The best seats at the games
Imagine the crowd at Olympia. Every four years, according to a tradition that dates the first games to 776 BC, Greeks gathered at the sanctuary of Zeus in the western Peloponnese for a festival. The place turned into a fair: spectators camped in tents, and philosophers, speakers, artists, and performers of every kind turned up looking for an audience. Now the story. Around 45 BC the Roman statesman Cicero retold, in his Tusculan Disputations (5.8–9), a tale he credits to Heraclides of Pontus, a member of Plato’s circle who lived about two centuries after the man in the story. The man was Pythagoras, who came to the town of Phlius and talked with its ruler, Leon. Asked what craft he practiced, Pythagoras said he knew none, but that he was a philosopher. Leon had never heard the word, and asked what it meant. Pythagoras answered with a picture: life is like the festival at the great games. Some people come with trained bodies, for the glory of a crown. Some come to buy and sell, for profit. And some, the best sort of free people in Cicero’s telling, come for neither applause nor gain, but simply to look, and to watch closely what is done and how. In life too, a few people look closely at the nature of things. Those are the lovers of wisdom.
Treat the story as a legend, because it is one. Many scholars doubt that the conversation took place, and many doubt that Pythagoras coined the word (Lesson 1 weighs this). But the picture has lasted because it is true to an idea the Greeks really held. They had a word for the person in the third group, and for what that person did, and the word has come down to us in a changed form: theory.
The oldest uses of the word are about looking. In the Histories of Herodotus (about 430 BC), the king Croesus greets the Athenian lawgiver Solon with news that has reached him of Solon’s wisdom and wanderings: that he has traveled over much of the world, philosophizing, as the sentence goes, for the sake of theōria, of seeing (1.30). (The meeting itself is almost certainly a literary invention, since the dates barely fit; what matters is how the Greek of Herodotus’s day put the two ideas side by side.) A theōros was a person who went to look. This course tells the history of the word in three steps, as a story of widening meaning: first the spectator at a sacred festival, then the person who looks closely and quietly at anything, and last the philosopher’s contemplation of what is most real. A caution about the first step: it is sometimes said that the oldest sense of the word was “seeing the god.” That comes from the folk etymology just mentioned. The word’s earliest meaning was “spectator,” and the festivals were sacred, which is how the two ideas sit so close together.
Looking for its own sake
Aristotle gives the idea its fullest statement. The Metaphysics opens with a sentence about looking: “All men by nature desire to know.” His evidence is the pleasure we take in our senses, which we love, he says, even apart from their usefulness, “and above all others the sense of sight.” A few lines on (982b) he says that it is “owing to their wonder” that people both now begin and at first began to philosophize. In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book X, chapter 7) he argues that if happiness is activity in accordance with the highest virtue, it is the activity of the mind, and that means contemplation. It is the most continuous of our activities, he says, since we can contemplate truth more steadily than we can do anything else, and the most self-sufficient. And it depends on leisure: “we are busy that we may have leisure.” He adds a daring line, that we must, so far as we can, “make ourselves immortal,” and then a sober one: such a life would be too high for a human being, and is possible only in so far as something divine is present in us.
What does contemplation ask of a person? This course answers with three conditions. First, you set aside the immediate question of use: you ask why, and keep asking, without needing the answer to pay. Second, you look for a long time, patiently and deeply; a glance is not contemplation. Third, you cut the world loose from your own interests for a while, so as to see it as it is and not as it serves you. (The twentieth-century philosopher Edmund Husserl called a version of this “bracketing,” putting the ordinary assumptions in brackets so that the thing itself can show.) In this reading, that is the first step of philosophy, the one before arguing or acting. The philosopher is not first of all someone with opinions, but someone who has learned to look.
Plato had put the point in an image. In the Republic (Book VII, 518c) he says that education is not like putting sight into blind eyes: the eyes can see already, and what is needed is to turn the whole soul around, as one might turn a whole body, until it can face what is brightest. The word in this course’s title, “gaze,” is the right one: this is not a glance, but a long, steady, directed looking.
