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The preceding chapter showed that the best remaining hope for defending realism from the challenges of history seems to lie with the strategy of “selective confirmation.” On this strategy, we defend only some parts or components of past theories as responsible for (and therefore confirmed by) their successes, while abandoning others as idle, merely presuppositional, or otherwise not involved in the empirical successes those theories managed to achieve, and therefore never genuinely confirmed by those successes in the first place. This chapter argues that without some prospectively applicable and historically reliable criterion for distinguishing idle and/or genuinely confirmed parts of our theories from others, the strategy of selective confirmation offers no refuge for the scientific realist. Without such a criterion, we can have no confidence in our ability to pick out the parts of theories needed for (and thus selectively confirmed by) their successes while those theories are live contenders. We will therefore not be in a position to identify those parts or features of our own theories we may safely regard as accurate descriptions of the natural world (even though we know that not all are), and thus the realist's opponent will again be entitled to the conclusion that was wanted all along. Such criteria are just what existing appeals to selective confirmation do not (and perhaps cannot) provide.

This chapter looks at how descriptions of Spain in the eighteenth century are intriguing for their accounts of perceived indolence, or more generally of a people who failed to take advantage “of their Climate and Situation.” Taken at face value, these observations convinced contemporaries and historians that Spain was simply producing less than it could have. Alleged idleness was a well-rehearsed theme in Europe's Protestant north whenever the mores of southern European papists (or non-Europeans, for that matter) were described. Travel writer Henry Swinburne argued that Spaniards worked fewer hours and days than he thought they ought to, and intuitively provided one possible explanation for such behavior: Spaniards simply did not believe they could benefit from higher levels of “industry,” that is, effort.

This lecture discusses the durable hostility to idleness, particularly idle reading. It presents a claim that late medieval, pre-Reformation textual practice is not driven by a need to define and expel cultural waste; rather, idle reading is an important part of a cultural economy. The lecture concludes that a literary education can easily feed the psyche's capacity for delusive satisfaction.

The Tales draw to an end amidst antitheses between busy occupation and idleness or sloth. The Second Nun and her Tale dramatise a complex ideal of morally productive work. This chapter shows how the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale contradicts that ideal through a misplaced ‘unfruitful’ obsession with inchoate fragmentary matter. Alchemy comes to represent hectically idle work (while at the same time it is gendered distinctively masculine). The twinning of these tales also concerns speech, its efficacy, or fruitlessness: the very question that takes centre stage in the last extant Canterbury Tales. ‘Sins of the tongue’ are not incidentals in the context of Chaucer’s poem. Rather, they constitute both the besetting vice and the imaginative inspiration of the entire tale-telling game.

This chapter argues for the causal networking of value. In making it plausible, it has become apparent how such causation would mesh smoothly with the natural fabric of the world. The argument from explanatory idleness, the argument from causal exclusion, mental causation, causation by values, causation and convexity, and causation and properties are discussed.

This chapter discusses how idleness is one of the contradictory figures that weave through Jean-Jacques Rousseau's works. The problem of idleness pervades Rousseau's philosophical writings and dominates his autobiographical works. The chapter aims to trace the various paradoxes that inhabit the question for Rousseau and to explore why it engages him as political philosopher, moralist, and writer alike. After considering his anthropological ruminations on work, as well as his praise of labor, the chapter shows how Rousseau creates a radical esthetics of désoeuvrement (lack of occupation), the keystone of his program to valorize inactivity and validate subjectivity, which he also envisions as a return to origin. Rousseau thus develops a notion of idleness as decadence, a corruption of natural human energy and an evasion of patriotic duty.

