The Humane Arts: On Leisure

The notion of the humane arts describes a list of certain behaviors that are unique rather than an institution or historical condition. These are things that are integral to civilization: stuff like letter writing (or instant messaging nowadays), leisure, walking, conversation, salons and cafe`s. On the very superficial it seems extremely trivial and simple, but these are the elements that profoundly shape human society.


Leisure and time:

Contrary to popular belief, we have a lot more time than people did in the mid-18th century, simply because we have a longer life expectancy. In the mid-18th century, if you made it to around 20, you survived childhood diseases and were fine for another 35-40 years. Nowadays, it seems that "I don't have any time" because of the illusion produced by modern technology, which strips away the psychological aspect of time's length. You need not count for 60 seconds while staring at a wall to realize how long a minute really is.

In addition to that, the invention of the electric light was hugely advantageous in stripping away the environmental barriers that prohibited work from being done. It seems to be forgotten by many that once night hit, the blanket of darkness that surrounded towns disallowed people from writing, composing, painting, etc. People rarely stayed up very late because it was dark, and the only way you can stay up late is if you burned candles or whale oil, outputs which were very expensive at the time. Nowadays, we stay awake much later, which means that in a given day we have a couple of hours more in time than people did in the 18th century. It only doesn't seem that way because it feels shorter due to the psychological affects of certain pressures that influence us.

Where does the psychological element of time come from?

Well, if you look at the average amount of time spent a week by adults in the U.S., you can see that a person spends on average of 30 hours a week watching TV (which is quite an achievement), 3 hours on cellphone use, 15 hours on driving cars, and 27 hours a week on the internet. In other words, almost 75 hours are being spent on things that weren't even available to people in the 18th century. These social pressures are pressures because we feel we ought to engage in them, simply because everyone else does, when in reality, it is not an obligation.

What is leisure?

Leisure comes from an old word that means license. It is the time that you give yourself license to do whatever it is you want to do. We tend to associate leisure time with vacations, or doing absolutely nothing, which is why it has such a negative connotation in society. But this is not what leisure originally meant.

A perfect embodiment of what is originally meant by leisure is a woman by the name of Émilie du Châtelet. She was a french noblewoman who was a mathematician, physicist and author during the Age of Enlightenment. She's known for producing the french translation of Newton's works. They weren't easy to translate since they were in Latin, plus the fact that Newton thought differently about the world than most people. All in all, it was a difficult intellectual undertaking. She was pregnant at the time during which she was producing the translation, and she desperately wanted to finish before childbirth because she was informed that she was probably going to die giving birth. And so she finished the translation, gave birth, and promptly died as a result. That is leisure. The fact that she was a noblewoman meant she didn't have to do anything. So why did she translate Newton? Well, because she wanted to.

Newton was a man of leisure. He did all kinds of tasks that were intellectually demanding, none of which were his job, and often drove himself to utter exhaustion because of it. But he did it because he greatly wanted to stimulate his intellectual curiosity. Although one would consider this tireless work, these were in fact, acts of leisure.

In fact, this is the definition of humanism. It stipulates that because you are the most important thing in the universe, what you choose to do is hugely and invaluably important. With this philosophical stance, you have the opportunity to express what you wish to do. However, if what you wish to do is spend 30 hours a week watching T.V., humanism has nothing to say to that except that maybe you're a bit lazy.

Leisure & Education

Education is not about getting a job. The only utility it's supposed to have is helping you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. In other words, it's supposed to help you with your leisure. If one is using it as a means to get a job they won't at least enjoy, they have then become a slave to social pressure.

This idea comes to us very early, and it has this unbelievably perverse effect on us. For example, if someone has a child and he is good at arts, two things seem to happen:

1. "Oh you're really good. You should work at that, go to school, and make a career out of that." (Pressure, pressure pressure) 
2. "Oh that's fine, but you should cut that sooner or later and get serious about something" (which is such a distasteful thing to say to someone) 

The notion is that if you're learning something there must be some sort of payoff, and the payoff is the performance, and that if you keep practicing, you'll play concert after concert after concert, and then eventually, you will get to play at Carnegie Hall. However this is all wrong. The payoff for music is music. This is the idea of leisure. The activity itself is the reward for the activity. (Why do you write? because I like to write. Why do you paint? because I like to paint. etc., etc., etc.) In theory, this makes sense, but look how rare this is. It seems that we don't want to do this. 

A thought that offers insight to this would have to be: Money often complicates things. 

