Sublime

This little book by the German philosopher Josef Pieper is simply a gem. No book its size will teach us so many true things about everything we need to know to understand what and why we are or about how to live a life worth living. This book is one of the first I recommend for waking us up to what life is all about, to what is essential to and glo

To Pieper, leisure was above work. It was “a condition of the soul,” and the “disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion – in the real.”⁠

Pieper was shocked at how people were eager to throw themselves into work without pausing to reflect on what kind of world they wanted to build. To Pieper, this was evidence that German society had abandoned a connection to a traditional form of leisure.56

Pieper was shocked at how people were eager to throw themselves into work without pausing to reflect on what kind of world they wanted to build. To Pieper, this was evidence that German society had abandoned a connection to a traditional form of leisure.⁠6

That counterpart is not inactivity or nonwork, but free activity, ars liberalis: work that does not have a purpose outside itself, that is meaningful in itself, and for that very reason is neither useful in the strict sense, nor servile or serviceable.

have never bothered or asked”, Goethe said to Friedrich Soret in 1830, “in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result.”35 In the Middle Ages the same view prevailed. “It is n