While in the late 1920s Nabokov was particularly interested in understanding play through the specific qualities of individual games and sports, in the next decade he was thinking about play in relation to its antitheses with use and with work, and Chapter 4 is about play as the opposite of work in the novels of the 1930s. In the same month, December 1925, that Nabokov wrote his manifesto for play in ‘Play’, he also wrote a vision of art and the world as work in ‘A Guide to Berlin’. Nabokov's vision of play is haunted by a competing vision of work, and in Glory, Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, both play and work are treated as provisional stages on a path towards some more complete goal. In the later 1930s Nabokov engaged in a battle against the nineteenth-century idealisation of labour, which he believed had led to the Soviet and Nazi ideologies, and in The Gift, he mounts an unambiguous assault on the culture of labour, focusing on the figure of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the Russian radical of the 1860s.

This chapter analyzes whether staring is relational or not. The frightening thing about staring is a person's total withdrawal at such moments—their compelling yet somehow wholly absent presence. It was not a question of idleness, of a more or less deliberate refusal to engage with things, or a sensually pleasing indulgence in doing nothing—the person had become unreachable. The world was fully present, fully visible, but somehow not there; it had become possible to look fixedly at it without seeing it. The chapter explains how staring may be the only nonrelational relation humans can visibly, corporeally have in a world in which they no longer are. The feeling inherent in this encompassing nonbeing at the heart of being can perhaps be called melancholy.

By consistently refusing to subordinate eros to other actions that characters might undertake in its name, John Lyly confirms that desire itself can be the main event of a play. Chapter 1 explores the role of potentiality, what Aristotle calls dunamis, as both the source of erotic change and its medium in John Lyly’s plays. The chapter begins by surveying metaphors of motion and stillness that dramatize subtle erotic changes in Lyly’s plays, and then focuses on idleness, an experience his characters conceive less as physical stasis than as movement without purpose or telos. Idleness has a peculiar, counterintuitive, feel to it in Galatea, a play that explores alternatives to the fast-paced, teleological movement typically associated with sexual pursuit. Galatea, Phillida, and the nymphs who fall in love with them discover the queer erotic potential of circuitous language that prolongs desire and defers closure.

This chapter argues that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) not only represents the temporality of capitalism but also contests it through an aesthetic strategy of idleness or sloth. It analyzes how Pynchon recuperates nineteenth-century traditions of anarchism, work refusal, rioting, and the commune as a way of responding to contemporary conditions of labor under capitalism. Putting Pynchon into conversation with the Italian Autonomist Marxists—most notably, Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti—it shows how Against the Day frames class struggle as a conflict between capitalism and workers regarding the social organization of time. It explains that Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to a political version of idleness, or a willful refusal of capitalist efficiency. It also situates Pynchon’s utopian imagination in respect to the social forms of the riot and the commune.

Fictional Victorian readers were often prone to enjoying French novels. The dangers lurking for female readers in improper material had been something of a literary cliché for some time, and can be found in contemporary poems and cautionary tales. However, Victorian novelists were as concerned with the effects of the novels on male readers. Numerous novels engage less with ideas of immorality than with anxieties surrounding idleness and its effect on the British male. Increasingly, though, novels offered more ambivalent and thoughtful reflections on the cultural discourse surrounding French works. Their dangers were shrugged off, and their pleasures dealt with sympathetically by novelists such as Braddon and Ouida. Cautionary tales about French novel-reading never quite went away, but critics found it increasingly hard to determine the extent to which the cautionary tales themselves might be mimicking the very dangers which they purported to condemn.

The chapter serves as a historical prelude to chapters on modernism and postmodernism, by providing a historical context for how the trope of laziness evolved in American literature prior to the 20th century. First, it looks at how the motif of laziness functioned in early Puritan literature, how this function was broadened in 18th-century secular and religious didactic literature, and how it eventually developed into an aesthetic device in the Early Republic, when the new trope of laziness combined high Romantic aesthetics of the pastoral with unrefined motifs of vagabondage and delinquency, and in this way addresses the culture’s desire for freedom from the norm of collective labour and from patterns of inclusion and exclusion within the consensual networks of social participation. Second, the chapter explores the difference between the familiar Romantic topos of idleness, which has no subversive potential with respect to ethical normativity and the topos of laziness, which does. Walt Whitman’s trope of loafing is reread here via the Cynical tradition of performative indomitability as parrhēsia, or speaking truth to power. Herman Melville’s experiments with haptic poetics of laziness in Typee are interpreted as a critique of Romantic moralism and the emerging ethico-aesthetic norm of productivity.

