Capitalism versus the Contemplative Life
An essay on the exploitation of free time
One of Aristotle’s greatest contributions to philosophy was the notion that human happiness consists above all in contemplation (see the Nicomachean Ethics, book 10, chapter 7). Contemplation is characterized by its inactivity, by comparison to the other forms of activity (practical and moral) that characterize human life. This is because, of all human acts, contemplation is the most divine. The gods, says Aristotle, need no activity precisely on account of their profound ontological perfection. Being perfect, there is nothing they need to pursue, nothing they need to accomplish, nothing they need to achieve. The only activity proper to the gods is the (in)activity of contemplation, and humans become happy by approximating such contemplation to the greatest extent of which they are capable.
Unlike the gods, the human capacity for contemplation depends on the fulfillment of certain material conditions. Above all, because he is a temporal creature, man requires a certain allotment of time set apart for leisure. Contemplation is not easily practiced during the toil of labor. But leisure is possible only given the adequate provision of material necessities, so that the contemplative person (the philosopher, for Aristotle) need not busy himself too much with procuring such things through labor. In Aristotle’s time, this entailed a rigid class division: leisure was the privilege of the nobler classes, whose material needs were mostly provided by an underclass of slave labor. On account of their position, slaves could not engage in contemplation, for their time was entirely taken up by labor.
Karl Marx often observed that one of the central traits of capitalism was its monopolization of time for the purposes of capital. The working classes were to have no time for themselves, because time is money – almost literally, given the main tenets of Marx’s labor theory of value. Of course, outside of the time they were to spend in labor, the working classes also make up the bulk of the consumer base for the commodities which capitalism produces. But consumption itself was, for Marx, a form of social reproduction – something that reproduces the capitalist system indirectly, as much as commodity production sustains the capitalist system directly. Free time, which the laborer spends in various forms of consumption, only serves the reinvigoration of the laborer for the next day’s work – that is all. From the standpoint of capital, any use of free time not related to labor itself is frivolous. “Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) — moonshine!” (Capital Vol. 1, Penguin Books, 1990, p.375.)
On this temporal basis alone, then, it is possible to assert that capitalism makes the life of contemplation impossible for the majority. In this way, it is little better than the slave society of Aristotle’s time, yet it also confirms Aristotle’s thesis that contemplation itself depends upon freedom from labor. It is no wonder, as many critics of capitalism have observed, that the contemplative life has vanished from so much of capitalist society. Free time is monopolized for capital alone; and servitude to capital entails servitude to a life of labor. The dissolution of the Catholic monasteries throughout Europe may well be understood in just this light: monastic life (a microcosm of communism?) is pure frivolity, a waste of time and labor power, by the calculations of any self-respecting capitalist!
Marx’s commitment to the shortening of the working day was of a piece with the larger communist trajectory towards maximal free time for the masses. In one comment from the Grundrisse, Marx quotes Dilke’s The Source and the Remedy of the National Difficulties, stating that the true measure of the wealth of nations is in its disposable time — by contrast to capitalism, where the measure of wealth is determined by necessary labor time: “‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’” (Grundrisse, Penguin Books, 1993, p.706.)
Alexandre Kojève brings this Marxist commitment to free time back to its Platonic and Aristotelian roots in a letter to Leo Strauss, where he writes (provocatively!) that “[Hegel and Marx] did not want either to destroy the Academy (= ‘monasteries’) or to render them inactive and ineffectual, but wanted on the contrary to transform them into a ‘polis.’” (“The Strauss–Kojève Correspondence”, in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, pp.302–303.) The academies and the monasteries were, in Kojève’s understanding, places where the Platonic (and Aristotelian) commitment to contemplation was lived out to the full. The purpose of socialism, in Kojève’s interpretation of Marx, was to make such a life possible on a universal basis, precisely by its universal redistribution of free time.
