“Ain’t it funny how time slips away.”
So sings Elvis Presley, at least. Yet, in wrapping up the discussion colloquium on “Josef Pieper and the Good Life” that I led, my sentiment was much the same: Things felt like they were only just getting going right as it was time for our conversation to end.
The discussion colloquium is a staple of Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government programming. It consists of four, hour-long discussion sessions punctuated by shared meals where a group of undergraduates wrestle with a particular set of ideas or a specific piece of writing. This colloquium centered on the thought of 20th-century philosopher Josef Pieper. We particularly focused on his writings on the concepts of leisure, love, festivity, and the abuse of language.
Overall, the colloquium was a success. Thanks to the students being wonderful (in both senses of the word), the discussion was very rich and, at least from what I could tell, actually enjoyed by all (despite some Saturday morning sleepiness). There were some challenges involved, however, in my task of guiding the colloquium. Foremost among these, especially at the start, was the multi-tasking required in facilitating the conversation (keeping a queue of contributors, monitoring the group for raised hands, etc.) while intellectually engaging with the discussion itself. That, I suppose, is a soft way of saying I struggled to pay attention to the actually important things being discussed. Due to this struggle, I believe the early conversations suffered from a lack of guidance from me, the discussion leader. I still believe the overall discussion was quite good, but there were times when I felt as though the conversation got bogged down in the peripheries of a concept. It was in these moments that an intentional nudging of the conversation could have benefitted us all.
This “bogging down,” I think, was where my expectations for the colloquium were least in accord with reality. I expected us to tackle the definitional questions of the concept at hand and still have time remaining in each session to get to the real center of the issue. I hoped to break through the crust and get at the core: the philosophical and practical implications of the concepts we were discussing. Yet most of our time was spent in an examination of the meaning of the concept. Far from this being detrimental to the overall experience, I think it was actually valuable.
It is ultimately good that we spent much of our time on wrangling definitions. Definition is one of Pieper’s strengths as a thinker—this is largely why I chose him as the focus of the colloquium. He is philosophically dense while being clear, precise, and quite practical. But he is not practical in that he gives us a list of things one specifically must do to learn a particular virtue. Rather, his practicality arises from his focus on what a thing is and why it matters. In this way, definition itself becomes an extremely practical thing. If we do not know the nature of the thing we are working towards, we cannot possibly work towards it. The “what” and the “why” ought to come before the “how.” They tell us if the “how” is worth caring about.
Pieper distills for us the philosophical dimension of a concept while at the same time forcing us to confront that concept’s very real implications. In this way, we come to see, for example, how the virtue of leisure is fundamental to the act of worship, which itself is bound up in the act of contemplation and the virtue of love, as each one of these concepts involves the expressing of an affirmation of the goodness of God and His creation. As Pieper says, love consists of stating, “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in the world!” While these need not be the specific words used in addressing one’s beloved, this sentiment should always be the core disposition, or it is not love. Pieper also shows us ways by which this disposition can be endangered. Impurity of heart, a treatment of sexuality as the overriding quality to be observed in someone, twists this affirmation into something ordered toward use and selfish enjoyment, rather than wholesome gratitude. Likewise, Pieper shows us that when we abuse our shared language by lying to one another, we are denying each other a rightful participation in reality. Does this not, at the very least, render the words, “it is good that you exist,” hollow? In lying, we are pulling a veil between each other and reality itself. This sifting of our existence is indeed antithetical to love.
While reflections like these tangibly give us much to work with, Pieper’s practicality does not extend to its utmost limit. He largely leaves to us the task of figuring out the implementation of his ideas, or the “how,” though he gives us plenty of tools to do so. This approach often leaves his reader with that same feeling of time slipping by at the conclusion of his essays: “Wait, that’s it? But things were just getting good!” When I pointed this out to the group as my usual reaction upon finishing a work by Pieper, many of the students vigorously nodded their heads in agreement. This, too, is not a defect in his writing, but a virtue of it. He wants us to put in the effort; he wants us to spend our own time pondering the high things! Contemplation is ultimately what life is about for Pieper, and when applied to Christian worship of the divine, Pieper’s hope is that we “may truly be ‘transported’ out of the weariness of daily labor into an unending holiday, carried away out of the straitness of the workaday world into the heart of the universe.”
Perhaps our shared sense of time having slipped away during our discussion was a peek at that “unending holiday,” an ephemeral glimpse of life eternal. Indeed, my main goal in hosting this colloquium was to give each student an introduction to some of Pieper’s key ideas and how each points us to ultimate communion with God. I hope this exposure for each student, someday and in some small way, occasions further reflection and kindles a desire to draw nearer to God in mind, heart, and soul through learning about a life of virtue.
Learn more about the colloquia we offer on our events page.