The Boy Who Fishes: The Importance of Leisure

The boy I saw fishing was enjoying a moment of solitude—a state of being alone that seems a luxury in a churning world agitated with digital waves. It made me realize that in leisure, we open ourselves to receive God and take confidence in trusting the mysterious and fragmentary.

Be at leisure – and know that I am God. – Psalm 45

After Sunday Mass, I went with my new friends, Linda and Ed Schaffer, to the Tippecanoe River, where they own a cottage. By the time we arrived, the extended family—Katie, John and the kids—were scattered along the river bank, in the water, and in the cottage.

The visit to the river turned out to be an extraordinary trip to a world so different from my own. I inhabit a university campus where nowadays so little seems real. People play, connivingly or acquiescently, according to a woke script. The daily routine is suffused with emails or virtual conferences, in which human images feel opaque and a bit cartoonish—almost computer-generated characters. That afternoon, at the river, I found myself, a bit like Alice in a (perverse) Wonderland, who fell into, this time, the real world populated by real, lively humans.

From the dock, I saw Henry, 12 years old, almost 13, alone in a canoe, fishing. Probably an unexceptional act for Henry’s family, but for me, a Chinese national, what Henry was doing was nothing short of a wonder. Henry’s “audacious” action was unimaginable in contemporary Chinese society, where kids are tended with elaborate care, much as plants in a terrarium are pruned and shaped. They are “handled,” uniformly, by teachers and tutors, as though interchangeable items, particularly as seen by the state. School and various after-school activities constitute their entire lives: lives resembling products moving through the assembly line and heading towards the same destination. I looked at Henry with admiration—he was left unsupervised and unmonitored; he was permitted to grow naturally. Beyond a cultural shock, I saw political implications in that event. I recognized the key elements of American tradition of self-ruling that assumes individual competence and takes pride in independence.

Before me was Henry, free to test himself with certain limits, doing something mildly dangerous. If what I saw in Henry was quintessentially American, it was an America that is being pushed to the fringe of contemporary American society where the ideology of “safetyism,” yet another new deity, reigns supreme in almost all aspects of public life. Henry escaped also from the nearby-hovering solicitude that prevails mainstream American childhood guarded by school administration and after-school therapy. The coddled Americans are not just delicate or brittle, but, worse still, cold and detached. An American friend told me that her daughter, who attends a college in New York, told her that “Your suffering offends me!” It is a statement that defies all comprehension. “Nannies” of all sorts, who do not assume or believe in individual judgment and competence, and who claim to be loving, in the name of caring for emotional well-being, are raising “little monsters.”

And so, I was mesmerized by watching Henry fish. I felt a bit like an anthropologist who has found a tribe in a primitive society, untouched by modern life. That anthropologist anticipates that what she is observing is on the road to cultural extinction. All of sudden, I seemed to see a heroic strife in Henry’s act to remain human, to preserve true, unconfined, and untruncated humanity, against the technology-ladened and consumption-oriented modern world that is increasingly colonizing more and more domains of human autonomy. Humans are becoming an extension of a plethora of technologies and digital devices that not only are engineering new social orders but also human nature itself. Computers may never be an equal to the human mind, as some AI critics avidly argue, but humans are voluntarily having their minds and muscles atrophied. The continuous demotion of the human race is real and at our own hands.

Henry, the boy who fishes, remains unattracted to the riveting modernity project that advertises amusement, comfort, and safety, promised by a cornucopia of convenient apps that claim to make life easier, but, meanwhile, are clandestinely harvesting and marketing our attention, in a massive techno-bureaucracy that ensures the most rational social order at the expense of individual sovereignty, ingenuity, and competence. What could be a better portrayal of the modern life than the utopian world presented in the 2008 animated film Wall-E? It depicts the best life humans can possibly dream of—one that is effortless, worry-free, and soaked in non-stop entertainment. As the movie character BnL CEO advertised, “there is no need to walk!” But is that world utopian or dystopian? Through the robot Wall-E’s befuddled and even horrified eyes, I saw grotesquely fat humans, undifferentiated from each other, strapped in a floating chair, slurping “foods” that merely simulate the flavors and having their eyes glued to the screens that construct their entire world which is purely virtual. Their half-opened eyes emit a gaze that is dull and the same. As Matthew Crawford succinctly put it in his 2020 book Why We Drive, “These beings are completely safe and content, and somehow less than human.” When humans are made fully disburdened, they are no longer fully humans.

