Vita Contemplativa
Culture is formed by diversion, excess and detour; it is not produced by following the path that leads straight to the goal. The essence at the core of culture is ornamentation. Culture sits beyond functionality and usefulness. The ornamental dimension, emancipated from any goal or use, is how life insists that it is more than survival. Life receives its divine radiance from that absolute decoration that does not adorn anything.
During the Sabbath, all activity must cease. No business may be pursued. Essential to the Sabbath are inactivity and the suspension of economic life. Capitalism, by contrast, turns even the festival into a commodity. It becomes an event and a spectacle that lacks contemplative calmness. As a form of consumption, it does not found community.
Unbridled consumption isolates and separates people. Consumers are lonely creatures.
We owe true happiness to the useless and purposeless, to what is intentionally convoluted, what is unproductive, indirect, exuberant, superfluous, to beautiful forms and gestures that have no use and serve no purpose. Unlike walking to a destination, running somewhere or marching, taking a leisurely stroll is a luxury. Ceremonious inactivity means: we do something, but to no end. This ‘to-no-end’, this freedom from purpose and usefulness, is the essential core of inactivity. It is the basic formula for happiness.
The fully known life is a dead life. Whatever is alive is not transparent to itself. It is precisely not-knowing, as a form of inactivity, that enlivens life.
Roland Barthes comes across the ‘idleness [he] dream[ s] about’ in a haiku: Sitting peacefully doing nothing Springtime is coming and the grass grows all by itself.
We use most of our powers to extend life. In so doing, we succeed only in reducing life to survival. We live in order to survive. The mania for health and optimization is a reflexive response to the lack of being. We try to compensate for the absence of being by extending bare life, and in so doing we become desensitized to life’s intensity. We confuse it with increased production, performance and consumption, but these are merely forms of survival.
The neoliberal regime increases productivity by isolating people and forcing them to compete. It transforms life into a battle for survival, into a hell of unbridled competition. Success, performance and competition are forms of survival.