When looking back on the reception of the leisure concept and also the leisure idea in history, Heraclitus’ famous adage panta rhei (everything flows) comes to mind. He uses the image of a river to argue that, like the water is continuously flowing, reality is in a constant state of flux. Yet the only thing that stays the same is the concept of the river, whereas its bedding and content are always changing (Dietz 2004: 60). The first chapter of this study confirms the change in reception of the leisure concept, or rather the leisure idea over time. History shows a cyclic movement regarding the perception of leisure, which starts with the centrality of happiness and the good life in ancient Greek philosophy, flows through epochs in which health, worship, idleness, pleasure, entertainment, recreation, luxury, play, celebration, self-realisation, and spirituality alternate, and ends again with well-being, thriving and happiness in current times. Yet these ideas often/usually figure within societal structures such as everyday leisure activities which, in turn, evoke meaningful experiences that are also socially relevant – in the sense that they are expressed in desired behaviour. Having said this, the question about the ontological meaning and nature of ‘leisure’ unavoidably emerges when used as an adjective to the noun ‘activities’. What does leisure mean when conceived as an activity? In addition, what does leisure mean when, for example, conceived as (discretionary) time, or an attitude, a state of mind or a state of being? Is it possible to catch the very essence of the leisure idea? Can philosophical analysis bring more clarity with regard to the very meaning of leisure and can that open up (new) possibilities for revitalising the study of leisure? This was the purpose of this study from the outset.
Blackshaw believes that the question about the essence of leisure is unanswerable, and in coining the notion of liquid leisure, he essentially embraces Heraclitus’ pre-Socratic idea of flux – which of course has been revitalised by Bauman in modern times. Leisure is just too dynamic and its meaning just too elusory to express its fundamental meaning in one single, timeless answer. There is not only an etymological and historical-epochal dimension underlying the essential meaning of leisure, but there is also a contextual-cultural dimension to consider. Chick points out that, based on anthropological research, many languages lack a direct translation of the word ‘leisure’, but still, people from other cultures do have some understanding, from their own contexts, of what leisure means (1998: 117). In India, for example, people do not conceive leisure as time or activity, but as joyous freedom and ‘an overall state of existence associated with happiness and the good life’ (Rauchaudhuri and Samdahl 2005: 3). The Chinese word hsiao yao contains meanings that could be related to the Greek skholē, although direct translations are problematic. Comparative research into the etymology of words from two Kenyan dialects points out that they are not directly equivalents of ‘leisure’, but they do have comparative meanings such as ‘behaviours or activities that give people happiness or bring back or soothe the heart or the spirit’ and ‘free or unrestricted time’ (Chick 1998: 117). Chick’s anthropological inquiries lead him – as indicated above – to hold that leisure can very well be experienced without having a concept of leisure. He also proposes that scholars should break the Western ‘monopoly’ in determining the concepts in the global study of leisure (1998: 127–128).
This is quite an important observation, since other cross-cultural studies confirm that conceptualisations of leisure in academic and professional literature are predominantly Western. For example, Lee et al.’s comparative empirical research on the conceptualisation of leisure in two countries from different cultural contexts points out that an individual’s relationship to work and the feelings surrounding it are, for Americans, highly correlated with leisure, while Koreans deem perceived freedom to be the most important indicator for the essence of leisure (2001: 149). This finding concurs with Gerring’s view that a concept structurally consists of a term (for example, leisure) that covers both the phenomena that are to be defined and the properties or attributes related to them (1999: 357–358). Therefore Chick’s suggestion that content can be understood without concept seems debatable. How can one know that what one experiences is leisure if one does not have a concept of leisure? In addition, is it logically, hermeneutically and argumentatively sound to typify an experience that an individual from another culture has as a leisure experience if the same kind of experience is deemed as such in one’s own culture? In other words, is it valid to label, for example, the presence of discretionary time in Korea as a leisure phenomenon just because it is labelled as such in North America? The answer seems to be ‘no’. Concepts and their attributes and empirical referents are always contextual, or rather embedded. It will go too far to get submerged into a foundational discussion about the theory of concepts, but it might be illuminating to call Van Leeuwen’s Radicality Manifold approach to the nature of concepts to mind. This model is based on an holistic presupposition depicting the embodied agent as fundamentally embedded within his own environment (2009: 213). Humans are bodily involved in and interact with physical and environmental factors, which form the coordinates of behaviour that is ‘steered’ by the concept. He holds: ‘it should be possible to individuate concepts in terms of the various constraints and enablings that are posed by the experiences and bits of knowledge contained within a concept’s narrative jurisprudence’ (2009: 213). A concept, according to Van Leeuwen’s theory, is more than a mere mental representation of an object: it is derived from embodied experience and therefore has its own ‘story’, based on a specific experience and rationality. This is important to notice when dealing with concepts that emerged in different sociocultural contexts. Is leisure, then, Chick wonders, although labelled as a ‘universal human phenomenon’, ‘subjective experience or existential condition’ (1998: 127)? One might add: ‘or is leisure both?’