It was for this reason that, in “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy,” Kojève proposed the establishment of a “Latin Empire,” constituted by a federation of the countries of Southern Europe – France, Spain, and Italy. The unifying characteristic of these countries was the cultural importance which they historically attached to the arts of leisure, and especially contemplation – a value which they inherited from Roman Catholicism, the prevailing religion of those countries. Since the purpose of socialism, in Kojève’s Aristotelian interpretation of Marx, was the maximization of human leisure, he considered it essential that the countries which had most perfected the arts of leisure should be protected by an imperial formation that would resemble something like a Catholic integralist polity (notwithstanding that Kojève himself was an atheist). This would be in order to preserve the arts of leisure for a future in which their cultivation – their humanization – would be the universal political project for humanity.
There is an obvious question regarding the uses of leisure: why, given sufficient free time, would anybody choose a life of contemplation? Why might they not use their time for something else? As it happens, Kojève himself was acutely aware of the different uses of free time. In America during the post-war period, he observed that “post-historical” American capitalism had itself achieved a level of freedom for its population that the Soviet Union could only look upon with envy – and yet this abundance did not yield anything particularly noble, philosophic, or contemplative, in the development of the American spirit. On the contrary, it enabled a totally animalistic behavior, which Kojève seemed to find degrading and distasteful. This was in stark contrast to the use of leisure that he observed, not only in Southern Europe, but in the ritualistic society of Japan, where leisure was employed in the “pure snobbery” of tea ceremonies and other highly aestheticized rituals. Such rituals shared more with the noble life of contemplation than with the life of brutish consumerism that characterized American society. (See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pp.161-162.)
Kojève’s observations about the American version of “post-history” seem even truer in the neoliberal context of today, when a base and degrading form of consumerism is the defining feature of a now globalized American culture. With production outsourced to cheap labor in less developed countries, while developed countries are characterized by an asymmetric abundance of extractive industries like finance and technology, capitalist profits have continued to soar. Meanwhile, as wages have failed to rise significantly in real terms, the American working class has been further atomized and isolated, thanks to the disappearance of Fordist production systems, the decline of unionization, and the disappearance of older forms of community and free association. At the same time, average Americans may boast of far greater access to cheap consumer goods than their proletarian forebears, giving them the illusion of greater freedom, even as their wages have not risen and their working hours have not declined — quite the contrary, they have lengthened.
The consequence of all this is that the fate of the average worker, and the quality of his life, is no longer tied to the collective fate of working people in general — for gone are the natural bonds of cooperation and solidarity that formed at the height of America’s industrial power. Nor is the individual’s sense of purpose any longer tied to his belonging in a dense network of relationships and communities, knit together by shared purpose and common goods. Rather, each man is the maker of his own way in the world, the author of his own fate. As both a laborer and a consumer, he has nothing and no one to live for except himself, and nothing to do for himself but work and consume. His labor becomes the sole source of his sense of self-worth, and he has an endless range of consumer choices with which to entertain himself in the midst of this deep isolation.
These changes in the material substructure of late capitalism brought with them a new set of psychological maladies and disorders, peculiar to the neoliberal era. These psychological disorders explain why, even in an era defined by seemingly unlimited consumption — supposedly the sign of true freedom finally attained — the human capacity for contemplation seems as dead as ever, and even America at its own “end of history” cannot seem to aspire to the noble cultivation of leisure which Aristotle defined as human happiness. To understand why this is so requires a philosophical examination of the psychological effects of late American capitalism that neither Marx nor Kojève quite foresaw.
In The End of Burnout, Jonathan Malesic attends to the rising phenomenon of burnout, perhaps the most conspicuous psychological effect of the shifts which capitalism has undergone in its neoliberal phase. Malesic describes in detail how he and other academics have buckled under the overwhelming superfluity of tasks that accompanied the academic profession. In particular, he notes the burden of administrative paperwork that academics are increasingly pressured to take upon themselves: “Paradoxically, the growth of non-teaching staff has not lessened faculty workloads. If anything, faculty are responsible for more paperwork now, to satisfy the demands of the bloated administration. Particular in the area of assessment – that is, not teaching itself, but evaluating the effectiveness of teaching – the administrative load has increased dramatically.” (The End of Burnout, 96.)
