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By Pierre Saint-Amand
We consider the Enlightenment as an period ruled via rules of development, construction, and industry--not an period that preferred the lax and indolent person. yet was once the Enlightenment in simple terms in regards to the unceasing development of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines ethical, political, and monetary treatises of the interval, and divulges that the most important eighteenth-century texts did locate price in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment pondering within the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin, this booklet explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, now not as a vice of the wretched, yet as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to ideals approximately advantage and utility.
Whether within the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who behind schedule and procrastinated or within the matters of Chardin's work who overjoyed in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand indicates how eighteenth-century works supplied a robust argument for laziness. Rousseau deserted his prior safety of work to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasised a parasitic technique of resisting paintings as a way to unencumber time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks noticeably hostile the crucial philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely put off work.
Unsettling the obdurate view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and hard work, The Pursuit of Laziness plumbs the texts and pictures of the time and uncovers planned yearnings for slowness and recreation.
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The pursuit of laziness : an idle interpretation of the enlightenment
We expect of the Enlightenment as an period ruled through rules of growth, creation, and industry--not an period that favourite the lax and indolent person. yet was once the Enlightenment in simple terms in regards to the unceasing development of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines ethical, political, and monetary treatises of the interval, and divulges that the most important eighteenth-century texts did locate price in idleness and nonproductivity.
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Extra resources for The pursuit of laziness : an idle interpretation of the enlightenment
Sample text
As he humbly takes stock of his achievements, he recalls his choice of a modest life, removed from the appetite for possessions and wealth, from dizzying aquisitiveness: “Ah! blessed laziness! Tonic indolence! ”31 Repose becomes the supreme good for the mind. It avoids the vicissitudes of material things and makes it possible to remain beyond the reach of commercial troubles. Laziness is the only pleasure that can be counted on, when all possessions are forgotten; it is the ecstatic suspension of expenditure.
But Marivaux’s negligence is easily liberated from this context. This same laziness devoid of moral gravity is what allows Marivaux’s narrators to pick and choose from the present, from the daily offering. ”2 Marivaux quickly diverges from his English predecessors, not only by giving his publication a personal dimension but especially by gallicizing the English model. Le Spectateur français takes its place within the essayistic tradition of Montaigne,3 Pascal, and La Bruyère, authors who were to remain models of style and originality for Marivaux.
The narrator begins thus: “this morning I opened my window between eleven and noon; the minute I opened it, there was a strong gust of wind; I moved to draw back, for it seemed impossible to stay there: and just imagine, I would have missed a moral lesson” (p. 193). Here again we see the volatile wind-blown work, which Marivaux conflates with moral turbulence and existential instability. Morality itself is buffeted by the wind: the lesson is grasped in the moment, rather than through an artificial abstraction like that of the moral Treatise.