A great example from the last 100 years is Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is a great example of a writer who was at his leisure, although constantly in debt. So much so that he gambled away all the money for his wife's life saving surgery, causing her promptly death. During the late 1870's, he had handwritten over 400 manuscript pages of  'The Brothers Karamazov'. He writes a letter to his brother saying: 'I've got around 400 pages done, and I need like 200-300 more which is due at the publisher in around a week and a half, and he's advanced me the money, (which of course he spends around three times over) so hopefully he delivers me more money with the manuscripts and I won't be in debt.'

The very next day, he writes a letter to his brother again, saying: 'I've burnt the manuscript pages. I have decided that I did not like them and I wanted to change them, and I was afraid that if I did not burn them, I would not have the courage to make the necessary changes.' 

So he's totally in debt, and in ten days he was supposed to hand in 'The Brothers Karamazov' to his publisher. He took a wad of manuscript paper, over 400 pages worth of laborious writing, and he just throws it in the fire to burn. You see, that's a man of leisure. It's actually pretty hilarious. 

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Nietzsche famously quoted:

"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of the day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, and official, or a scholar." - Friedrich Nietzsche

It's a very humanistic notion. This is why the Greeks were so judgmental of everyone around them, because they believed in humanism. "You're a human being, why aren't you measuring up?" Measuring up to the standards of being a human being that is. "You said you wanted to do this, why are you still here?"

This alludes to the famous section from the opening of the Iliad where Achilles says that he isn't going to fight, and everybody turns to him and says: 'What are you talking about? You're a great fighter, you said you were going to fight, now fight.' So Achilles sits in his tent and ponders about the fight. Contemplating, he thought: 'I'm a dead weight on the world. I would be better off dead than let myself down completely.' During this thought process, he knew he was letting himself down. This is the core of humanism. It means that if you say you want to do something and you don't do it, it raises a couple of possibilities:

1. You don't really want to do it. 
2. You really want to do it, but you don't want to pay the price.

Chances are, you really don't want to do it, and that's a very hard conclusion to accept. This is us measuring up to ourselves, which takes introspection, reflection, honest dialogue, debate, and discussion. 

When discussing these matters, one might interject: "You have to discipline yourself." 

However, one must note that self-discipline is not the same thing as doing what you want to do. Leisure suggests that you have to have the discipline of not having discipline. 

How much time does one really need?

This is a question one must ask themselves when analyzing one's own life. How much time does it really take to do task 'a'? How about a more daunting task, namely, learning a language? More often than not, all the time one claims they spend is vastly different that the time one actually spends. In the college environment, many students love to boast that: "I've spent 8 hours studying for this exam." but conveniently fail to mention that 3 of those hours were spent perusing unrelated Youtube videos and 2 of those hours were spent cooking dinner. 

Famously, when Michael Jordan was reaching the end of his career, he decided to develop a jump shot, because he didn't have one, and because of the fact that he was slowing down. So he dedicated a summer practicing about two and half hours a day, just jump shots. And when the season started he had an un-blockable jump shot and spent the next two to three years destroying everyone because his jump shot was just so impervious to defense. An un-blockable jump shot was achieved with only two and a half hours a day of real dedicated work. In essence, I submit that you don't need as much time to accomplish the things you want to do as you think you do.

It's all about doing what you want to do for the sake of doing it. Under the principle of leisure, it is not about the cash. Professionalizing and monetizing things just makes things weird in a sense. Many artists had great jobs. Take Michelangelo for example; the Medici's worked that guy to death, almost literally too. Of course, it is well known that he did not enjoy being ordered to paint (despite the fact that he produced magnificent paintings). In fact, there were two instances where he attempted to run away during the production of the Sistine Chapel, only to be caught and sent back to Rome to continue painting. On the other hand, Mozart famously cranked out flawless drafts of music. Two-thirds of his compositions was flawless "elevator music", and were essentially solely composed for monetary reasons. In addition to that, his father always instilled in him this idea that he must utilize his talents to make lots of money, and partly was for the selfish reason of him wanting to be cared for in old age. But there are some pieces Mozart wrote that he absolutely loved, and he would spend years working and reworking and massaging the piece until glorious masterpieces were produced. Those are the pieces that Mozart wrote for Mozart, and not for a contractor who hired him to do it. This other third of Mozart's music was the music that made him think: 'No, I'm not going to rush this. I'm going to take my time with this, I don't care what the deadline is, I'll send you something else.' Some of the pieces he wrote he worked on for up to six years, because that was for him. With that, you can see the drastic difference in the quality of his music, and with that, it can be safe to say that when Mozart turned into a man of leisure, he produced his absolute best work.