While Malesic is recounting his own experience in the academic sector, he also notes that the same trend has affected practically every sector in the neoliberal economy: “In every sector of the economy during the past several decades, the typical job has become more stressful and less rewarding.” In this period, “work has laid greater psychological burdens on us and become more precarious, while our ideals for it have risen.” (Ibid., 97.) The paradox here is that while, on the material level, working conditions have indisputably worsened, the attitudes and expectations with which people approach their jobs are almost comically positive. It is in this disjunction between expectations and reality that Malesic identifies the origins of burnout. Earlier in the book, Malesic writes that “[the] gap between our ideals for work and the reality of our job is burnout’s origin point. We burn out when what we actually do at work falls short of what we hoped to achieve.” (79)
What is it that people hope to achieve from work? “In the cultures of wealthy nations, we want more than just a salary from our jobs. We want dignity. We want to grow as persons.” (Ibid.) In other words, in wealthy nations with broad access to material goods, work is no longer simply a means of acquiring the means of material subsistence, as it was in an earlier and more “honest” stage of capitalism. Rather, work now has a moral, psychological, and spiritual significance attached to it. “The ideal that motivates Americans to work to the point of exhaustion today is the promise that if you work hard, you will live a good life: not just a life of material comfort, but a life of social dignity, moral character, and spiritual purpose.” (123) In other words, work is no longer merely the production of material goods or the provision of the means of subsistence. It is the source of one’s entire sense of self.
Malesic, a former professor of Catholic theology, draws from the work of the well-known Catholic philosopher and Thomist, Josef Pieper, to illustrate how the culture of total work undermines the life of contemplative leisure. The basic observation of Pieper’s book, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, is simple and intuitive: contemplation requires leisure or rest — not merely the free time available to spend in relaxation, but the psychological capacity to truly rest in that time, rather than use one’s leisure merely for activities that augment the capacity for labor. The Aristotelian core of this observation is that, in the natural order of things, work exists for the sake of rest, not rest for the sake work. But under the regime of capitalism, this relationship has been inverted. As Malesic writes: “We justify time off as ‘self-care,’ which sounds like resistance to total work but which we often frame as a way to stay strong enough to carry a heavy workload . . . The ‘fun’ workplaces of stereotypical tech startups, with their game rooms and napping pods, are not really designed for leisure. They’re designed to keep you at work forever.” (137)
The psychological incapacity for true contemplative leisure created by these conditions pervades the whole phenomenon of human life in the present era, and it requires its own analysis. Such an analysis has been provided by the “rising star” of German postmodern philosophy, Korean-born Byung-Chul Han, in a number of books that have recently been published in English. In books such as Psychopolitics, The Agony of Eros, and The Burnout Society, Han elucidates how neoliberalism weaponizes the psyche in its pursuit of capital’s self-expansion. Neoliberalism is characterized by the imperative of can rather than the older imperative of should. The subject who believes that he can rather than he that should is a much more productive worker. Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation. Labor is no longer an externally imposed discipline, but the ego’s own work of achieving something for itself. In Byung-Chul Han’s words, “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer ‘obedience-subjects’ but ‘achievement-subjects.’ They are entrepreneurs of themselves.” (The Burnout Society, 8.)
In this way, the neoliberal subject imagines that he is in possession of freedom, even of free time. The transition from an industrial capitalism to a purely consumerist epoch bears many puzzling resemblances to Marx’s own prediction of a transition from capitalism to communism, i.e. from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, predicated upon the diminishing of the working day. The fact that the citizens of the neoliberal order may now boast greater ability to consume whatever goods they desire, as inexpensively as possible, leads them to think that capitalism itself has granted them what communism promised, namely unlimited free time: time for themselves, rather than time for another.