Instead of being passively carried through the world or having needs and desires catered, in the moment of fishing, Henry was in total command of himself. He was taking the full charge of his voyage—he decided where to go based on his own judgment. There were no machine-generated certainties in that territory or packaged commodities within arm’s reach. Henry was exposed to an array of the unknown, unexpected, and unpredictable, which necessitates the crucial learning in one’s development to adapt to a constantly-changing environment, and which introduces genuine novelty into life—the very essence for the highest pleasure on offer. Henry told me that before we arrived he caught a big largemouth bass, which was later released. His face beamed with sparkling joy when recounting the story, which was rare because Henry is a reserved young man who most of the time is deep in his thoughts.

Henry was also spared from the so-called crisis of attention that vexes so many of us contemporary modern humans. He was enjoying a moment of solitude—a state of being alone that seems a luxury in a churning world agitated with digital waves. In that solitary state, he was able to act according to a settled purpose, fully attentive to his task. The boy who was fishing, thus, presents a counterargument to the “modern life” that is supposed to be inundated with the beep sound of emails or texts that alerts every few minutes. Integrative actions conduce an integrative soul; Henry is a non-fractured man.

As my mind flashed back to the movie Wall-E while watching the boy fishing, floating near Henry’s canoe were several deluxe pool loungers attached to each other in a circle. In them were human subjects, sunk into their loungers, inactive, appearing very relaxed. Beside them was Henry, sitting still and gazing into the water in front of him.

In that juxtaposition of two quiescent pictures, though of different natures, I recalled Aristotle’s definition of leisure, stressing the distinction between leisure as a specific activity versus leisure as the passing of a period of time in idleness. Henry is a rare modern creature who is capable of at leisure—“the art of being serene” (in Roger Scruton’s words). It is a liberal (i.e., free) art. In that Aristotelian sense of leisure, Henry is thus capable of being free. Consider the difference between go fishing and to fish. The first is leisure: an activity that aims at no utilitarian end but is for its own sake. Leisure exists outside the realm of necessity or habituation—the former is labor and the latter regulated behavior—both of which are not free. Aristotle, in fact, understands leisure in a manner that is even more alien than the above sketch to our modern mind. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes, “We are not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure.” In the Politics, Aristotle says that leisure is the end towards which all actions directed.

Perhaps the most beautiful tribute ever paid to leisure is German philosopher Josef Pieper’s book Leisure: The Basis of Culture. This book bears much larger significance now than when it was first published in 1952, even though Pieper wrote the book as a warning to an ethos of “Restlessness” and “Despair” that was forming in front of his worried eyes. With the book, Pieper tries to recover the original meaning of leisure, and to reclaim the art itself in a world of “total work.”[*] Pieper argues, one foundation of Western culture is leisure and “leisure, in its turn, is free because of its relation to worship, to the cultus.”

Pieper offers our modern mind a striking interpretation of the English word cult which we moderns exclusively associate with uncivilized and primitive behavior. But Pieper argues that cultus in its original sense “is the primary source of man’s freedom, independence and immunity within society.” Hence, culture, argues Pieper, “is the quintessence of all the natural goods of the world and of those gifts and qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his needs and wants.”