Another view
Not everyone has accepted the ideal of the spectator. In The Quest for Certainty (1929) the American philosopher John Dewey attacked what he called the spectator theory of knowledge, the idea that to know is to look at a finished reality from outside. For Dewey, knowing is a kind of doing: we test ideas by acting on the world and watching what follows. He also argued that the Greek preference for pure contemplation over practice reflected a society that left manual work to others. This course sets pragmatism aside as a passing wave. That is too quick: it did not pass. Charles Peirce published its founding statement in 1878, and William James and Dewey carried it forward; Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam were still developing versions of it in the late twentieth century. Contemplation, in this view, is a useful tool for some questions, and a bad model for all of knowing.
Quiet enough to see
Looking steadily is hard because the looker is noisy. In the Phaedo (65c) Plato has Socrates say that the soul thinks best “when none of these things troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor any pleasure,” and is as far as possible alone by itself. (The speaker is making an argument, not a recommendation to ignore the body; but it is a vivid portrait of the problem.) Nearly two thousand years later the French priest and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) taught the same discipline: quiet the senses, the imagination, and the passions, and you will hear the voice of inner truth. A caution about how he is sometimes read: the “inner master” Malebranche meant was universal Reason, and he identified it with the Word of God, in the manner of Augustine. So his stillness is a stillness before God as well as before truth, and this course borrows him only as one voice for a discipline that many traditions share.
Buddhism has the most worked-out version. Its two basic practices are śamatha, calm or tranquility, and vipaśyanā, insight, “special seeing.” In Chinese they became 止 (zhǐ, to stop) and 观 (guān, to look), joined as 止观 (zhǐguān), calm and insight. The great Tiantai master Zhiyi (538–597) built them into a whole system in the Mohe zhiguan, “Great Calming and Contemplation,” which his student Guanding edited from his lectures. The order matters: first you stop, then you see. It sits inside Buddhism’s “three trainings,” 戒 (jiè, conduct), 定 (dìng, steadiness of mind), and 慧 (huì, wisdom).
致虚极，守静笃。万物并作，吾以观复。
Reach the limit of emptiness, hold fast to stillness. The ten thousand things arise together; I watch them return.
Laozi (Daodejing), chapter 16 (literal gloss)
The Daoist line is the same discipline in another voice: stillness first, and then watching. The word for watching is the same 观. This course’s own name for the first step, 静观 (jìngguān, “quiet looking”), keeps both halves of it.
One minute of looking
Pick something near you: a plant, a window, a coin, your own hand. Press start, put the screen out of mind, and just look for one minute.
This is a taste of the discipline, not a course in it. Nothing you type is saved or sent.
The gift of idle time
The German philosopher Josef Pieper (1904–1997) asked what a society has to look like for contemplation to be possible. His short book Leisure, the Basis of Culture, first published in German in 1948 and in English in 1952, in Alexander Dru’s translation with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, is this step’s second guide. Pieper was a Catholic thinker writing just after the Second World War, and his target was what he called the world of total work, a society in which work takes over everything and anything that is not work has to justify itself as rest for more work. He starts from words. The Greek for leisure, scholē, is the root of the Latin schola and of our “school”: the word for the place of learning originally meant leisure. The Greeks had only a negative word for work, ascholia, “un-leisure,” and the Romans did too: negotium, “not-leisure.” In Pieper’s argument, leisure is not an interval in the working day, nor an idle gap for recovery. It “stands in a perpendicular position,” in his phrase, to the working process: another dimension. It is a condition of the soul, a kind of stillness, “the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear.”
What the old words say
Five words about leisure, work, and looking. For each, pick what the word first meant.
Etymology is a guide to how a culture once thought, not a proof of how we should.