But this is an illusion: the laboring subject merely imagines his labor time to be free time, his servitude to be freedom. Likewise, he imagines his consumption to be free time, when as much as his labor it is merely the result of his own auto-compulsion. No longer conscious of his opposition to the capitalist class, the neoliberal subject operates now by auto-compulsion rather than under the compulsion of another. Although he is no longer consciously subject to the repressive regime of a dominating Other, the achievement-subject is not truly free. Neoliberalism creates only an illusion of freedom, because the achievement subject in fact exploits himself, rather than being directly exploited by another.
A sign of this transformation is the blurring of boundaries between work and life, and between labor and consumption — made possible in large part by the internet. This blurring is partly responsible for the illusion of freedom and free time. In a post-industrial society, labor itself — one’s career or profession — becomes a form of consumption, i.e. something one does because one can rather than because one should. One pursues a career no longer simply because one is forced to do so by the material necessities of survival, but in order to achieve something for oneself: success, status, fame, a sense of self-worth, etc., not to mention a kind of wealth in unlimited consumption (even if one is relatively poor — in America and the West, the obstacle posed by poverty to unlimited consumption has been largely overcome). Labor no longer appears as something one is forced to do: it is rather an act of self-determination, an act of freedom. Conversely, outside of “labor time” properly speaking, consumption itself is something we increasingly do by a sort of compulsive necessity, like an addiction, and not out of the mere necessity for survival. The constant availability of the internet in our back pockets makes it all too easy not only to shop, but also to scroll, to click from one thing to the next, seeking one dopamine hit after another. We are hyperactive, even outside of our “labor time” — we cannot stop acting and working. Our attention span disappears, and the capacity to relax disappears along with it.
Consumption itself has come to involve the project of crafting the perfect lifestyle for oneself, the perfect identity, all of which are tied to the same sense of dignity and self-worth that is narcissistically pursued in the workplace. Much of this takes place on the internet, where even one’s free time is spent cultivating an online image or “brand.” “In social networks, the function of ‘friends’ is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as commodity.” (The Burnout Society, 43.) As such, rather than a mere means of regenerating one’s labor power, neoliberal consumption and especially online consumption becomes its own form of production — the production of the self-as-commodity — which the laborer as self-exploiter forces upon himself.
Along with this profound transformation comes an increasing focus upon the self. Since the neoliberal “achievement subject” is now his own capitalist, laborer, and commodity all wrapped in one, the field of his consciousness is entirely closed in upon himself, no longer aware of the oppressive capitalist Other that once forced its exploitative pressures upon him from outside. By the same token, he is no longer aware of the Other as an object of erotic desire, in pursuit of whom he must renounce himself and his ego in an act of self-giving love. On the contrary, as a self-exploiter, his only goal becomes self-creation, the fashioning of a particular ego-identity defined by a particular set of experiences, desires, and achievements. To the extent that there are others in his life, they are merely instruments of his self-creation, “adumbrations of the narcissist’s self.” (The Agony of Eros, 2.)
One of the marks of achievement society, in Han’s analysis, is excess positivity. In a world where we are constantly bombarded with messaging and marketing, whose purpose is to pressure us into the pursuit of unlimited achievement, it is easy to understand what Han is referring to. As Jonathan Malesic observed above, the cultural ideals and expectations which we now hold over our work lives are higher than ever — even as we also fall farther short of those ideals than ever. We are relentlessly encouraged to make something of ourselves, to become somebody, to accrue experiences, etc. All things are possible and permissible, and we are given an endless variety of options to pick in order to determine the shape and character of our lifestyles and identities. Slogans like “Yes, you can!” signify the excess of positivity to which we are subjected by the ubiquitous presence of capitalist marketing and media propaganda.
