this intermezzo, we will prepare the discussion of the upcoming chapters by expanding our analysis of postmodernity, and of the experience concept in that context.
In Intermezzo I as well as Chapter 3, reference has already been made to postmodernity, or the alternative interpretation of liquid modernity as suggested by Blackshaw (2010), and the status of (aspects of) leisure in that context. Since the upcoming chapters are explicitly about the role of leisure for self-determination and/or co-creative stimulation of well-being in today’s context of fluid values and perspectival meanings, it will be helpful to provide a more in-depth look at some of the core ideas of postmodernity.
Of course, it is always dangerous to ‘define’ historical developments, to lock them down into a specific interpretation, especially while sketching many centuries’ worth of idea evolution in only a handful of words. Spracklen (2011) is appropriately apprehensive about doing injustice to the many context-dependent nuances of ideas, concepts, theories and interpretations that have emerged throughout history, in his endeavour to summarise the history of leisure.
Still, we need to pin certain key ideas down to be able to work with them, and build our own interpretations and extrapolations on. So, necessarily and inescapably, the characterisation of postmodernity below is limited, and almost certainly wrong if regarded from some angles. In fact, the idea that ‘the truth’ is a particularly slippery and unobtainable ideal is the core insight that infuses postmodern thought.
That was not always so. The Enlightenment was a cultural, social, political and scientific development in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, in which the general attitude towards truth and science was different. Many thinkers during that period (some of the most important being Descartes, Newton, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Hume, Locke, Washington and Franklin) professed a strong confidence in human ability, with a progressively stronger reliance on rational thought and science (rather than religion), and a drive towards objective knowledge (extrapolating the outlines of an empiricist, objectivist scientific method developed by Francis Bacon). Two aspects of that science-based optimism were that there was in fact something like the truth about how the universe and everything in it functions, and that properly applied scientific methods would indeed be sufficient to find out what that truth was.
Some of this optimistic attitude is still alive today, mostly in the natural sciences, technology and analytical philosophy (see further down in this intermezzo), but in the humanities and social sciences a different attitude reigns: the idea that objective truth is an unattainable fiction. The development from the Enlightenment idea that man is the ‘master of the universe’ towards the existential confusion of postmodernity can be sketched by highlighting a few of the insights that helped deconstruct that optimistic picture. Ricoeur (1970) famously called Nietzsche, Marx and Freud the masters of the school of suspicion. The sequence below expands that ‘school’ a little, sketching several key stages of that deconstructive process that have led to postmodernity. We will briefly mention five important stages.
[1: Copernicus] The main insight of one of the flag-bearers of the scientific revolution, Copernicus, already contains the first seeds of this deconstructive process. With his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543, Copernicus argued to replace the then-common geocentric model of the universe (i.e. with Earth at the centre) with a heliocentric model (i.e. with the Sun at the centre). As such, Copernicus deconstructed the idea that Earth is the centre of the universe – his insight, therefore, means that humanity is not at the centre of God’s creation.
[2: Charles Darwin] Darwin’s brilliant insight was, of course, that all living things resulted from evolution via natural selection. This process can (and did, and continues to) occur in many different contexts through the accumulation of tiny changes over large time spans. As such, Darwin’s theory of evolution deconstructed the idea that man is the pinnacle of creation – man was not created, and humanity is not necessarily in any general sense nature’s most successful or ‘best’ product.
[3: Friedrich Nietzsche] Nietzsche, one of Ricoeur’s ‘masters of suspicion’, targeted Christianity in many of his writings (e.g. The Antichrist, 1895). He claimed that Christianity is guilty of the ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (transvaluation of all values): its moral system supports the weak, in direct opposition to the natural way, where the ‘Wille zur Macht’ (will to power: ambition as humankind’s main motivating principle) reigns. In fact, through the development of science and knowledge, Nietzsche said that humanity killed God, that he is not necessary any longer as an idea to guide our lives. This way, Nietzsche deconstructed the idea that God is the master of man’s existence.
