November 22, 2005

Dear Colleague,

         I am in my office everyday, holidays included. I am always thinking about something, stimulated by what I have read or by what someone has said; and by the time my thought reaches the state of jello--reasonably firm, but not yet solid--I write it down. And so the days go by, month after month, year after year. This kind of self-indulgence makes me feel guilty. Once in a long while, I would stiffen my backbone and say to myself, "You have got to go to a movie!" As the time for the promised movie approaches, I feel antsy and want badly an excuse to back off. But I am a man of my words--I don't back off. I go to the movie, and when it is over I glow with a sense of accomplishment and virtue.

         Some people think I have reversed the scale of value, that I have called work "leisure" and "leisure" work. But, of course, I haven't. As Josef Pieper points out, the Greek word for "leisure" is skole and the Latin word for "leisure" is scola. Our word "school" thus means fundamentally "leisure," the opposite of work (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1950). We are at school to have not just a good time (we can do that by watching the Packers), but rather the best time that is possible for a human being to have, which is the contemplation of truth, beauty, and goodness--or, as Kant put it, "the moral law within and the heavens above."

         But before we can have leisure--before we can enjoy the luxury of school--we have to earn a living. We have to have a trade or a profession. And that is work. Sometimes the work is so hard and takes so long that one whole generation may give up hope of ever attaining the leisure for liberal studies themselves, and so rest their hope on the next generation, or on the generation after next. An American politician of the early nineteenth century (unfortunately, his name escapes me) said something like this: "We study medicine and law so that the next generation can study history and government, and so that the generation after next can study philosophy and the fine arts." The Chinese have a similar bias. My father wanted my brothers and me to be engineers. He was fearful that we might not be able to find well-paid employment otherwise. Once we, his children, have become affluent, I am sure father would have no objection to his grandchildren becoming musicians, poets, or philosophers.

         Now, some of this hifalutin scale of value (or prejudice) persists to this day. At American universities, for instance, the highest earned degree is the Doctor of Philosophy, even if your field of specialization is genetic engineering or welfare reform. Genetic engineering and welfare reform, however theoretically informed they may be, are still means to an end. Philosophy, as love of wisdom distinct from love of information and even of knowledge, is an end in itself and is therefore the leisure activity--mankind's most self-indulgent activity--par excellence.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu