Communication and Leisure: Cultivating 'Creative Democracy'

• In Event: Understanding Discourses of Stability and Change

Abstract

The engagement of philosophical leisure in the lives of individual citizens can cultivate John Dewey’s notion of “creative democracy” by enabling people to contemplatively play with ideas that can revision new possibilities of creative citizenry, especially for those citizens who may have experienced limits or challenges in their contribution and participation in the public forum.

This essay will first discuss philosophical leisure through theoretical paradigms and philosophical discussions of Aristotle, Marcus Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Thorstein Veblen, Josef Pieper, and contemporary communication scholars, Elihu Katz and Hanna Adoni. The essay will identify a distinction between leisure and recreation that is not widely acknowledged in public discussion. Second, this essay will discuss John Dewey’s “creative democracy” and provide an argument that demonstrates how citizens benefit from genuinely integrating leisure into their lives, providing citizens with a public voice that can potentially move to change social or political conditions in their community. Using Richard Sennett’s Fall of Public Man, this essay discusses how philosophical leisure has the potential to move citizens from spectators to participants in the shaping of their own human existence. Lastly, this essay will also provide practical examples that offer social, political, and philosophical implications of the integration of philosophical leisure into a public sociopolitical wellness. Philosophical leisure cultivates the ground upon which “creative democracy” can be embraced by citizens to forge social/political change and transform their own interiority as a by-product.

Author

• Annette Holba, Plymouth State Univ