[4: Karl Marx] Marx, another of Ricoeur’s ‘masters of suspicion’, analysed history as a process of class struggles – the elite on the one hand versus the proletariat, the workers, on the other. His texts contain a call for the emancipation of work as the focus of man’s existence, and the emancipation of workers as the true backbone of society. As such, Marx deconstructed the idea that the elite should rule the masses.
[5: Sigmund Freud] Freud, the third of Ricoeur’s ‘masters of suspicion’, put one of the final nails in the coffin of the Enlightenment’s optimism about humanity’s potential for obtaining ultimate knowledge and control over nature. His psychological theories posited the Id (the unconscious, uncontrollable, instinctual) as an important influence on conscious thought and behaviour. As such, Freud deconstructed the idea that man is fully in control of his own thoughts and actions.
Via these – and other – deconstructive steps, in the twentieth century Enlightenment optimism was supplanted by postmodernity, according to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences. The postmodern insight includes the ideas that human beings do not reside at the centre of the universe, humans do not represent the pinnacle of creation, there is no higher being to take care of us, average citizens should not depend on an elite that tells them what to do, and we are not even fully in control of what we do and say. At the core of the postmodern condition is the idea that nothing is certain, and there is no single truth … merely many different stories and opinions. An important sociopolitical development in the twentieth century contributing to this diversification of truths and voices was the emancipation of former European colonies, which progressively (re)gained their independence and found their own cultural voices to add to the global discussion. This resulted in a proliferation of stories and viewpoints about what the world is or should be like. Jean-François Lyotard (1979) describes postmodernity as the end of grand, singular, globally applicable narratives: the Enlightenment ‘narrative’ was a story of the great historical powers of Europe, but that narrow view is no longer appropriate. Instead, in postmodernity, there is no single unifying truth, merely many parallel personal stories, viewpoints and experiences that have very local, context-bound truth conditions.
This suspension of judgement about universal truth has affected many thinkers, theories and branches of science. Thomas Kuhn (1962), for instance, suggested that the idea of definitive truth in science is questionable. Instead, he claimed that there are paradigm shifts in scientific development, and working form a particular paradigm it is impossible to be neutral and objective in establishing which paradigm is ‘the best’. There is always a disciplinarian or cultural bias. Richard Rorty (1989) claimed that there is no universal morality: all moral claims are context-bound. And Jean Baudrillard (1981) even suggested that modern media has lead us into a state of hyperreality: via media such as television and (more recently) the Internet, so much information is represented and simulated that there is a loss of meaning of this information. Because the current media consumer is focused on the consumption of non-authentic stimuli, we are losing the ability to distinguish what is real from what is fake and simulated.
Previous chapters have already introduced some of the postmodern ideas. Specifically, Chapter 2 (on freedom), 3 (on meaningful experiences) and 4 (on identity) argued for the centrality of experience, and the relinquishing of the ideal of absolute freedom in leisure (and instead the suggestion that something feeling free or something being in accordance with one’s values and wishes was ‘free enough’), already foreshadowing these postmodern insights. There are significant and serious additional consequences for our understanding of leisure to be found in the postmodern paradigm.
An important insight is that leisure plays a key role in the commodification of postmodernity: postmodern society has transformed experiences into something that can be purchased and consumed. The experience economy, conceptualised and popularised by Pine and Gilmore (1999), is the economical dynamic in which consumers are willing to pay a premium for experience value attached to goods and services. A can of generic cola represents a certain value, but if it is a name brand like Coca-Cola which represents a particular quality, and even in a way a particular lifestyle (crafted by marketeers through imaginative and cleverly evocative advertisements), the value for the customer (hence the price that she is willing to pay) is significantly higher. The core of this insight had already been seen a few years earlier by Gerhard Schulze (1992) when he described the Erlebnisgesellschaft. The insight here is having experiences is an important goal in everyday life, and even that a growing number of (post)modern Western consumers strive for ever more extreme experiences, to keep looking for ways to experience danger, emotion and sensation, in the process crossing boundaries of privacy, bad taste and sheer intensity, with the intent of experiencing something new and exciting. This escalating search for novelty and excitement is intended to compensate for numbness, boredom and indifference that have accrued due to overstimulation via the media and urban overcrowding.
