Muße in relation to education
There is the impression that the origin of the word Muße has something to do with the English muse and its link to art and inspiration. But Muße in its origin has more to do with education and school.
[…] Muße in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English “school”. The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means “Muße”. “School” does not, properly speaking, mean school, but Muße.[1]
If school means Muße and is linked to studying, then we should look again at the definition of Muße as referenced in other sections of this website:
The German concept Muße (loosely translated as ‘leisure’) signifies freedom from the pressure of time. Muße does not mean the wasting of time, but on the contrary a free and meaningful dwelling in time beyond any purpose-driven rationality or utility or pressure to achieve.[2]
I think we can all agree that this definition of Muße is not what it feels like to work or study in HE these days. What we deal with is a lot of information overload coming from all directions at us. Yet loads of the different elements can be of no real interest to us creating a feeling of boredom even though we are busy.
Overload boredom is experienced as loudness, decoding difficulty, disconnectedness, a dearth of feedback, pseudo-information and sheer overload, in which information becomes noise-like. Because noise is essentially confusion in messages, the higher its proportion in the environment, the less we learn and the less meaning we are able to receive.[3]
We have to learn how to bring the noise level down again, so that Muße can be established and learning can occur. As Jenny Odell points out: ‘[t]he storm is co-created.’[4] If we feel the onslaught of information and ways of communicating is just too much, then we have to also ask ourselves, how much of it we have created ourselves? And, yes, isn’t it ironic that I created a website full of it? I have no excuse other than I am fully embedded in the system or frame of mind of which I am trying to find a way out. There is too much happening for everyone and if we are not careful, it will make us ill.
Now that we know the Greek for Muße is skole, let’s look at the Greek word phronesis which translates as practical wisdom.
(Practical wisdom / Greek phronesis) is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad (Nicomachean Ethics VI.5) … it involves the knowledge of what is good or bad, … not merely theoretical knowledge, but a capacity to act on such knowledge as well.[5]
What can we do with our theoretical knowledge of Muße and the essential factor it plays in our wellbeing? How can we act on such knowledge within education? Which things can we delete from our to-do-list, our learning outcomes, our professional plans, our social media marketing campaigns, our MyStudies folders or Panopto uploads in order to bring Muße and wellbeing back into education?
[1] Josef Pieper, Leisure as the basis of culture / The Philosophical Act, p.19
[2] Peter Philipp Riedl, Die Kunst der Muße. Über ein Ideal in der Literatur um 1800, Publications of the English Goethe Society, (2011) 80:1, p.37
[3] Louise Farnworth, Doing, Being, and Boredom, Journal of Occupational Science, 5:3 (1998),
pp.143
[4] Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2019), p.60
[5] University of Brighton, University Strategy 2016-2021, Practical Wisdom, <https://www.brighton.ac.uk/practical-wisdom/index.aspx> [Accessed 10th May 2021]