The traditional study of the language arts finds its justification in the belief that self-reflection is the special characteristic of human beings, and that this ability to recognize oneself as a person is possible—or even begins to be possible—through the cultivated use of language. One department of language study is called etymology, and under that title are included such topics as the parts of speech, the various forms a word may take to signal its grammatical function, and the derivation, or source, of a word. While etymology studies individual words, syntax studies how words work together in a sentence.
Many, maybe even most, find learning about the derivation of a word interesting, perhaps because the source-meaning sheds light on the originating idea or material, psychic or even spiritual, from which the word was first constructed. One such word of unsuspected background is our word school. We mean by that unremarkable noun an organization or institution that provides education, but the original meaning was, of all things, leisure. The noted German philosopher Josef Pieper explains:
Leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school.” The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “leisure.” “School” does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure. The original conception of leisure, as it arose in the civilized world of Greece, has, however, become unrecognizable in the world of planned diligence and “total labor….”
That quote is from Pieper’s important work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, written in the years shortly after the end of World War II. He was conscious of the fact that calling into question the idea of “total labor” and living “in a world of nothing but work” at a time when there was no choice but to rebuild a fractured world, could be difficult to understand. But leisure, he says, is not idleness:
Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of…work as activity, as toil, as a social function.
This true, or etymological, meaning of our word school (the term etymology derives from a Greek adjective meaning true or real, hence original) points, says Pieper, to “the conception of the contemplative life.” He continues: “Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.” And because leisure is a mental attitude, a point of interiority, it has more to do with the manner in which one acts, rather than what one is occupied doing. It is, as Aristotle framed it, “the center-point about which everything revolves”; and Aristotle’s meaning of leisure is, says Pieper, at the historical source of our distinction between the liberal and the servile arts, what we do freely to be free and what we must do under tedious compulsion.
We may think of work as the opposite of leisure, but the Greeks thought of it as the absence of leisure: askolia—not something in its own right, but the insubstantial privation of that reflective disposition which can finally reveal to us the truth of things—which to the classical eye was the original purpose of a school. Leisure in Latin is otium, and when we negate our leisure, we have negotium, the carrying on, or negotiating, of business. And the immensely suggestive etymology of the English business is busy-ness, that habit so unlike the silence of leisure.
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In this culture, so hard bitten in our negotium, “leisure” smacks of the elite, so it may behoove us to tread cautiously here. But Pieper was onto something, “an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of…work as activity, as toil.” He demonstrates a breadth of thought far more broad than the alphas and “Masters of the Universe” of this age of dominance.
That “condition of the soul” would seem to be a centeredness, even possibly a mindfulness as practiced by the humble Thich Nhat Hahn, who described this in his “Peace Is Every Step:”
One day, I offered a number of children a basket filled with tangerines. The basket was passed around, and each child took one tangerine and put it in his or her palm. We each looked at our tangerine, and the children were invited to meditate on its origins. They saw not only their tangerine, but also its mother, the tangerine tree. With some guidance, they began to visualize the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain. They saw petals falling down and the tiny fruit appear. The sunshine and the rain continued, and the tiny tangerine grew. Now someone has picked it, and the tangerine is here. After seeing this, each child was invited to peel the tangerine slowly, noticing the mist and the fragrance of the tangerine, and then bring it up to his or her mouth and have a mindful bite, in full awareness of the texture and taste of the fruit and the juice coming out. We ate slowly like that.
A different school of thought, indeed; its silence drowned out in the babel and bustle of this time.