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When asked about their day, average Americans say, “I devote eight hours to sleep, eight hours to work, and I have eight hours … left over for free time.” So writes Mortimer J. Adler in his book “How to Think About the Great Ideas.”
Then he adds, “And the average American today would [also] use … three words, play, leisure, and rest, as if they meant the same thing, as filling for free time.”
To address these concepts, he first dismisses sleep as inactivity, or rather “biological activity,” and then goes on to discuss the difference between work, rest, play, and leisure. In this article, we’ll focus on Adler’s understanding of play vs. leisure. He writes:
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The trouble with life in America today is not that we work too much but that our free time is too much engaged in play and amusement so that too little of it is left … for the kind of leisure activities that really are the most profitable part of human life.
But not all play is bad, Adler notes:
Play is of two sorts. There is the kind of playing which we do just for amusement. And sometimes we play not just for pleasure but as a form of recreation. And if you look at the word recreation, you will see that what it means is that we recreate our energies, we recuperate from fatigue. This kind of play is useful. It’s like sleep, because by sleep we also recuperate our energy. Recreation is that sort of play. The other kind of play is just for pleasure.
Then he turns to leisure:
Here are the things that people do by themselves, as part of their leisure: any form of learning; any form of thinking; reading, mainly for the improvement of one’s mind not just to kill time; making things of any kind, from carpentry to the highest form of works of art: writing books, painting pictures, taking photographs, and enjoying works of art. These are parts of a person’s private life which belong to leisure activity.
Adler concludes with this thought:
I would like to define leisure as consisting in all those activities by which the individual grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually, through which he attains personal excellence and also performs his moral and his political duty.
Complement these timeless musings from “How to Think About the Great Ideas” with Mortimer Adler on work vs. rest, our article about the best Western philosophy book for beginners and then revisit Jessica Hagy on how to be interesting.
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