Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Articles

In Defense of Idleness

Wendell O’Brien says, ‘Just Don’t Do It’.

In a sense, every living person is always doing something – breathing, at least, or sitting in a chair – and even a dead man is lying in his tomb. There are nonetheless perfectly good senses in which a person, even if alive, may be said to be, at some time or other, ‘doing nothing’ or ‘being idle’. My primary concern in this essay is to defend idleness – not for everyone, and not all the time, but in moderation, for those who love and have a disposition for it.

In various Eastern traditions there are states sometimes conceived of as ones in which you do nothing. In Daoism, for instance, there is wu wei, or non-action, the sage’s customary mode of being.

…