Russell (2013) highlights the role of leisure in the historical developments that have brought us to our current, postmodern confusion. He describes, roughly, the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, i.e. the birth of postmodern society as we know it, and then with a focus on the British situation. In line with Schulze’s idea above, one of the key processes of this period highlighted by Russell is urbanisation. In a practical sense, the growth of cities means a bigger public to viably sustain many more leisure facilities and opportunities. Urbanisation is also a key driver of some of the postmodernity factors mentioned above: the acceleration of society, a massive increase in the availability of impressions, resulting in a continuous pressure to deal with that increased impression-load, e.g. to make choices what to consume.
Another historical development mentioned by Russell is the improvement of conditions for average working citizens, primarily the regularisation of the work/non-work balance, as well as rising income. More free time and more disposable income meant increased possibilities and demand for leisure and holidays. An additional factor here is that if some level of freedom is offered, people are going to explore that freedom, necessitating the continued development or discovery of new experiences. Additionally, Russell says, the importance of class (and gender) barriers has decreased, meaning that social interaction became more dynamic, less rigid, less ‘safe’, allowing for new leisure-based interaction possibilities. This latter point is also stressed by Blackshaw (2010), as he describes liquid modernity, his alternative to the (in his eyes) confusing and none-too-specific idea of ‘postmodernity’. Liquid modernity, in Blackshaw’s understanding, means that society is no longer stratified along the old divisions of gender, class and race. In contrast, our current leisure options are much less rigid, and are in fact defined by individual freedom of choice.
Blackshaw (2010) highlights the novelty of the liquidly modern conception of leisure by contrasting two metaphors: McDonaldization versus IKEAization, exemplifying, in order, rational control versus hedonistic entropy in leisure. Sociologist George Ritzer (1993) suggests that in modern society we can see the process of McDonaldization: an emphasis on efficiency, calculability and predictability, with the intent of controlling the leisure process. This overly rational approach to doing business results in the strangely contradictory situation that everything of value for the consumer and the employee has been removed: eating at McDonald’s lacks, for many people, many of the qualities that make eating enjoyable, and working there is hardly rewarding. Blackshaw, in contrast, supports the idea of IKEAization as a valid metaphor to capture the specifics of current leisure behaviour: the opportunity to make and remake one’s own environment in a personally agreeable manner best fits the concept of liquid modernity. In that sense, IKEAization suggests the centrality of using the freedom in leisure to explore personally meaningful experiences in leisure.
Visser’s (1998) analysis of the pressure of experience that infuses (post) modern society offers several important ideas to help understand experience in a postmodern or liquidly modern context. In this section, we will highlight a few ideas from that analysis that will inform our own conceptualisation of leisure as we move towards new ground in the philosophical perspective on leisure, in Chapters 6 through 9. In earlier chapters (e.g. 3 on meaningful experiences, but also 2, on freedom, and 4, on identity) we highlighted the importance of the (meaningful) experience to leisure: to have such a satisfactory sensation is the goal and quality criterion for many leisure pursuits.
Experiencing as an expression of being-in-the-world is ambiguous – for Nietzsche, according to Visser, this ambiguity takes the form of a dual decline, a nihilistic catastrophe. On the one hand, there is experiencing as exploitation, and experiencing as experimentation. For either variant, or in fact in general, according to Visser, experience is characterised by pressure: the pressure to have experiences at all, and the pressure (either self-imposed or from peers) to have one’s experiences be particular kinds of experience – for instance, the pleasurable experiences that one hopes would enrich one’s life. Both dualities can be recognised in postmodern leisure, and if we impose a pessimistic perspective, we can definitely see, in line with Nietzsche, the nihilistic and catastrophic nature of these options.
