vita contemplativa
Aren’t we always in tension between these two modes: stillness and activity, vita contemplativa and vita activa?
In stillness, the presence of the world swells; its hum of diligent, unceasing work becomes self-evident. Hence its popularity with poets, who are always hunting for material from somewhere beyond.
In this contemplation, my attention is soft and flat like a tablecloth, inviting you into conversation, my will to listen to you wholly even threatening to subsume my own ego; a risk I will wear for the promise of wisdom. My subjectivity recedes and the otherness of you blooms into full view. My attention a lingering, gently wandering gaze, the flâneur, who gets more than their fair share of leisure from the five dollars of coffee at the cafe. I walk aimlessly around the gallery, not knowing what I am there for, and therefore more prone to genuine surprise. I allow questions to haunt and nip at my heels until they find their resolve or else a sensible place to be filed safely and neatly away.
It is contra to activity, in which the world is fashioned to a point at the end of my long telescope of perception; it is a mere object for me to reach out and enact my will upon. I judge without hesitation, and slice time into fungible units during which to execute. I make myself useful and make use-of things. In activity I will gain no wisdom on the fundamental correctness of my frame, only whether or not it fulfils my immediate objective.
Byung-Chul Han points out that vita contemplativa is not passive, mindless, but a mode of living equally as rich as vita activa:
‘Leisure time’ [understood as ‘respite from work’] lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time. …
We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, represents an intense and radiant form of life. …Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. Without calm, a new barbarism emerges.
When life follows the rule of stimulus–response, need–satisfaction and goal–action, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life.
If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function.
To properly inhabit stillness requires as much resolve as does action; they share the same enforcers of discipline and attention. Don’t just do something - stand there. Be present with beauty resolutely enough to make you wise. Be present with pain enough to allow it to change your heart. Be present with your contradictions enough to allow your logic to become sharper.
Creation is born from the delicate alternation of activity and stillness. Sometimes, after a long pause, even a gap of uncertainty or awkwardness, and then only after patiently and painfully waiting for it to it resolve itself, do I find a fresh and surprising thought arrive ready for me to pluck. Vita contemplativa into vita activa; one must dream vividly and then rapidly haul its insights into reality; but take care never fall into half-hearted dreams, nor grasp weakly at their elusive callings.