When Rationality Won't Let You Live: Aristotle on Leisure
Almost all of us have a road we take every day to get to work. We know it so well that we could drive it with our eyes closed, and in a sense that is exactly what we do. We don't look at the trees, we don't notice the hill in the distance or the colour of the sky that morning. We think about the meeting ahead, we work out whether we will arrive on time, we get annoyed at the traffic light that costs us two minutes. That road exists only as the distance between where we are and where we need to be, and the shorter and faster, the better.
Now think of another kind of road, such as the ones that wind through the Scottish Highlands. Whoever travels them is not trying to reach the next town as quickly as possible. They pull over at the bends, get out to look at a loch, and let a narrow stretch with passing places take twice as long as planned without it being a problem. The road is no longer an obstacle between two points, it is what they came for. The curious thing is that both are roads, and the difference lies not in the tarmac but in the way we relate to them.
This article is about that difference. About how a particular form of rationality, the one that weighs costs and benefits, gradually settles into our lives until it becomes the only way of being in the world, and about why there are things, like art, enjoyment or the encounter with others, that simply cannot be reached from there.
Economic rationality as a way of life
In 1932 the British economist Lionel Robbins proposed a definition that went on to shape the whole discipline. Economics, he wrote, is "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Since then, almost every introductory economics textbook has started from some version of this idea. We have limited time, money and energy, and being rational means using them in the best possible way to achieve what we want.
It is worth being fair to Robbins. His definition does not tell us what we should want. He himself insisted that economics is neutral between ends and that judging them is not its business. The problem is not the definition, which as a tool for understanding certain phenomena is very useful, but what happens when that way of thinking becomes a habit. Because we use it all the time. We choose the cheapest supermarket, the shortest route, the option that takes up the least time, and in those cases it makes perfect sense to do so.
What happens is that a way of operating we use again and again ends up being the way we live. Without realising it, we begin to see everything as a scarce means to something else. A conversation is measured by what we get out of it, a free afternoon by how productive it was, a book by how useful it turns out to be, and even rest is justified because it lets us perform better on Monday. And so, little by little, nothing is worth anything in itself. Everything is there for something else, which in turn is there for something else again, and that chain never ends. It is the road to work extended to the whole of life.
Heidegger and the world of "in order to"
Martin Heidegger described this way of being in the world with great precision. In Being and Time he shows that, in our everyday lives, things do not first appear to us as neutral objects we observe from the outside, but as equipment. The hammer is for driving in nails, the nail for holding the board, the board for building the house, the house for sheltering us. Each thing refers to another in a web of "in order to" in which we are completely immersed.
What is interesting is that while this web works, we do not see it. Whoever is hammering does not think about the hammer, they think about the task, and the hammer disappears in its use. Heidegger points out that equipment only becomes visible to us when it fails, when the hammer breaks or is not where it should be. Something similar happens with the road to work. We only notice it when there is a traffic jam, and then it appears, but it appears as an obstacle.
This helps us understand why it is so hard to step out of this way of being. It is not a decision we make every morning, but the background from which everything presents itself to us. We are so settled in the web of "in order to" that we do not even notice it as one way among others of relating to the world. It simply seems to us like reality.
Technology and the river
Years later, in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger went further. He argued that what is distinctive about modern technology is not machines, but a way of looking that demands that nature supply energy which can be extracted and stored. Under that gaze everything becomes standing reserve, resources waiting to be used.
His example is the river Rhine. When a hydroelectric plant is built, the river becomes a supplier of water pressure. It is no longer the plant that is built into the river, Heidegger says, but the river that is dammed up into the plant. Against this he sets another Rhine, the one in Hölderlin's hymn, where the same river appears as something to be sung and contemplated. It is the same river seen from two completely different places.
There is a detail in the text that is worth not overlooking. Heidegger warns that even the Rhine as landscape can become a resource, when it is reduced to an object that the holiday industry offers to groups of tourists. A road through the Highlands can also be travelled like this, as a list of places to tick off and photos to post, with the same logic as the commute. The difference, then, lies not in the place but in the attitude with which we travel it.
Aristotle and the true meaning of leisure
Long before, Aristotle had thought about this same tension from another angle. In the Nicomachean Ethics he states that we are busy in order to have leisure, just as we make war in order to have peace. Today the sentence sounds almost provocative, because we have reversed it. For us leisure is the time left over, the rest we need in order to go back to work.
For Aristotle it was the other way round. The Greek word for leisure is scholé, from which our word school comes. Leisure did not mean doing nothing, but the space of activities that are worth doing for their own sake, such as thinking, contemplating, conversing with friends or enjoying music. Work, by contrast, was defined by negation. The Greeks called it ascholia, the absence of leisure, and the Romans did the same with otium and negotium, literally "not leisure", which gave us the word negotiate.
In the Politics, Aristotle also distinguishes between leisure and mere amusement. Play and entertainment serve to rest from effort, and so they remain in the service of work. True leisure is something else. It is where what makes life worth living is at stake, and that is why it is the end towards which work should be ordered.
Seen this way, the problem of our age is not only that we work too much. It is that we have turned even our free time into a means, and in doing so we have lost the place where things could be worth something in themselves.
What cannot be calculated
There are experiences that simply cannot be reached through the logic of calculation. A work of art is not appreciated by asking what it is for. A friendship cultivated for what we get out of it stops being a friendship. The enjoyment of a landscape vanishes the moment we measure it by how long it took us to get there. These are relationships that demand another way of being present, more open, more patient and less concerned with
the result.
For this, Heidegger proposed an attitude he called releasement (Gelassenheit). It is not about rejecting technology or returning to a life without calculation, which would be neither possible nor desirable. It is about being able to use technical objects without becoming trapped by them, saying yes and no to them at the same time. Using the road to work as a commute when we need to, without forgetting that there are other roads, and that the same road could be travelled in another way.
From the perspective of Existential Analysis, Alfried Längle would say that what is at stake here is our relationship with life itself. For something to come to have value for us, we need to draw close to it, give it time and let ourselves be touched by it. None of these three things can happen if what moves us is efficiency, and without them nothing truly comes to matter to us.
Try this. This week, choose one activity you do just because, without it having to serve any purpose. It could be walking with no destination, listening to a whole album, cooking without rushing or travelling a familiar road while looking at what you normally overlook. Notice the moment when the voice appears asking what you are doing this for, or reminding you of everything you could be doing instead. There is no need to silence it. It is enough to notice it and stay a little longer.
Frequently asked questions
What is instrumental rationality? It is the kind of reasoning concerned with finding the best means to reach a given end, without asking whether that end is worth pursuing. It is very useful for solving practical problems, but it becomes a problem when it turns into the only way we relate to everything.
What did Aristotle say about leisure? That leisure is the end of work and not a rest from it. We work in order to have leisure, and leisure is the space of activities worth doing for their own sake, such as thinking, contemplating or sharing time with others.
What is releasement according to Heidegger? It is an attitude that allows us to use technical objects without being dominated by them, saying yes and no to them at the same time and remaining open to other ways of relating to things.
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If these questions resonate with you, my work in philosophical counselling and Existential Analysis offers a space for dialogue to think through how you are living and what life you want to build. If you would like to take that step, I invite you to get in touch.
References
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, chapter 7.
Aristotle. Politics, Books VII and VIII.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, §§ 15 to 18. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, Blackwell, 1962.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology", in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York, Harper & Row, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York, Harper & Row, 1966.
Robbins, Lionel. An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London, Macmillan, 1932.
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