That is, in postmodern society, with its barrage of media stimuli, there is certainly a pressure to experience ever more frequently, and ever more intensely. Advertisements tell us what to buy and where to go on vacation, and the widespread sharing of one’s activities via social media creates a context in which it is expected to have wonderful experiences all day long – the perfect breakfast, the ideal night out on the town, the most original interior design choices, etc. If this pressure becomes great enough, it starts taking on an exploitational character – it becomes a race, almost, of exploiting one’s limited resources to be the first, or the best, to stand out somehow and be most effective at having an experience. This is where we would see some people pressuring their leisure experiences and themselves to find the greatest pleasure – especially when the quality of an experience is defined by hedonistic elements. At this end of the spectrum we find Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) conspicuous consumption, either of goods one can buy to consume, or of experiences intended to quench a spiritual hunger that has emerged in the postmodern dissolution of deep meaning, be it religious, aesthetic or otherwise. Somewhat more adventurous people might also use the freedom in leisure and the moral underdetermination of postmodern society to experiment, especially with their leisure exploits: to seek new interpretations and experiences. This too can be hedonistic, for instance if the bodily dimension becomes dominant, if chasing pleasure and ever more extreme sensations becomes the norm. Leisure can be an important playground for such exploration; recall that in Chapter 2 we characterised the more experimental forms of leisure as existential adolescence. Here we can sense some of Rosa’s (2013) notion of social acceleration, highlighted in Intermezzo I, i.e. what he poetically describes as people being caught in a frenetic standstill.
However, if we infuse exploitational and experimentational experience with a strong moral centre, especially in a leisure context, we believe that we can end up with something more valuable, something with a lot more beneficial potential. Inspired by Aristotle’s leisure as skholē, as a search for eudaimonia, and Blackshaw’s (2010) leisure as art of life, we can infuse leisure with a strong optimistic drive, a focus on well-being and quality of life, and, therefore, by implication, a particular ethical and aesthetic normativity (see Chapter 5). This too can be an expression of a pressure to experience, but then not an experience for its own sake, but an experience with a deontic dimension – the experience will have the intent of bringing about a more desirable state, e.g. one with increased well-being. This would be a very practical and somewhat literal implementation of Heidegger’s notion of ‘care’: an action-oriented benevolence, a drive to improve one’s fate in life, sprouting from the fundamental being-in-the-world that is characterised by the ever-continuing process of experiencing. One of the ideas to be developed further in Chapters 6 through 9 concerns the role of leisure in this well-being-focused dynamic.
Before we can go there, some additional conceptual clarification and expansion is needed. In Chapter 3 we have already looked at the connection between meaningful experiences and leisure. At this time, we will explore the experience angle from the life philosophy perspective, incorporating ideas from Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger (inspired by Visser’s (1998) analysis).
Dilthey understood that being human means being submerged in experiences – more particularly, that understanding oneself as human means understanding this life coherence as a temporal phenomenon. In line with the notion of narrativity introduced in Chapter 2 and explored more extensively in Chapter 4, we can suggest that understanding oneself as a self means zooming in and zooming out of the experiential sequence that makes up a life narrative: the meaning of an experience emerges in seeing it in the local temporal context – living the experience in the moment – and placing it in a holistic framework – seeing the role of this experience in one’s broader life context. This understanding can unfold as time progresses – in remembering, (self-)interpretation and contemplation will help experiences settle in one’s life narrative, not definitively but changing and adapting as one’s identity evolves.
Experience exists as pressure, as was claimed above, but the (perceived) freedom of leisure (which we explored in Chapter 2) opens up the possibility to play with this pressure. To insert playfulness into the pressure to experience means to introduce a kind of fluidity, a creativity to this pressure, and the possibility to place one’s own experiential markers in one’s own narrative life sequence. This fluidity is facilitated by the stretchability of experienced time itself. This idea can be found in, for example, Bergson (1896), and consists in the claim that in experiencing or remembering events from the past, meaningful occurrences are differently indexed than periods that are light on personally significant events. In experience, eventful periods seem to progress quickly (‘time flies when you’re having fun’), whereas boring periods can appear to last much longer than they actually do. In memory, the reverse appears to be the case: more is retained from high-density periods than from empty, eventless time (Van Leeuwen 2009b; Wittmann 2016; see also for a nice selection of relevant papers Arstila and Lloyd 2014). So, while in the process of experiencing, a boring/empty experience can seem to last a long time: experienced time is stretched out. While remembering, an impressive experience becomes much more prominent, and a boring experience all but disappears. Remembered time, therefore, shows exactly the opposite properties.