Depression and burnout are the psychological maladies that naturally result from excess positivity, achievement-oriented hyperactivity, and the fixation on the self. Endlessly pushed to out-do ourselves, we are exhausted and depressed by our failure to reach ever-higher levels of achievement. As such, depression is also an opportunity for capitalization by a ballooning self-help and self-care industry, which, rather than treating the surplus positivity of neoliberal society as a disorder, merely exploits the phenomenon of depression in order to heighten that positivity still further. Self-care, even when proposed as an antidote to depression, still falls neatly within the paradigm of achievement society, which is organized around the attainment of maximal experience and good feelings – a society in which individuals are relentlessly pressured to be entrepreneurs of themselves.
Byung-Chul Han echoes Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man in rebelling against a culture that glorifies “the power of positive thinking,” and advocates instead for a recovery of genuine negativity. But he goes far beyond Marcuse in his understanding of what such negativity entails. For Marcuse, and for the Marxist tradition generally, negativity as a subversive response to contemporary capitalist society entailed simply the critique of present conditions, as a prerequisite to transcending those conditions and moving to a new and higher form of social organization. Negativity served the purpose of advancing history forward, beyond the stagnant conditions of a modernity (or a postmodernity) in which no future could be imagined.
By contrast, Han advocates an even more radical negativity than Marcuse. For Han, “the power of negative thinking” lies not simply in the power to support the historical process of revolution, but in its power to opt out of the “achievement imperative” altogether. Han’s negativity is not simply a critique of present society, but the negativity of doing nothing in a society that pressures us to do, act, consume, perform, and succeed, all the time and without relent. To be sure, there is a resolute critique of achievement society implied by the very act of saying no to the imperative of hyperactivity, and opting instead for doing nothing. But the power of negativity lies not so much in the ability to make such a critique, as in the direct choice of intentional or mindful inactivity, in resistance to the hyperactivity that is usually forced upon us.
On Han’s account, the proliferation of mental disorders such as depression, burnout, and ADHD, signifies not an excess of negativity as one might initially suppose, but rather a deficit in the ability to say no to the imperatives of a hyper-positive and hyper-active achievement society. He contrasts this to the mental disorders that characterized the subject of an earlier more disciplinary phase of capitalism, who suffered from the excess negativity of inner repression – the effects of “not-being-allowed-to-do-anything.” The subject of contemporary achievement society, by contrast, suffers from “being-able-to-do-everything.” It is a suffering that stems from the imperative to pursue nothing but pleasure and achievement without limits — what the late Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism called “depressive hedonia”: a condition constituted by “an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.” Depression results from the compulsion to consume — it is death by an overdose of positivity.
In Han’s words, “the compulsion to consume is immanent to the system of production.” The necessity of economic growth, or in Marxist terms the accumulation of surplus value, requires “the quick uptake and consumption of things.” Consequently, the experience of time is distorted, and it becomes impossible to experience duration as such – for there are no more things that endure. “In the consumer society, one forgets how to linger.” (The Scent of Time, 93.) The internet plays almost a structural role in this dynamic, conditioning the subject to experience time no longer as a continuous narrative with a sense of duration, but as a series of unconnected moments of stimulation. The endless pursuit of pleasure and experience, the drive for instant gratification, uses up even the “surplus time” that capitalism creates, killing the soul’s capacity to pause and linger in a state of contemplative non-doing.
The inactivity which Han champions is not that of one who is exhausted and impotent, but the inactivity of one who willfully intends to do nothing — e.g. the mystic or the Zen master, who simply sits mindfully in a state of not doing. It is similar to the Taoist concept of wu wei (無為), sometimes translated as “non-action” or “non-doing.” This is a profoundly powerful form of negativity, which Han is at great pains to distinguish from the impotent negativity of depression and burnout, which are the afflictions of one who is exhausted by the sheer limitless availability of things to do. The depressed and burnt-out person is unable to do. True negativity, by contrast, lies in the ability not to do — the power of self-denial or self-negation. In this way it is also the polar opposite of neoliberalism’s fixation on the self. Incidentally, in The Agony of Eros, Han also pushes the thesis that it is precisely self-negation that grounds the capacity for love. Without self-negation, the Other is not encountered as other, and is instead treated as yet another commodity in the self’s compulsive entrepreneurial project of self-creation.
