What is leisure, anyway...

Greetings,

Free-thinking, free-conscienced, beautiful people.

Continuing to look through the mirror of art…

What appears to us today in the mirror of art is,

Leisure…

It seems you smiled a little…

You said, "Can there be such a thing as leisure in the mirror of art?"

You said, "Neither art comes from emptiness, nor does its mirror fill up." Right…

Dear friends, confess, I won't judge you.

Then let me try to explain a little.

The concept of leisure has been associated with human non-productive inactivity and characterized as the opposite of work. This characterization is not a generalization made for the entirety of human history. According to cultural anthropologists, such a distinction does not exist for primitive hunter-gatherer societies. For them, time is a holistic flow where what needs to be done to stay alive is carried out.

The concept of leisure was first used in Ancient Greece. In the Ancient Greek civilization, which had a slave-based social order, almost all physical labor was performed by slaves. Thus, a process took place for free citizens that laid the groundwork for the construction of cultural values, defined as leisure, which distinguished them from others. Philosophy was accepted as the primary determinant for the formation of the principled values necessary for it to be culturally structured.

The word "schole," which is the origin of the word "school" and means leisure in Greek, also means dialogues conducted mutually, the knowledge gained from these dialogues, and the place where these dialogues take place.

The Academy, the school founded by Plato, Aristotle's Lyceum, or Zeno's Stoa School all existed on this root approach.

Thus, for free Greek citizens who did not have to deal with physical labor—that is, those who had leisure—this leisure was defined as the process of aesthetic and intellectual liberation in a cultural sense and the ability to construct one's own essence spiritually. It was accepted as a necessary condition for a virtuous life, which is indispensable for a person to know themselves within themselves and to elevate themselves.

What does Aristotle say in his work, Nicomachean Ethics?

"We work for the sake of leisure."

Okay, but are we crazy or simple-minded that, while we are already surrounded by leisure, we also work for the sake of leisure on top of it?

It is because what he calls leisure is not empty…

As we explained above, for a virtuous life….

It's as if you said, "Professor Abidin, you've started playing with words again…"

Well then, what did Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle's teacher, say:

"Know thyself"

Are you saying, "Okay, let's know ourselves, but what does that have to do with leisure, Professor?"

We said it, leisure is not empty.

Just as there is no void in the physical world, there is no, and cannot be, any void in the thinking activity of the human mind.

The mind thinks and thinks, until it becomes a "crazy mind" (deli Zihni).

Jokes aside.

What we define as time, and use to measure the change and motion of everything, especially the Universe, is a conceptualization invented by human consciousness to lawfully place the relationship between itself and everything outside of itself into its own mental design first.

Therefore, time is already a result of the human mind.

In other words, time is reflected not from an emptiness, but from a fullness.

Well, it is full, but where is it full? Of course, it is full in the human mind. Then let's say it is full of thought. Like the tree and its fruit, mind and thought have a symbiotic relationship, that is…

But the real problem is our ability to continuously maintain in our own essence the cognitive capacity to analyze its fullness in our minds, and the thinking activity to show it to ourselves, in ourselves. That is where the paradox begins: "We work for the sake of leisure."

I thought time was an invention of our minds… I thought there was no emptiness there… That's true, but…

We need something to understand all of this in its own relationality.

"To know ourselves"

To know ourselves, we need questions, to question ourselves with these questions, and as a result, we need to challenge ourselves to transform what we encounter into a virtuous being.

Because the human mind is a stakeholder of the nature it is born into and a conscious subject that can constantly perceive it, it has been able to gain the skill to objectify its own existence in front of its consciousness, just as it objectifies nature, and to build its own existential being upon it.

It is thanks to this skill that mental imagery begins to trigger artistic creativity, "leisure" fills with art, thus we begin to know ourselves in the mirror of art, and as Aristotle said, we create leisure to know more.

Rightfully, you are saying, "You've philosophized up to here, where is the art…"

This article ends here, but don't think there isn't more; don't I need to create leisure for the continuation as well?

What is leisure, anyway?

Could it be civilization?

Until our next meeting, goodbye for now, breathe with art, stay with art, now and always.