This distinction is linked to the conceptual refinement of the notion of ‘experience’ that has already been referenced in Chapter 3: the difference between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. In Van Leeuwen (2009b), the two subconcepts were characterised by highlighting that ‘[Erfahrung is] the intensely meaningful and essentially personal and organic character of an individual, content-rich experience…. Erlebnis, on the contrary, is more shallow, repetitious or repeatable, more common but ultimately fleeting in nourishing content’ (Van Leeuwen 2009b: 185–186). In Van Leeuwen (2009b), the suggested translations, in order to capture these nuances in English, were ‘momentary experience’ for Erlebnis, and ‘momentous experience’ for Erfahrung.
Leisure is a prime contributor of Erlebnisse, of fleeting but sometimes powerful momentary experiences. The freedom and playfulness in leisure allow for the exploration of novel momentary experiences, and also of bespoke momentary experiences – experiences that provide a better fit with who someone considers herself to be, or wishes that she were. Furthermore, leisure as the practice of seeking out momentary experiences can help ‘fill’ time, to stave off boredom and add a particular character to one’s life narrative (e.g. by choosing artistic, or athletic, or exciting momentary experiences that are coherent in light of a particular personality doing the choosing). These are ways in which leisure can help make the pressure of experience more fluid, and help provide a better fit in one’s personal narrative.
Let us return to Dilthey’s temporal conception of experience for a moment. The temporal situatedness of momentary experiences means, to an important extent, exactly that: they are confined to a specific time and place, and derive much of their meaning and uniqueness from that contextdependence. However, the zooming-in and zooming-out referenced above that helps localise these momentary experiences in one’s life narrative consists of interpretation and finding and ascribing meaning with a double-sided (i.e. past- and future-oriented) tension. What an experience means is established by seeing it in light of memories of past events, and predictions or even active planning and anticipating of future events. Planning for future actions or events becomes a process of extrapolation of the life course inspired by preferred past experiences, so this extrapolation has a direction. Based on what we would consider to be a desired outcome, our experiences accrue a teleological dimension: this is what we hope for, this is what we want, this is the goal that we are trying to reach. Making such plans based on personally held values means infusing this process with normativity, in line with the exploration of leisure ethics in Chapter 5: this is what we feel is good, this is what we consider to be important.
Using the freedom in leisure to seek out activities to do, hobbies to pursue, skills to train and destinations to visit that add value to our lives, means to use the contextual nature of momentary leisure experiences and extrapolate them into something bigger – a life narrative – along benevolent and optimistic lines. Here we see the building blocks of leisure as art of life, as Blackshaw (2010) might see it. Choosing the right kinds of leisure experiences can help make one’s life better.
This is an expression of power, arguably a form of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht. This means taking control of one’s life, exploiting one’s freedom (e.g. in leisure), and using experiences to transcend the limitations of an unexplored, unambitious, unfulfilled life. Which norms then apply can be very subjective, so, appropriately, leisure has many different forms. The norms that shape these forms can be ethical – as we have already seen in Chapter 5 – and they can be aesthetic – very appropriate if we consider leisure an expression of art of life, of living life artistically (whatever that might mean concretely for a given individual).
Just like leisure, good works of art facilitate momentary experiences with a particular, valuable content and character. Art helps people to discover insight, personal truths, about themselves and about the world. Art also helps people to uncover moral truths, about what really matters, about what is (personally or communally) important. Viewing art or producing art can deliver these effects in various shapes and intensities, and the aesthetic experience to facilitate these effects can exist in many shapes and intensities. In Chapter 8, we will look at art and artistic expression, and the consumption of art in exactly this context: as a facilitator of self-determination. Some of the methods involved, and some of the norms that can be explored, the level of authenticity that can be strived for, can be quite extreme – we will look at trailblazing forms of leisure in shock art and edgework, leisure on the edge.
