A game of two halves. The first half of the book is an inspiring synthesis of thought on the subject of inactivity and its necessity to a life well lived. Shot through here and there with the author’s disdain for the internet – nothing you haven’t read a couple of dozen other people write. And, curiously, in its explorations of contemplation, it doesn’t go much farther east than Greece. But it’s good stuff
‘Leisure time’ lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time.
Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. Without calm, a new barbarism emerges.
When life follows the rule of stimulus–response, need–satisfaction and goal–action, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life.
If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function.
There was a lot to think about in the first half of this book, and I recommend it for the first half alone.
When language is nothing but work and the production of information, it loses its radiance. It becomes worn out, and keeps reproducing the same. The French writer Michel Butor says that the current crisis of literature is a result of communication: ‘For ten or twenty years, almost nothing has happened in literature. There is a flood of publications, but intellectual stasis. The cause is a crisis of communication. The new means of communication are admirable, but they produce an enormous noise.’
It is, I note again, synthesis. It’s a lyric essay. But no less valuable.
The other half… well. The author starts to get, to my eye, sloppy with language and definitions. And then he mounts a rehabilitation of Heidegger, followed by an extended bout of what seems like weirdly personal philosophical score-settling with Hannah Arendt, who has been dead since 1975 and therefore cannot possibly have done anything to merit such spite.
But that first half? Very useful, very thought-provoking.
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With digitalization, availability reaches new heights. By bringing about total producibility, digitalization suspends facticity itself. The digital regime does not acknowledge an unavailable ground of being. Its motto is: being is information. Information makes being fully available. When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible. Like a hunter, the gaze screens its surroundings.