Giddens, in advocating a plausible theory of leisure within sociology, detects a ‘lack of adequate conceptualisation’, since the concept itself has been used in different kinds of meanings (1964: 84). It is therefore important to realise that leisure is mainly conceived as ‘instrumental activity’ while – in order to come to some kind of generalisation – it should also be studied in terms of the ‘total life situation’ of a specific group (1964: 85) – hereby attesting to the contextual nature of contexts as well. Yet a proper understanding of leisure, Giddens holds, takes the interrelationships between work, leisure and play to be its preferential basis. However, the question remains: ‘what does Giddens perceive leisure to be?’. Purrington and Hickerson search for an unambiguous conceptualisation of leisure, which they regard essential to its understanding. They state that although ‘an ontologically “correct” or final definition is unlikely’, it should be possible to ‘develop a working operational definition that is applicable and comparable across cultures’ (2013: 134). To their minds, this definition should answer to two central questions, namely, what is the nature of leisure and how does leisure relate to work? (2013: 128). Spracklen, as has been explicated in the first intermezzo of this study, argues that the challenge lies in solving the leisure paradox, depicting being instrumentalised on the one hand and related to personal choice on the other. He is in need of an ‘objective arbiter of truth’ (2011: 181) which is firmly related to the meaning and purpose of leisure within a specific time and place and therefore also ‘ultimately associated with agency and with identity’ (2011: 197). The hermeneutical-conceptual complexity of leisure and the scholarly attempts to steer the discussion towards a clear definition of leisure have caused some struggle and headaches during the last decades, but also in this study. It might be clear by now.
Isn’t it plausible then that one, in attempting to reach a proper understanding of the concept leisure, reaches back to its very roots? Some leisure scholars indicate they believe that the views of the ancient Greeks might open up new insights, but it seems that contemporary analysts of leisure do not share the classical idea of leisure en masse. Despite attempts to explore the origins of the concept, scholars in the United States, for example, keep on studying leisure as time, activity or a state of mind, which, according to some European leisure scholars, for example, rather resort to the conceptual coordinates of recreation, instead of leisure. The phenomenon of leisure is studied from different perspectives and by different disciplines, but the sociological paradigm still performs the overtone. This leads some scholars to find the nature of leisure being expressed in both objective coordinates of leisure, such as the relation between work and activity, and subjective coordinates, such as affect, self-expression and perceived freedom. The array of conceptual views on leisure which lead scholars to formally categorise leisure as time, activity, state of mind, and state of being seemingly do not yet create a substantial impetus towards new and creative streams of thinking. The complexity surrounding its study is quite immense and so is the need for Leisure Studies to escape the apparent crisis it is currently in.
While leisure is fundamentally a philosophical concept, it is, as said, mainly studied by the social sciences. In order to open up new possibilities in the study of leisure, a (philosophical) analysis of foundational-historical meanings of leisure and a search for the conceptual depths of leisure through clarification of its definiendum, the leisure ideal, was undertaken. Scholars like De Grazia and Goodale both hold the ‘leisure problem’ to lie ‘in the absence of meaning in our leisure’ (Hemingway 1988: 181). Meaning is a category which is studied in different contexts and from different perspectives, but its foundational significance and meaning could better be explored by philosophy, which aims at understanding the general principles and ideas that lie behind the concept and the language used to communicate it. Philosophy tries to illuminate the implicit, and interrelationships between phenomena and the analysis of those ideas points to interesting analogies that could be made between the classical viewpoint of leisure and modern man’s interest in being:
a little bit of a philosopher and an athlete, combining moral perfectionism, hedonic as well as ludic intentions and actions in the complex niche of recreation, treating them all as the values necessary for building happiness, wholeness, healthiness and even holiness in his personality and life offered to him by his fate
– a description which embodies a ‘complex, classical model of human self-fulfilment’ (Zowisło 2010: 70). The human propensity of being a ‘little bit of a philosopher’ gives rise to contemplation – an activity deemed by Aristotle as an essential characteristic of a leisurely life, because it was the key to self-actualisation, c.q. a life of excellence (Rauchaudhuri and Samdahl 2005: 1). This kind of contemplation, or reflection, as is argued in this study, is fundamentally focused on creating meaning in and assessing the meaning of an individual’s life, which logs on to De Grazia’s and Goodale’s diagnosis of the problem of leisure.