The optimistic, well-being-focused perspective that is opened up in leisure, with as a foundation a layer of context-bound momentary experiences, implies one last set of ideas that we will briefly touch upon here. The philosophical elephant in the room is, of course, Heidegger.
A notion central to Heidegger’s philosophy is Dasein, which refers to a pre-conceptual situatedness, a being-in-the-world that precedes any cognitive analysis, but rather makes it possible to perceive, experience, grasp and understand. Dasein can also refer to a being – a person – that exhibits this fundamental epistemological and social openness and context-dependence. It is this fundamental situatedness, the always already being somewhere in a particular way, that we recognise from the (momentary) experience concept developed above.
There are several dimensions in Heidegger’s Dasein that are relevant to our ongoing efforts to understand leisure.
First of all, Dasein as that fundamental situatedness is something that unites us, something that we share as human beings. Haugeland (2005: 423) highlights the social dimension of Dasein when he describes it as ‘a way of life shared by the members of some community’. We have already encountered the openness to the other that this would require – the affect attunement in Chapter 4, and the very ethics of leisure in Chapter 5.
Second, Heidegger suggests that the situatedness, this being-in-the-world, expresses itself as Sorge (care). Being in the world, living in a context – especially a social context – already presupposes that this world matters to us in some way. We are always already in the world in a particular way, so with a specific attitude, or mood, or disposition of some other kind. In leisure, care as a mode of being in the world tends towards largely optimistic, social, personal-improvement-focused, meaningful, high-quality experiences and activities. Along similar lines, we can say that leisure is about exploring a pleasurable interaction with the world, and if we add ethical and aesthetic norms this enables leisure as art of life.
And third, according to Heidegger, the phenomenology associated with each Dasein’s situatedness has a strong hermeneutical flavour. While experiencing, we are constantly urged to interpret ourselves, each other and our position in the world. We suggest that leisure is an important domain for that kind of interpretation. Leisure, and the freedom it implies, opens up the playground, so to speak, for experimentation and exploration as a hermeneutic mode-of-being. Some of the building blocks of this idea have already been touched upon in earlier chapters, with narrativity as a possible hermeneutic form, and play (as a way of exploiting the freedom in leisure) as a possible hermeneutic tool through which leisure can facilitate this exploration.
In general, we see potential in a leisurely mode of Dasein, and several aspects of this idea will be explored in upcoming Chapters 6 through 9. Leisure is not necessarily about what humans-as-Dasein are, but what they can be. Leisure is about the quest to realise potential, to bring the self and the world in line with ethically and aesthetically defined quality criteria, to shape and improve the personal narrative. This lies at the centre of leisure as art of life: leisure facilitates a way of being-in-the-world (optimistically, optimally, optimisation-focused) and being-there-for-the-world (leisure as care: striving for goals according to aesthetic criteria, e.g. stimulating reflexive and communal well-being).
Leisure helps shape being-in-the-world based on free choice in accordance with narratively coherent identity exploration and development goals, which include transcendent, meaningful, enriching and enlightening experiences.
There is an interesting tangential point here. We will not get into it too deeply in this book, because the topic is complex enough to deserve its own book. But here it is, because we do want to at least mention it, and suggest it deserves further research: we believe that leisure represents a crossover domain that might contribute to closing the gap between two long-standing philosophical rivals. We have already seen ideas and concepts from both traditions, and now it will pay to make that explicit.
There are two main traditions in Western philosophy: analytical philosophy, which is rooted mainly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and continental philosophy, which is traditionally mainly German and French. The main thematic distinction is that analytical philosophy is focused, in its preferred themes and general approach, on (natural/positivistic) science, whereas continental philosophy is much more closely aligned with the study of culture and society, i.e. the domain of the humanities and social science. This means that the main methodological distinction between the two philosophical ‘schools’ is that analytical philosophy is usually objective and logic-based, whereas continental philosophy is often literary and phenomenological in its approach.
