Paideia, Schole, Paidia: Then and Now
ABSTRACT: Aristotle centers the citizen’s education (paideia) on leisure (schole). Its features, especially of play (paidia), are evoked to remedy deficiencies in three contemporary philosophies of leisure: classical, critical and communitarian.
Paideia, the citizen's education, is extensively tied up with liberal studies in most of Aristotle's discussion in book eight of the Politics. But this tie-up intellectualizes the leisure at their root in the first few chapters of the book.
While my undergraduates in leisure studies always need to be drawn up from their sole focus upon sport, perhaps my philosophy colleagues need relief to de-intellectualize paideia back down to schole. There are dimensions of Aristotle's comments which are remedial to contemporary streams of leisure theory. This paper will recapitulate his comments, then apply them to three types of contemporary theory.
His first chapter justifies the reason why politics is not meddling when it takes an interest in the formation of its citizens. This is because any constitution will not be workable unless citizens' characters, their virtues, are compatible with it.
His second chapter opens what should be taught. Without doubt, useful things should be taught. But not all useful things: useful things which "vulgarize" the citizen should not. To vulgarize is to make one less fit for the practice of virtue, the city's concern. Any occupation, art or science can vulgarize. An occupation will, if it is paid employment; that degrades the mind by absorbing it. An art will, if it deforms the body; the Spartans did that, by their excruciating and savage routines. And a science will, if it is pursued to its perfection of detail.
Our bywords about workaholic compulsions, steroid stars, and nerdy scholars, show that we experience the three instances he speaks of, even if paradoxes appear that do not trouble him. Why learn anything at all that is useful, if we can't earn a living at it? How is it virtuous to be never the master but ever a dabbler? Is it not inherent in science to drive us to its ultimate details, one way toward its principles and another toward its applications?
These three are more localized problems, however, than his fourth limitation on useful education. That the very same activity is first excluded from the teachable useful, and then is re-included merely by a change in its object, touches our Aristotle with an anachronistic subjectivity, whereby the subject constitutes whatever identity the object has.
As a child, many individuals have free time where they can participate in leisurely activities often. Known as the preparation phase, leisure at this point is usually where a child forms relationships and set goals they wish to achieve in the future. This differs drastically from the establishment phase, where an individual is usually too busy to participate in leisure as much. At this phase, leisure is viewed as purposive, such as taking their child to a museum. The focus is generally not focused on just the individual themselves but rather on acting upon their previous goals to successfully reach them. The final phase is known as the reintegration phase where an individual reflects on the course their life has taken due to the preparation and establishing they have done. At each stage, there are constraints and facilitators that affect what an individual may do as leisure. However, there are other cultural and social factors that affect this as well. Ever since ancient times, an individual’s economic status is a factor that has affected their participation in certain leisure activities that they can afford or not. Today, this still occurs as some people can afford to do activities for leisure while others can not. There are other constraints that an individual can face as well based on where they live, their religion and what race they are. It is unfortunate that not all
Marks, L. (2006). The Loss of Leisure in a Culture of Overwork. Spirit of Change Magazine.
Evidence suggests that families often enjoyed everyday leisure but in reality working class social life was divided by gender. Married women’s leisure tended to be separate from the public domain and was not very different from work, but was linked with domestic duties and family relations. It was during this period that to survive families had to send their sons and daughters into the labor force to supplement the earnings of the father, while the mother cooked, cleaned, cared for the children and manufactured goods in the home. The typical wage-earning woman of 1900 was young and single.
The argument that the “Tumult of the Metropolis” creates inner barriers between people is justified by Simmel’s social theory study of sociability (paraphrased in Frisby 1989, p.75-77). His reflective view explores the importance of sociability and its ability to transcend ones inner barriers and concerns on modern leisure within a “growing objective culture” (Frisby 1989, p.76). Simmel further suggests that the concerns raised upon the modernised culture derived from two main ideologies of objectification and reification which was dominated by production, exchange and consumption. The domination of these aspects reflects the process of commodification as what was seen as valuable had been reduced to exchangeable prices, therefore meaning that subjectivity and individuality was destroyed.