Ontologically speaking, the essential structure of meaning has been indicated as the important. As has been explicated in Chapter 3, meaning, in turn, is, according to Ford, the most foundational structure of reality. Whereas Heidegger holds Dasein (being there) to be the most fundamental ontological structure of reality since it depicts searching for (the nature of) human identity (the self), and whereas Levinas broadens the ontological basis of reality by posing responsibility to be more fundamental than any search for truth (ethics comes before being), Ford argues that meaning and purpose are even more fundamental than ethics. Meaning presupposes engagement with transcendence, because every attempt people make to create meaning anticipates experiences that bring meaning and purpose to their lives. This resonates with Aristotle’s notion of skholē, which revolves around the pursuit of a life that leads to happiness, human flourishing and well-being. These ideals could be considered the most important in the lives of human beings. Contemplating and searching for the important presupposes a freedom of spirit and a spirit of freedom that transcend the notions of positive and negative freedom as explicated by philosophers like Stuart Mill, Berlin and Taylor (Ten Kate 2016: 34). Creating the important presupposes a strange freedom that cannot be placed on the continuum between the poles of servility and sovereignty, since it is related to finding an imaginary place in the strangeness that lurks in the world and in human beings. Bataille calls freedom the experience of emptiness; it is detached from (social) reality; it calls for imagining and creating a life in continuous oscillation between the two extremes of servility and sovereignty, knowing that people are unable to live according to the rules of both, although they are both at the same time (Ten Kate 2016: 50–51, 53). This strange freedom, this living ‘within’ dilemmas, is arguably a possible substantiation of what Blackshaw calls the ‘unknown known’, which he holds to be the secret of leisure (2010: 141–142). At the same time, leisure relates to the secret imaginaries of every human being, which form the building blocks for creating meaningful worlds.
The notion of the important runs like a golden thread through all the other different constituents of leisure ideas that have been teased out from their historical embedment. It concerns not only meaning and freedom, but also human identity and ethics. As far as identity is concerned: the important, as the essential structure of meaning, is instrumental in navigating the fluid reality human beings find themselves in. It serves as a compass for exploring different ways of constructing one’s personal narrative through experiencing, learning, doing, creating, thinking and interpreting. The exposure to something of transcendental importance opens up to self-creation and self-shaping (Bouwer and Van Leeuwen 2013: 589). The important also steers the great human adventure of experimenting with different kinds of ‘becomings’ and underlies their presupposed perceptions about the ends of life and moral ways of realising them. This implies being concerned with learning the skills by means of which one can integrate the important into one’s own life in such a way that self-care and wisdom are served and advanced. It embraces the notion of the ‘art of life’ which has been addressed in the chapter on the interrelations between leisure and ethics. Moulding one’s life into a piece of art, among others, presupposes breaking through the walls of the ‘frenetic standstill’ Rosa has diagnosed modern society to be in. The illusionary fluidity of reality usurps any time that could be reserved for the important. Steering one’s life in an artful way inevitably has to deal with, among others, slowing down the pace of life and recapturing inner, personal time. ‘How do I spend my time?’ has in modern times become the temporal version of the ethical question ‘how do I want to live?’.
What does the notion of the important, as the essential structure of meaning, tell about the essential nature of leisure? Does it help to show new directions in the study of leisure or does it just add up to the conceptual confusion that dominates leisure literature? Is it a valid exercise if one, in trying to unknot conceptual entanglements in a specific (postmodern) time frame, performs conceptual analysis of foundational concepts born in another (ancient) time frame and context which clearly developed other meaning contents over time? Is there an added value to tampering with meaning contents of a specific concept that is widely (academically, professionally and popularly) established in a specific language field?
