It was not so long ago that the great American philosopher Richard Rorty made his famous criticism of the abstractness of analytical philosophy and its obsession with the ‘foundations’ of knowledge. In its place Rorty famously appealed for a more socially and politically inclined philosophy, which is not only more imaginative, and hence more expansive than analytical philosophy, but is also able to do full justice to our personal and social experiences. Throughout his academic career Rorty straddled these two philosophical worlds, forging his own special role as an informed intermediary, whose job as he saw it was to enhance communication between these two different kinds of inquiry.
Rorty’s position is not one that Johan Bouwer and Marco van Leeuwen accept but the Philosophy of Leisure is an answer to his appeal in the form of a ‘dual approach of philosophizing’ leisure. What gives these two approaches to philosophy a unifying link in this book is the astute use of the sensitising idea of the ‘intermezzo’, which as well as enabling the authors to reconcile the one way of doing philosophy with the other, enables them to account for the passage from modernity to postmodernity – as they point out, making such historical linkages is important since what we do in our leisure is always determined by events that could have been different.
The first part of the book offers an overview of the ways in which leisure has been conceived and theorised throughout history. The authors’ observation that the ‘leisure ideal is arguably the definiendum of the leisure concept’, though a controversial one, is well founded and illuminating.
After presenting the first intermezzo ‘The times, they are a changin’ ’, in the second part of the book, Bouwer and Van Leeuwen analyse the ‘foundations’ of leisure in a concise and critical way. They concentrate their attention on four main areas of analysis: leisure and freedom, leisure and meaningful experiences, leisure and identity, and leisure and ethics. In each of these chapters, the authors’ knowledge of the extant literature is far-ranging, penetrating and thorough.
It clear that the twenty-first-century world has patterns of its own, quite distinct from those of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity. In the same way it has also become clear that the different leisure worlds we inhabit today have spatial, temporal and existential orders quite distinct from those that we will find in most classical philosophy of leisure books. The great merit of the third part of this book is the paths it reveals for studying contemporary issues in the philosophy of leisure, as we once learned to study the relationship between leisure and metaphysics, leisure and freedom, and so on. This discussion is foregrounded by the second intermezzo which extends the analysis of the shift from modernity to post-modernity by exploring the renaissance of interest in the search for meaning and leisure as the art of living.
The case studies identified by Bouwer and Van Leeuwen in part three – embodiment and virtual leisure, leisure and spirituality, leisure and well-being, and idealistic leisure – not only do justice to contemporary personal and social worlds of leisure (as analytical philosophers would not) but they also open wide opportunities for empirical and theoretical validation. Here the authors have given us an accurate account of the general nature of the critical explorations involved in these case studies and of some of their more significant results to date. It remains to be seen how far these insights will be capable of further development, but for the time being we can be content with the considerable scholarly achievement which the third part of the book represents.
It is notoriously difficult to write well about philosophy, and Bouwer and Van Leeuwen do it better than most. While much of this book is challenging, its tone, in whatever form the two authors are exploring the philosophy of leisure, is rigorously unpretentious. The authors succeed in negotiating the worlds of analytical philosophy and social and political philosophy, the past and the present, the difficult and the not-as-difficult, making the philosophy of leisure accessible to all. This is not just the philosophy of leisure; it is the philosophy of leisure as seen magnified through a critical lens. This is a book packed with knowledge – importantly relevant up-to-date knowledge. It is learned, and fascinating. It will energise debate on the philosophy of leisure, and no one who is interested in leisure in the twenty-first century can afford to ignore it.
Tony Blackshaw