The Roots of Culture | The Foreword to Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture | Fr. James V. Schall, S. J. | Ignatius Insight
When a culture is in the process of denying its own roots, it becomes most important to know what these roots are. We had best know what we reject before we reject it. If we are going to build a chair, the first thing we need to know, above all else, is what a chair is. Otherwise, we can do nothing. We are not a culture that never understood what a human being was in his nature and in his destiny.
Rather we are a culture that, having once known these things, has decided against living them or understanding them. Indeed, we have decided to reject most of them, almost as an act of defiance—as an act of pure humanism—as if what we are is not first given to us. We have let an empty future that we
propose to make by our own standards become the ideal over and against a
real
past that revealed to us what man really was and is: namely, a being
open to
wonder who did not create himself or the world in which he dwells.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 glorious about our lives. Pieper, through his writing, gives us the quiet assurance that he knows what is important. He has an uncanny command over the way to bring reality to our attention in a manner that makes it ours yet leaves it as it is.
This book contains two related essays that Pieper gave in Bonn in 1946. The first is on the classic notion of "leisure", what we "do" when all else—politics, economics, daily duties—is done. The second essay is on what it means to philosophize. Augustine said that there is "no other reason for men to philosophize but to be happy". Pieper would agree with this. The second essay is often overlooked, but it contains the profoundest insights about the nature of philosophy, its self-understanding, and its relation to theology.
Both essays belong together. Man has the power to know all that is. This is what his mind gives him. Yet he still knows himself as a finite being by knowing what is not himself. This is the importance of the philosophic life. It is for its own sake; yea, it is even "useless" because it is not for something else other than its own delight in knowing the truth. No short essay will teach the reader what his knowing powers are about better than Pieper's "Philosophic Act". Few have ever had such an act explained at all, let alone so well.
Originally, these essays were written with the background of World War II and its aftermath. Here, Pieper was already quite aware that the first principle of action is the end for which we act. If we get this source of action wrong, our efforts to achieve our end will go wrong. When read today, these essays now stand against the background not only of World War II and then of the decline of Marxism, but also of the absolutization of democracy and the resurrection of Islam. A world once thought to be automatically prosperous is suddenly thrown back on its essentials.
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