In this chapter the writing of the Confessions is associated with Rousseau's discovery of botanizing as a collection of ‘specimens’ to be classified and examined according to objective criteria, epitomized by the Linnaean system he explores during his stay in England. His theory of ornament is elaborated in terms of the truth and objectivity claimed for the Confessions and Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, along with the hand- and footwork implicit in the activities of his old age, his music copying and plant collecting, and his countervailing praise of idleness.

This chapter examines the different stages of the Protestant life-course. Childhood was normally neglected as a period of sin and ignorance, but in fact childhood piety was real, and a few memoirs, inspired by Augustine’s Confessions, explore this. Conversion, most typically a phenemenon of adolescence, did not always conform to theoretical models, and was often a multi-stage process. The long middle years of life posed particular challenges for Protestants, not least because of the pressing need to avoid idleness. The emphasis on vocation and godly labour needs to be seen in this context, and was as much about filling time as about Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic. The chapter also considers how Protestants marked time, noting their use of New Year’s Day and of birthdays as spiritually important dates. Finally it considers the Protestant deathbed, and in particular how Protestants expected it to be the site of a final, successfull battle with despair.

The conclusion underscores the difference between the method of cases as commonly practiced and ordinary language philosophy. The latter proceeds by inviting us to project ourselves imaginatively into situations of significant speech—situations in which the words would actually be used; the former invites us to “apply” our words to “cases” from a metaphysically detached position in which nothing but a philosophical theory hangs on what we say. But, as argued in this book, apart from being put to some particular use or another, in a context suitable for that use, our words mean, and say, nothing determinate. The Conclusion accordingly proposes that in deploying the method of cases, we are going, and getting, nowhere with our words. It ends with a few thoughts about how that sort of philosophical idleness may be avoided.

This chapter provides a useful counterpoint, drawing on feminist scholarship to highlight the gendered nature of policy designed to tackle the evil of ‘idleness’. It points to the dilemma, unarticulated in the Beveridge reforms but an increasingly important one for policy makers, of how to treat women's paid and unpaid ‘work’ and contribution to the economy and well-being. It focuses particularly on the challenges posited by the rise in part-time working and lone parenthood, both notable by their absence from serious consideration in the Beveridge model but an increasingly salient feature of the contemporary social and economic organisation of society. It notes that the review of the limitations of the current welfare-to-work policies in tackling ‘idleness’ points to the continuing challenges facing policy makers.

This chapter argues that the fanciful trifling featured in Love’s Labor’s Lost explores the epistemological utility of imagination, does so by deconstructing the prevalent view that imagination is a sort of intellectual idleness. Francis Bacon and others wrote that imagination is little more than childish cognitive toying, distinct from the more systematic labor of discovery. In his comedy, Shakespeare parodically recasts these prejudices by conceiving a pedagogic courtly academy devoted only to fancy, run not by scientists but fops, pedants, and children. In so doing, the play weighs the importance of courtesy, collaboration, novelty, and invention in the making of scientific knowledge.

This chapter examines Sir Francis Bacon's notion of the public and the private by offering a reading of his Essays and Aphorismi de Jure Gentium Maiore Sive de Fontibus Justiciae et Juris. Bacon was skeptical that a vision of state and commonwealth that placed its hopes in social distance and an exemplary class could really deliver the public-minded service and broader contentment needed. What he saw was envy, competitive behavior of the wrong sort, emulation, and idleness. His theory of the commonwealth was a reflection on how social and political organization could transform and channel these competitive behaviors. The chapter also considers Bacon's argument that the ideal type of behavior required true talent and the capacity to actually accomplish things; those who sought office to serve others, even if not from the nobility, were no less public-minded and their motivations no more private.