Joseph Pieper Quotes on Knowledge
Josef Pieper (1904–1997), the German Catholic philosopher whose Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) and Living the Truth (1947–49) gave mid-twentieth-century Thomism one of its most accessible voices, recovered for a wide German and Anglophone readership the medieval distinction between two modes of intellectual activity — the discursive ratio that argues from premise to conclusion and the receptive intellectus that simply beholds the truth that has come into view. The framework grounds Pieper's defence of the contemplative dimension of human knowing against the modern reduction of intellectual work to productive activity, and the corresponding analysis of the cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance — runs through his subsequent moral philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Leisure is the basis of culture.”
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Attributed to Joseph Pieper:
“Truth is the soul's love of being as it is.”
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“Über den Begriff der Tradition , quoted in Alberto Peratoner, Gli Otto Pilastri della Tradizione , oasicenter.eu , 1 July 2019.”
Wikiquote -
“What happens when our eye sees a rose? What do we do when that happens? Our mind does something, to be sure, in the mere fact of taking in the object, grasping its color, its shape, and so on. We have to be awake and active. But all the same, it is a "relaxed" looking, so long as we are merely looking at it and not observing or studying it, counting or measuring its various features. Such observat”
The Ernst Jünger quote is from Blätter und Steine (Hamburg, 1934), p. 202. -
“[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. […] It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive ; a stoniness of heart, that will not brook any resistance — as expressed once, most radically, in the following terrifying statement: "Every action makes sense, even criminal acts … all passivity is senseless.”
p. 14 | The Goethe quote is from his Maximen und Reflexionen , ed. Günther Müller (Stuttgart, 1943), no. 1415. The other quote is from Hermann Rauschning 's Conversations with Hitler ( Gespräche mit Hitler , 1940). -
“The Goethe quote is from his Maximen und Reflexionen , ed. Günther Müller (Stuttgart, 1943), no. 1415. The other quote is from Hermann Rauschning 's Conversations with Hitler ( Gespräche mit Hitler , 1940).”
[I]f knowing is work, exclusively work, then the one who knows, knows only the fruit of his own, subjective activity, and nothing else. There is nothing in his knowing that is not the fruit of his own efforts; there is nothing "received" in it. […] It is the mark of "absolute activity" (which Goethe said "makes one bankrupt, in the end"); the hard quality of not-being-able-to-receive ; a stoniness -
“Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity , first of all, there is leisure as "non-activity" — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet. Leisure is a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear. […] Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion — in the real.”
p. 31 -
“Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough. It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" […] over mere function.”
p. 50 -
“Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi , the desire for knowledge, active longing to know.”
The Philosophical Act | pp. 106–107