Part II. Rational Theories of Leisure. Karl Spracklen

Transcription

1 Part II Rational Theories of Leisure Karl Spracklen Introduction By calling this section of the handbook the part concerning rational theories of leisure, we are not suggesting that everything in the other three sections is somehow irrational. We are using the term rational in this section to imply an attempt to make sense of leisure using the tools of philosophy and, later, the tools of science. This section is what might be called a history of the philosophy of leisure and also a history of what might be described as the Western ontology and epistemology of leisure. In the first section of the handbook, we were interested in how leisure was understood implicitly and explicitly in different traditions, belief systems and cultures. In the next two sections, we will begin to concern ourselves with theories of leisure constructed from, in and out of the historical circumstances of modernity and its post-modern continuations. These two sections will concern themselves with what might be thought K. Spracklen (*) Carnegie Faculty, Leeds Beckett University Cavendish Hall, Headingley Campus, Leeds, LS6 3QU, UK

2 224 K. Spracklen of as socio-cultural theory of contemporary leisure. In this section, then, we are interested in the historical and philosophical development of the Western ontology and epistemology of leisure, and how this has transformed into the work of what might be called classic sociologists and modern-day social psychologists. In this section, Thanassis Samaras reviews theories of leisure in Classical Greek philosophy. This is the starting point for the entire section and the starting point for Western philosophy. Western epistemology, or what might be called the Western epistemological tradition, is the line of imagined and real debate from the Classical Greek world, which survives, through all kinds of strange and wonderful Christian and Muslim interpolations, to become the founding way of doing knowledge in Western Europe in the Renaissance. This is a crucial period in history in which Western European power begins to expand and dominate the globe. This political power is intertwined causally with the economic, cultural and technical power of the West. In the period of the Renaissance, philosophers and artists start to identify with the Classical Greek world. Soon after, philosophers and artists start to claim that they are superior to the Classical Greeks. There is a new knowledge emerging from the Western epistemological tradition that does not depend on the arcane logic of medieval scholasticism and its defenders in the European universities. This is an epistemological tradition that is based on making observations about the way the world works, a tradition based on trying things out to see what happens, as well as a tradition that values publication of ideas, findings and theories about the world. This new philosophy informs, and is informed by, the rise of capitalism, the rise of Protestantism and free-thinking, and is allowed to grow through the development of the European version of the printing press. There are many critical accounts of the Scientific Revolution (see discussion in Spracklen, this section), but it is a fact that the idea of doing natural philosophy to improve the world socially, politically and materially becomes commonplace in Western Europe by the start of the eighteenth century. In this period, there are philosophers like Newton who see the truth about the nature of light as something to be found through experiment; in the same epistemological tradition, Locke,

3 Part II Rational Theories of Leisure 225 Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant and Paine try to make sense of the political to come up with recommendations for improving or maintaining the social and cultural. There are chapters in this section that explicitly engage with the ideas emerging in philosophy at this point in the history of Western epistemology. In the second chapter, Ian Lamond explores the connections between the ideas of Locke and the notion of recreation-as-leisure and traces these ideas into contemporary debates about leisure and politics. In the third chapter of this section, Matthew Mendham turns the focus on Rousseau s theory of leisure and its philosophical and political context. After Mendham s chapter, Wallace McNeish and Steve Olivier apply some philosophical concepts from Kant to make sense of leisure and recreation today. Then Karl Spracklen examines the importance of radical Jacobinism in the construction of freedoms to be at leisure, and freedom to do leisure. The Western epistemological tradition helps shape modernity by shaping and influencing what is now called the Enlightenment, that moment in the eighteenth century when philosophers, readers and activists construct the public sphere, engage in free debate and develop justifications and theories for liberalism and radicalism. One way out of the Enlightenment is a rejection of its liberalism and radicalism, and the embrace of idealism, romanticism and nationalism. But the Enlightenment also provides the template for the construction of the modern scientific world view, and the rise of science as way of finding truth. In this section, Robert Snape follows one of those lines of development by exploring ideas of leisure in the liberal philosophy of Mill. After that chapter, Maria Manuel Baptista and Larissa Latif follow the course of idealism and explore the meaning of leisure seen through the prism of the work of Hegel. The ethos and ethics of modern science are formed in the West in the nineteenth century, and the idea of science as a profession, and the job of the university, follows from this. In this moment, the status of individual social sciences is much debated, but many important sociologists such as Dewey, Durkheim, Veblen and Weber try to make the case for sociology as a science of society based on the epistemology of science: sociology provides theories to be tested in experiments or sociology gathers observations from which theories emerge. While sociology s attempt to be as scientific as physics or biology is strongly contested,

4 226 K. Spracklen psychology has been more amenable to adopting the methods and habits of modern science, and social psychologists have been able to make more confident, rational claims about the meaning and purpose of things such as leisure. In this section, there are four chapters that engage with the idea on leisure found in these four sociologists. The first by Mary Breunig is a reflexive, historical and sociological account of Dewey and his place in leisure and sociology. Stratos Georgoulas chapter explores leisure in the work of Durkheim and the importance of Durkheim for leisure studies; then, a similar chapter on the importance of Veblen follows written by David Scott. After this exploration of Veblen, Weber is used by Pauwke Berkers and Koen van Eijck to explore the limits of leisure today. The Western epistemological tradition then is aligned with the aims of the Classical Greek philosophers, to use reason to provide natural explanations for the world, for us and for our relationships and our practices. Leisure is one part of our lives, one part of society and the spaces in which we move and interact. It is something that is sometimes in the forefront of rational philosophies and theories of the world, sometimes absent, but often one part of a bigger theory. These rational theories of leisure take it as evident that we can identify and isolate leisure, that we can know what the purpose of leisure is in the wider world. Leisure s ontology becomes something simple leisure is understood as something voluntary, something taken part in for fun, something that is contrasted with work and other duties. As we will show in the following chapters, rational theories of leisure have a long history and cover the most disciplinary and subject ground, and their contemporary equivalents, their inheritors, are present in work on flow and on serious leisure. In the last two chapters of this section, both these traditions in contemporary social psychology of leisure are explored and critiqued, with Sam Elkington exploring flow, and Karen Gallant taking on the enormous task of exploring serious leisure. In all the contributions to this section, we can see how the idea of science and philosophy as guarantors of epistemological certainty has been made throughout the West s history, and especially in modernity, which has allowed for the construction of an ontology of leisure that is real and measurable: we hope now our decision to name this section rational theories of

5 Part II Rational Theories of Leisure 227 leisure makes sense. We contend that these are all writers who have tried to use philosophy and science to make sense of leisure, without resorting to traditions, beliefs or other norms and values, and there is a connection from the work of Aristotle to the work of Stebbins.