In clarification of Pieper’s uncommon treatment of cultus, his idea of festival is our Rosetta stone. Festival is “to experience and live out a harmony with the world, in an extraordinary manner, different from the everyday,” writes Pieper, who avidly maintains that the festival character of humanity is a celebratory, approving, and affirming spirit that is an imitation of Divine. Plato has a passage that further explicates this argument: “But the Gods, taking pity on human beings—a race born to labor—gave them regularly recurring divine festivals, as a means of refreshment from their fatigue; they gave them the Muses, and Apollo and Dionysus as the leaders of the Muses, to the end that, after refreshing themselves in the company of the Gods, they might return to an upright posture.” Feast and festival lift us from a world of frenzied industry, and restore in us the sense of our being and the world. Indeed, as Pieper writes, festival is an affirmation of “the basic meaning of the world, and an agreement with it.”

So, what is Pieper’s conception of leisure? First, leisure is not work. In fleshing out this argument, Pieper objects to the Kantian epistemology, which states that the act of human knowing exclusively lies in the “discursive” process of reasoning; it is purely work. Unsurprisingly, Pieper aligns himself with ancient and medieval philosophers. Pieper writes, medieval philosophers distinguish between two forms of intellect: ratioand intellectus. Ratiois discursive, working-out process; whereas intellectus refers to the ability of “simply looking”- a receptive understanding. And the ancients understand the spiritual side of the human mind as an integration of the two forms of intellect. Following the train of logic, Pieper maintains that the highest art (not merely an act) of human knowing is contemplation. The essence of contemplation lies in the discovery of reality – it is “a receptive understanding and an immersion in the real.” The highest form of knowledge is like “a lightening-like insight” which comes to one like a gift from Divine, so argues Pieper.

This argument would be alien to most Enlightenment descendants, I suspect, as most of us have been taught and habituated to adhere to the Kantian thinking. If you want to understand something, you have to work, as the saying goes. This dictum has prepared humans for, perhaps contrary to Kant’s wish, epistemic and moral relativism, a dominant theme in modernity, as well as its contemporary derivatives such as intersectionality theory. For as Pieper perceptively points it out, “if knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else,” would then a corollary not be the one that the truth depends solely on the subjective, individual effort put into knowing? Since man “refuses to let himself be given anything,” because he “mistrusts everything that is without effort,” this cold logic has also prepared Western civilization for the rejection of Christianity that teaches God’s Grace is an unearned gift.

Second, leisure is neither idleness. Pieper writes that the old metaphysical and theological concept of idleness (i.e., acedia) means that “man finally does not agree with his own existence; that behind all his energetic activity, he is not at one with himself.” But do not mistake the opposite of idleness as acquisitive industriousness, Pieper warns us. Fanatic workaholism, just as amusements, is a diversion indicating that man despairingly does not want to be oneself. In order to avoid self-knowledge, man is seized in either inactive or agitated idleness. And then as Pascal famously says, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Then what is leisure? For Pieper, the most intense leisure available to humans is religious festival. Yes, it is worship of God. In leisure, we open ourselves to receive (not grasp) God and take confidence in trusting the mysterious and fragmentary. Take as loud a gasp as you wish, Pieper continues to argue that leisure is rooted in cultic festival, which is no abstract conceptual construct but evident in the history of religion. Taking a break from labor is essentially cultic because this designated time would not be used for any practical purposes or means-to-an-end considerations. Pieper warns us, when detached from worship, leisure is deformed into mere idleness or time-killing; when deprived of leisure, a life of work becomes “a bare, hopeless effort.” And only when we leisure inGod, Pieper argues, the most intensive harmony with ourselves and the world could be attained, because the power to be at leisure is the power for us to “win contact with those superhuman, life-giving forces that can send us, renewed and alive again, into the busy world of work.”

In an age when most us modern homos are cocooned in science and technology, Henry, the boy who fishes, is stretching his arm toward God.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.

[*]What Pieper means by “total work” can be understood with Max Weber’s quoting of Nikolaus Ludwig won Zinzendorf in Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one’s work.”