Scholé, meaning leisure, is the Ancient Greek root word for school. If you’ve ever attended a modern school, I bet that doesn’t quite sound right. However, schools back then were about engaging in leisurely activities. Aristotle dedicates the tenth book in one of his best-known works on ethics - Nicomachean Ethics to exploring leisure. This work explores the concept of Eudaimonia - a term that can be translated to something like happiness or a flourishing life. Aristotle defines leisure as anything that we do for its own sake. This is the kind of self-betterment we see in our pursuits of arts and other hobbies - anything we do “just because” without seeking to fulfil any other goals.
Not surprising for a philosopher, Aristotle greatly valued reason and contemplation for being an activity with “no end beyond itself” with the “self-sufficiency, leisureliness, unweariedness (so far as this is possible for man), and all the other attributes” that lead to “the complete happiness of man” (Book 10.7). I've found myself weighing up my values a lot recently and going back to the basics (if you can call Aristotle that) felt like a breath of fresh air to me. As much love as I have for modern philosophy, there's only so many levels of abstractions on abstractions on abstractions you can dissect before your head starts to spin, which felt a bit overwhelming when tackling these big questions.
For Aristotle, “happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure”. What I’m hearing is that Aristotle would have hated the idea of work-life balance - “you mean life-work balance?”. So, if leisurely activities are ones that we do for their own sake, we can deduce that unleisurely activities are ones we do with a goal in mind. Anything we do or create with the goal of ensuring our survival, or accumulating some sort of wealth or power, does not count as leisure.
Music is a big part of my life. More than that, if I really tried, I think I could relate everything in my life back to music in some way. But when it came to picking a pathway out of high school, I completely chickened out and music wasn’t even one of my options. Looking back, I feel like a younger me, without even knowing what was going on, was scared of music becoming something that I no longer engaged in just for the sake of it. Had I chosen it as a career, I would have struggled to engage with music as an activity of leisure. Once you see something as a tool, it’s hard to go back.
Okay, life-work, that sounds reasonable. But there’s actually a secret third thing we’ve been forgetting about - rest. “Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself ... seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.” (Book 10.6) We relax not for the sake of relaxing but so we can sustainably do things again.
This is where everything clicked for me. I’ve always felt like I’ve spent my life juggling balls. It didn’t make sense with just work and life; I’ve got two hands, surely I can hold those two balls and not have to juggle. But enter rest and there’s the ball that’s in the air. With the popular model of work-life, rest is assumed in the “life” part. If you’re working full time, you often find yourself having to choose either life as in reviving yourself or life as in actually living. So here I am, hoping you join me in this movement to live life by Ancient Greek rules - work as little as possible, live as much as possible, and spend the rest of the time resting so you can keep doing things.
In Book 9, Aristotle stresses the importance of friendship, even for otherwise self-sufficient people: “it seems strange, when one assigns all good things to the happy man, not to assign friends, who are thought the greatest of external goods. And if it is more characteristic of a friend to do well by another than to be well done by, and to confer benefits is characteristic of the good man and of virtue, and it is nobler to do well by friends than by strangers, the good man will need people to do well by.” For me, this firmly puts spending time with friends in the life-living, leisurely camp of activities.
So I welcome you here, to a community where the word ‘lazy’ does not exist, to live life, make friends, and do things just because you want to.
Welcome to the School of Leisure.