This is where this course’s social point lands. Pieper’s claim, which this course adopts, is that the great creative ages of culture did not come from people working hardest. They came from groups who had room to look, and to think about things with no immediate use. If your whole life is clocks, deadlines, and measured output, you are close to having nothing left to look with. Aristotle had the same thought in different words: “we are busy that we may have leisure,” not the reverse.
What did the Greek word theōria first mean?
Another view
Leisure for whom? Aristotle, the philosopher of contemplation, was also a defender of slavery, and the answer in his Politics is blunt. In Book VII (chapter 9) he says that citizens of the best city should not live the life of mechanics or tradesmen, since such a life is “ignoble” and works against virtue, and that the people who work the land will have to be slaves or foreign dependents. Leisure, in other words, was made out of other people’s work, and women were outside the citizen class. Pieper’s ideal has a price tag that a Greek author could ignore and we cannot. Others argue that the problem Pieper saw has only grown: Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (German edition 2010, English 2015) describes a culture of self-driven achievement that exhausts its members, and Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 (2013) argues that constant availability erodes rest and attention. The lesson of Aristotle’s example is that the case for leisure has to be made for everyone, not for a few.
Closer to home
The Chinese tradition has its own tools for quiet looking. The Song philosopher Cheng Hao (程颢, 1032–1085) wrote a poem usually titled “Autumn Day, Casually Composed” (秋日偶成), a favorite of schoolchildren in the old anthology Qianjia shi. Its third line reads 万物静观皆自得 (wànwù jìngguān jiē zìdé): when the ten thousand things are watched in stillness, each is found at ease in itself. It puts 静观, “quiet looking,” the name this course gives the first step, at the center of an ordinary autumn morning. For an American counterpart, think of Henry David Thoreau, who went to the shore of Walden Pond in 1845 because, as he wrote in Walden (1854), he “wished to live deliberately.” Both are voices from outside Greece for the same discipline: you cannot see clearly while rushing. For readers whose work lives are measured in hours, the practical question is Pieper’s: where in your week is the leisure that is not just rest for more work?
What to keep
- The Greek theōria meant looking: a theōros was a spectator or an envoy sent to see. Cicero’s tale of Pythagoras at the games, from Heraclides of Pontus, is a legend, but it states the idea: the best seats belong to those who come simply to look.
- Aristotle (Metaphysics A, Nicomachean Ethics X) makes contemplation the highest activity, continuous and self-sufficient, and tied to leisure: “we are busy that we may have leisure.” Dewey’s “spectator theory” objection (1929) is the best reply.
- Stillness comes before seeing: Plato’s Phaedo, Malebranche, Buddhist 止观 (Zhiyi, 538–597), Laozi 16, and Cheng Hao’s 静观 are voices for the same discipline.
- Pieper (1948, English 1952): leisure is a condition of the soul, not a break. Scholē became “school”; ascholia and negotium define work as not-leisure. Aristotle’s own leisure rested on slaves, which is why it must be asked: leisure for whom?
Think it over
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Sources and further reading
- Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, book 5, sections 8–9 (the story of Pythagoras and Leon, from Heraclides of Pontus); Herodotus, Histories 1.30 (Croesus and Solon).
- Aristotle, Metaphysics A 1–2 (980a, 982b); Nicomachean Ethics X 7 (1177a–1178a); Politics VII 9 and 15 (W. D. Ross and Benjamin Jowett translations are free online at classics.mit.edu).
- Plato, Phaedo 64a–65c, and Republic VII 518c–d.
- Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth (1674–75) and Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion (1688), Cambridge University Press translations of 1997.
- Zhiyi, Mohe zhiguan (about 594); Laozi, Daodejing, chapter 16 (Chinese text at ctext.org).
- Cheng Hao, “Autumn Day, Casually Composed” (秋日偶成), in Qianjia shi.
- Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru, Faber and Faber, 1952 (German: Muße und Kult, Kösel, 1948).
- John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929.
- Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Stanford University Press, 2015; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, 2013.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 (Project Gutenberg).