Arts and Manners

The Attack on Leisure

Man was made not simply to be doing but to be. Deny this proposition and man is reduced to a mere function, to a service, to a slave. Assert it and you assert the freedom and dignity of the human person. He alone is free who in some sense not only serves but is. The question “What is the use of being?” is a Marxist or a positivist question and therefore need not be answered. There is no use for being as being: this is its glory. To put being to work, to use it, would be to presuppose some end beyond being itself. But beyond being there is nothing at all and Nothing is approached only in anxiety and dread, and the anxious man is the man who does not know how to be. For this reason the anxious man is sick and our hospitals today are filled with these men, sick men who have never known how to luxuriate in the splendor of existence.

FW

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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

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The Attack on Leisure

Man was made not simply to be doing but to be. Deny this proposition and man is reduced to a mere function, to a service, to a slave. Assert it and you assert the freedom and dignity of the human person. He alone is free who in some sense not only serves but is. The question “What is the use of being?” is a Marxist or a positivist question and therefore need not be answered. There is no use for being as being: this is its glory. To put being to work, to use it, would be to presuppose some end beyond being itself. But beyond being there is nothing at all and Nothing is approached only in anxiety and dread, and the anxious man is the man who does not know how to be. For this reason the anxious man is sick and our hospitals today are filled with these men, sick men who have never known how to luxuriate in the splendor of existence.