Many individuals would define leisure as time free from paid work, domestic responsibilities, and just about anything that one would not do as part of their daily routine. Time for leisure and time for work are both two separate spheres. The activities which people choose to do on their spare time benefit their own personal interests as well as their satisfactions. While some people may enjoy one activity, others pay not. Leisure is all about personal interests and what people constitute having a good time is all about. Some may say that the process of working class leisure can be seen to contribute their own subordination as well as the reproduction of capitalist class relations. Self-produced patterns of working class leisure can lead to resistance to such reproduction. This leads to social class relations and inequalities, and the fact that it they can never be completely reproduced in the leisure sphere. This film Home Feeling: Struggle for a Community, gives some examples of the role of leisure within a capitalist society dealing with issues such as class inequalities, and how they are different among various societies.
The American black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street directed by Martin Scorsese was released December 25, 2013 and stars the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie. While on face value The Wolf of Wall Street looks like a film about excessive cocaine binges, long evenings filled with men with cigarettes, large portions of alcoholic consumption, having many sexual escapades with various women and even dwarf tossing from time to time, the film is deeply rooted in perception gender within the genre of The Wolf of Wall Street. The word ‘genre’ is rooted into a similar category as
The purpose of therapeutic recreation is to enable all individuals to achieve quality of life and optimal health through meaningful experiences in recreation and leisure. In this paper the definition of therapeutic recreation will be discussed as well as what should be included in the definition and what should be rejected. This definition will mainly focus on health and use the Health Promotion Model to further explain my choice to focus on health and well-being. I will also be discussing the importance of inclusion in therapeutic recreation for different learning styles in many environments, and the significance of diversity in the community and what we hope to achieve by being fully inclusive.
The. The "Aristotle". Home Page English 112 VCCS Litonline. Web. The Web.
Written in 1899, by Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, analyzes and critiques consumerism in the United States. Veblen explores the lifestyle and ways of thinking of the exploiter versus the exploited; in a point of view from those who are born into power and those who serve people in power. It is in this book where Veblen created the phrase “conspicuous consumption”, where it means buying goods in order to display a higher social class than others (Heath, 2001). He traces almost all practices and tastes of the leisure class directly to the pecuniary interest. I chose this book because I wanted to learn about how certain groups in society try to distinguish themselves from other groups and how it came to be for such differential.
I decided I wanted to know more about the advances in neuroscience in regard to migraines. This is significant to me because there is a pattern of them in my family. I have migraine headaches, my youngest sister does, my mom does, her dad did, and my son has them. I feel there must be some hereditary trait there. My mother was told by her doctor that she had a fifty-fifty chance of passing the problem of “migraines” on to her children. She had four children and two have migraines. I have two children and one has migraines. Science about the brain is very interesting to me. I analyzed three articles that addressed issues such as, is overuse of medication associated with migraine, what are the risk factors in migraine patients, and
The problem of modern leisure has, throughout the years, been a well-discussed topic among many sociologists. Sociability, in this case, is one of the most universal forms of leisure that will be discussed in this essay. The theoretical framework for this discussion is provided by the sociological insights of Georg Simmel (1858-1918) as he argues that the “tumult of the metropolis” (cited in Frisby 1989, p80) creates inner barriers between people and suggests that “sociability” can surpass this problem. According to Frisby (1989), Simmel states that the city life has transformed the struggle with nature for livelihood into a struggle with other human beings for gain. This is further discussed as Frisby (1989) and Giulianotti (2005) describes how sociability can transcend this problem according to Simmel’s sociability theory.
Wolsey C. & Abrams J. (2001) Understanding the Leisure and Sport Industry. Pearson Education 2001. Longman. p. 103
The Christian relationship to icons is very interesting. Over the centuries, there has been a controversy over if sacred images are effective in connecting the believer to the sacred. Other monotheistic religions do not have the same affinity for images as Christianity does. Judaism strictly forbids images in order to follow the Second Commandment, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”. Islam is similar in that it forbids images of God and of the prophet in fear of idolatry. The fear is if images of the prophet were allowed, the believers would make Muhammad into a sacred being. Straying from monotheistic religions, Hinduism and Buddhism both support images with the idea that images provide access to the sacred. But these religions are so different from Christianity, so it is hard to say that these religions influenced the Christian love for images. Since icons are specific to Christianity, how did the idea of such images emerge? Why are icons sacred for Christians?
Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...
Aristotle, though he had formed his ideas thousands of years ago, his philosophy has a great impact on the education we receive today. The main idea of Aristotle was that through education and learning, children become good and virtuous individuals in socie...