Han’s analysis is openly inspired by the Aristotelian account of contemplation as that which makes humans happy. He also borrows much from Zen Buddhism, which likewise proposes the inactivity of meditation or contemplation as the key to human happiness. (Han’s own essay on The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism was just published in English last month.) Similarly, the Christian mystical tradition of Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart features prominently in Han’s analysis, especially in The Scent of Time, which is a direct call for the recovery of the vita contemplativa. Indeed, Han’s analysis could profitably be read alongside such modern mystics as Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others, who might be understood as proponents of mindful negativity, self-forgetting, and inactivity in a world overburdened by positivity, narcissism, and technologically induced hyperactivity. For all of these writers, as for Byung-Chul Han, it is the negativity of contemplation that constitutes true happiness, in contrast to the endless pursuit of superficial pleasures that only depress and burn out the subjects of late capitalist society.
Han offers little practical guidance for what a political project moving forward should look like. In contrast to Kojève, with whom he shares an emphasis on the vita contemplativa over the vita activa, Han appears rather pessimistic about the future. Yet in each of his books he offers at least a philosophical framework through which to think about any politics of the future. Invariably, he emphasizes the importance of recovering the contemplative capacity of human nature. At the end of The Scent of Time, he implies that such a recovery must follow upon a more conventionally materialist political transformation: “the democratization of work must be followed by a democratization of otium [Latin for “leisure”], lest the former turn into the bondage of everyone.” (The Scent of Time, 113-114.) Similarly, at the end of Psychopolitics he follows Deleuze in advocating for a politics of “idiotism,” by which he means a politics that “erects spaces for guarding silence, quiet, and solitude.” (Psychopolitics, 84.) Here again, Han echoes Kojève, who wrote that “it is precisely to the organization and the ‘humanization’ of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts.” (Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy.)
There is also reason to hope that social movements on the ground will give evidence of a growing rejection of a culture hyper-focused on work, consumerism, achievement, and self-entrepreneurship, in favor of a culture of leisure. The so-called “Great Resignation” that is currently surging like a wave through the younger generations of workers may be just the beginning of such a movement. Yet the recovery of a properly contemplative leisure, as a political project, requires much more than this. It will require the construction of spaces — and the setting aside of time — devoted to the silence of contemplative non-doing, the extension of the ancient spirit of monasticism to the whole political body. It will also require a political movement or institution with the power to reshape the human psyche — or more accurately, with the power to silence the psyche, the ego — by leading it back (“reducing” it) to a condition of pure negativity, through the public presentation of powerful symbols, rituals, and narratives.
What such a movement or institution would look like in the details is a complex topic, probably for another essay. But by way of conclusion, it is worth recalling that, for the atheist Alexandre Kojève, the Catholic Church was a preeminent example of such an institution. Hence, Kojève’s proposal for the formation of a Catholic “Latin Empire” in the Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy. This is not to say that other contemplative currents may not play a role, or that a Catholic contemplative revival should not take stock of them in its attempt to “humanize leisure.” Yet the fact remains that, unlike many of these other currents, the Catholic Church appears to be the only surviving political entity with an institutional commitment to the priority of contemplative life. This would seem to be the main reason for Kojève’s nomination of the Catholic Church as a key player in the politics of the future.
For his part, Byung-Chul Han, while he is skeptical of the possibility of Christian revival in the current climate, has nonetheless spent much time in the city of Rome, precisely because (as he stated in one interview) “for happiness we need a towering, superior other . . . [and] Rome is especially abundant in towering others.” He is referring, of course, to the presence of towering baroque and romanesque churches throughout the Eternal City.
It’s incredible how modern philosophy time and time again returns to zen. Bhodidharma was the most ahead of his time philosopher who ever lived it would seem.