Jeff Pieper Work

What is work?
“Of course the world of work begins to become - threatens to become - our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.”
― Josef Pieper

When looking up the definition of work I was surprised to find so many definitions; According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary the main definition is “a job or activity that you do regularly especially in order to earn money.” One of the antonyms of work is laziness, which has as one of its synonyms “leisureliness. Leisureliness is defined as “averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent.” Surely this modern definition of leisure cannot be the “basis of culture” as Pieper’s essay title insinuates. This essay was indeed hard to follow, but one thing I am sure of is that Josef Pieper did not mean that being lazy was the basis of culture at all; in fact, his
view of the word leisure is quite different than that of our modern civilization; even different than the dictionary definition. This may be one of the reasons his book was so difficult to follow; we think about some things, and likely we think of the entire world differently than Piper did. Let us first begin with trying to understand what the word leisure meant to Josef Pieper.
According to Pieper, "Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. […] Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.” (Simply Convivial) This seems to insinuate that to Pieper, leisure was a time for incredibly deep thought and contemplation. It is a time to block out the trappings of everyday life and consider far deeper matters. “Leisure is not the attitude of the one who intervenes but of the one who opens himself; not of someone who seizes but of the one who lets go, who lets himself go, and “go under,” almost as someone who falls asleep must let himself go.”( Simply Convivial) Here I get the impression that Pieper is saying that we are to let go, and submit ourselves wholly to this deep contemplation and really listen to what reality really
is. Henry David Thoreau had some similar views in relation to some aspects of Pieper’s. Thoreau said “Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” This line of thinking seems to align with Pieper’s statements about letting go. Thoreau gave up the frills of everyday life to discover life without them.
One of my favorite quotes from a fictional character was that of Tyler Durden from the movie Fight Club; he says “It’s only after you 've lost everything that you 're free to do anything.” We are surrounded by distraction, and we have to work really hard to get away from it all. We must put what sometimes seems like all of our efforts to silence the madness of the outside world, if only for a brief moment. The idea of breaking away from the materialistic world was what Thoreau was all about when he spent his time at Walden Pond. “The things you used to own, now they own you.” (Chuck Palahniuk) “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” (Henry David Thoreau)
I think work is an important piece of the modern world. We need people to do the things that are necessary to keep the world running smoothly. I don’t, however, think that work in its current form is “essential.” We live in a world that favors money, seemingly above all else. It is the race to acquire as much as possible in the fastest amount of time that causes so much misery in the world. It is with work that we attempt to make money; work and the worship of the dollar seems to lead a lot of people to lose sight of “reality.” We forsake our fellow humans, as well as the entire animal and plant kingdom in search of this “wealth.” Very few of us take the time to get away from that insanity, and turn our sites inward. I tend to lean in the direction of Henry Thoreau, in all honesty, likely because I understand what he was talking about a little more than the essay by Pieper. I think the world would be a little better off if we did away with some of the excess and materialism we, in the western world, seem to have so much of. I don’t, however, think we should go so far as Thoreau did when he moved to Walden Pond. We should stop chasing the better version of something we already have, we should live simpler and more deliberately. “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” (Henry David Thoreau) I believe, whole heartedly, that if we made efforts to live a life less cluttered with items we will want to replace the next time someone tells us to, and begin to look inwards and see reality for what it truly is, that we will likely do less work as it is commonly defined, and begin to work on our understanding. We may find a compassion for others, a passion for life and, if we are lucky, we may begin to understand something far deeper than we currently do about life and what it means; really. “There is nothing, then, to keep the world of the “worker” from being a poor, sterile world, even though filled with material goods.” (Simply Convivial)

Works Cited:
"Simply Convivial." Simply Convivial Leisure The Basis of Culture Chapter 3 Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.
Pieper, Josef, and Josef Pieper. Leisure: The Basis of Culture ; The Philosophical Act. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009. Print.