Arguably, there is some value in these exercises, because tracing the meaning content of a concept back to its roots and the context in which it was born does not only provide etymological clarity, but also makes room for comparative analysis. In addition, the method used for performing this conceptual exercise, namely pushing through to the most foundational (ontological) level one could possibly reach, could also aid in bringing more clarity. Aristotle’s position on skholē is clear by now. His use of this notion can arguably be called ontological as well, since it is embedded in the search for the borders and ultimate ends of human reality. Skholē is the most important ideal in human life. It is therefore, to a great extent, subjective experience and a universal human phenomenon at the same time. Yet most of all: it forms the inner dynamics or structure of all other human activities, but is not identical with them. This implies that skholē is just not the same as play or recreation or rest or discretionary time. Solmsen has convincingly demonstrated that Aristotle:
puts play and serious work (or business) on one and the same side, assigning to play the function of relieving the tensions of àskholía, while on the other side he places skholē, remaining true to his conviction that it is the end and goal
where one can look for ‘human excellence and human happiness’ (1964: 214). Moreover, Solmsen holds, skholē was not, as widely is supposed, meant to be a philosophical endeavour in which only a few people could realise their ultimate bliss through contemplation and intellectual reflection. Since the majority of the citizens were not able to indulge in theoretical pursuits – Aristotle was clearly aware of their position – the purpose of skholē was conceived to be the ‘private happiness of the citizens’ and the potential for a virtuous life (1964: 219).
Skholē is all about meaning. It is about the art of life. It is subjective experience occupied in the pursuit of the important in life. That might be clear. Scholars have attempted to cater for this Aristotelian differentiation in history by also distinguishing between possible meanings leisure could have. Petrarch, for example, describes two kinds of leisure. Leisure one relates to ‘relaxation, recreation and entertainment’ and leisure two ‘cultivates our minds and makes our inner self strong’ (Holba 2007: 64). Many centuries later, in the twenty-first century, Holba revisits Petrarch’s view of leisure, calling his leisure two ‘philosophical leisure’ (2007: 64) and also distinguishes it from recreation. However, although the concept, according to Solmsen’s analysis, apparently does not fully cover the meaning Aristotle allotted to skholē (1964) – Holba typifies philosophical leisure as a ‘philosophy of communication and a-way-of-being-in-the-world’ (2010: 40) – it is important because of the clear distinction between the foundational and its manifestations in practices of individual and societal life.
The differentiation between kinds of leisure needs further reflection and study, yet it might be an option to distinguish between mode one, two and three leisure. Mode one leisure then refers to the foundational, personal inner process of meaning making (the art of life), while modes two and three leisure refer to activities related to relaxation, recreation and entertainment undertaken in the private and social/public spheres respectively. That is if the concept of leisure is still used to describe activities performed in the realm of mode two and three ‘leisure’. It will be conceptually more sound to reserve leisure for leisure (skholē) and define other activities as individual or social relaxation, recreation or entertainment respectively.
In wrapping up: scholars cannot work without concepts. And it is important to be clear about their constituents, attributes and empirical referents. Given contextual difference and the flux of time, it is hard to convey one single satisfactory definition of the exact meaning of a concept – even if it is labelled as a universal phenomenon. This is also true for the concept of leisure. Yet this study has arguably shown that analysis of its ontological significance and meaning, based on its classical roots (skholē), opens up a perspective that connects the individual and the social across cultures and contexts. Leisure fundamentally is the search for the important, for meaning in and of life. That could be manifested in play and recreation, but also in work, its beckoning horizon being the good life, eudaimonia and becoming fully human. For the study of leisure it implies an orientation on either different conceptual modes of leisure, which, starting from the most foundational and circling out to different layers of (everyday) reality (private or social/public), or making clear distinctions between foundational and adjacent or overlapping activities related to the same domain(s) of what is conceived to be leisure. It could probably open up new possibilities if the guiding philosophy is an art of life that revolves around self-realisation through pursuing the important with wisdom.
Hopefully the philosophical approach followed in this study will stimulate some serious and critical thinking about the arguments used in the analyses made and proposals done for future directions. If not convincingly, then there might be one last resort that conveys food for thought: the evocative. The poem ‘Leisure’ written by the Welsh poet W.H. Davies, published in 1911, might just capture the leisure imagination anew and reveal the secret to finding the tracks of the important in personal and social lives and contexts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_(poem)).
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
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