At its core, there is a disagreement between the two approaches about which kind of information about the world is most relevant or valuable to provide the most appropriate descriptions and analyses of people and their place in the world. A distinguishing characteristic of the continental tradition is a rejection of the natural scientific method as the primary means of finding out ‘what the world is like’: scientific methodology (even the very possibility of being objective) is a human construct, and all human constructs arise within a context (historical, sociocultural), so their validity should be assessed as such. This antagonism is what inspired Wilhelm Dilthey to make a distinction between Geisteswissenschaft (which focuses on ‘lived experience’) and Naturwissenschaft (which strives for an objectivist approach to nature).
This distinction becomes particularly clear in the study of the mind. Much analytically inspired philosophy of mind attempts to reduce consciousness to something more basic (e.g. physicalism: thinking is to be explained in terms of physical processes – often this means reducing psychological explanations to explanations involving (microphysical) brain processes). Phenomenology is anti-reductionistic, claiming that the main perspective to explain the world is at the ‘level’ of people and personal experiences, not atoms and biophysical processes. This focus on lived experience is something that we have already discussed in this intermezzo: it involves the feeling of being there that can only be experienced for oneself, and only from the first-person perspective (subjectively). Measuring the processes involved and describing the relevant parameters in objectivist scientific terms will not help us understand what it is really like to experience such and such. In contrast, poetry and literature are imperfect ways of capturing these feelings, but they can evoke them in a way that objective, positivistic, analytical scientific texts cannot.
Analytical philosophers would agree with the ineffable nature of phenomenological states or contents; they call these fundamental features of feelings and experiences qualia (Nagel 1974), the subjective what-it-is-like to experience something that cannot be captured in objectivist terms. There is a major discussion in the philosophy of mind about how to deal with them, how to respect them while still retaining the powerful explanatory properties of more objectivist scientific approaches and theories.
There are significant and exciting attempts to integrate the two traditions. Some philosophers and psychologists working in the embodied cognition paradigm, for instance those supporting enactivism (which we discussed in Chapter 4), attempt to integrate knowledge from phenomenological traditions, often Merleau-Ponty (Thompson 2007) and/or Heidegger (Clark 1997 – his book is called Being There, echoing Heidegger’s notion Dasein), and even Buddhism (Varela et al. 1991). An attempt at cleaning up this discussion at the metaphysical level can be found in Van Leeuwen (2009a).
Considering the themes we’ve already addressed in this book regarding leisure, the contours of our suggestion regarding the antagonism between analytical and continental philosophy are already there: leisure is a crossover domain which allows both sides into its playground. There is room in leisure for the bio-psychological perspective, i.e. theories involving embodied sensorimotor planning and acting from the analytical ‘camp’, and also for the existential-phenomenological perspective, i.e. theories involving fundamental, precognitive being-in-the-world from the continental ‘camp’. Leisure is open to both kinds of conceptualisation because it is a socially established and significant practice that is embodied, and incorporates the idea of the centrality of experience. Leisure is a playground to explore the personal and communal impact of the search for meaning and happiness – and our suggestion is that we need both the analytical and the continental perspectives to do this properly.
Of course, we do not entertain the illusion that our modest contributions in this book are going to solve this matter conclusively. However, what we do suggest is that the domain of leisure offers an intriguing context to explore, hypothesise, experiment and analyse many of the themes relevant to both philosophical traditions. Throughout this book, we have already used themes and insights from both of them. In Chapters 6 through 9 we will continue to do so, and we will formulate several follow-up questions that could help guide future discussions in leisure studies.
So now we believe that we find ourselves in a position to start exploring a promise that was encapsulated in an earlier chapter. In Chapter 5, we said the following:
The guiding philosophy behind a leisure ethic, then, could be seen as an art of life that revolves around self-care, self-development, self-perfection, self-realisation, self-responsibility within the framework of an ethics and aesthetics of existence. The leisure ethic fundamentally concerns self-morality, wisdom and becoming fully human with eudaimonia as the beckoning horizon.
Leisure as care, as a way to find the good things in life, to strive for self-development and a better future for others: that is the idea of leisure as art of life. In the remaining chapters of this book, we will explore several key current and future themes as we see them in a philosophical approach to leisure and the good life.
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