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an unnamed speaker, whose voice is the only one heard in the clip, discussing education and Aristotle

Aristotle’s Wildest Take | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat · partial coverage

• Aristotle
• education
• leisure
• school
• work
• war and peace
• liberal education
• contemplation
• Interesting Times

Coverage note: partial (a clip of about thirty seconds; auto-generated English captions, clean)

Core ideas

Education is for leisure. The speaker finds it "wild" that Aristotle sets leisure as the goal of education, and recalls that the Greek word that gives us "school" originally meant leisure. Education is therefore not a means to a job but a space protected from labor.

Work serves leisure, as war serves peace. Aristotle's logic is that we wage war for the sake of peace and, in the same way, we work for the sake of leisure. The usual order, where leisure exists to recover for work, is reversed: work is the means, leisure the end.

What leisure is and is not. The speaker is careful to separate it from idleness, from amusement, and from rest taken to get back to work. Leisure is the time deliberately set aside to cultivate "the highest parts of us," which is a definition of a liberal education as the formation of what is highest in the person.

Excerpts