ABSTRACT
The starting point of this chapter is Max Weber’s assertion that the individual is the only discernible reality and that any analysis worth its salt must start with the actions of individuals. Casting society’s members as individuals is the trademark of modernity (Bauman, 1999). This casting, though, is not a once in a lifetime act and in twenty-first-century societies this is a practice that has to be re-enacted on a regular basis. Drawing on the work of Bauman it is argued in this chapter that individualization is the destiny of all individuals today. In other words, in the twenty-first century freedom is based on the classic template of self-choice: gnothi seauton, the ancient Greek injunction inscribed in gold letters over the portico of the temple at Delphi, which means to ‘know thyself ’. This mode of life brought into universal being by modernity and transformed from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ (Bauman, 2000a: 31) as a personal destiny in the interregnum is not, as Agnes Heller argues, ‘a product of mere introspection but the result of action; this is a ‘proving’ or a ‘becoming’ whereby the self reaches out to find the kind of actions appropriate to the self-chosen character and destiny’ (Grumley, 2005: 192). A starting-over life of ‘becoming’ admits no fixed identities; what this suggests is that it must be understood as irreducibly mutable and heterogeneous. This is first and foremost because the precondition of the de facto modern individual is the ‘potential to live a life not yet determined’ (Levine, 2013: 92). As its title suggests, this chapter is concerned with developing a new understanding of devotional leisure practices in relation to the self. The first thing to say is this kind of leisure lends to its adherents the promise of being carried beyond the everyday into the transcendent, of being raised onto quite a different existential level. We should recall at this point the observations made earlier about what happens when a radical rupture and discontinuities in the historical process occur. According to Zehrer, more people start to ask the questions that we hardly ever care to ask. When someone asks these kinds of questions, as you will recall, they are usually asking what all the various situations of their life add up to (Eagleton, 2007: 57). It is my view that this is the prevailing mindset of our era and the foremost reason why today the need for transcendence is great and growing, and is perhaps one of the most seminal uses of leisure.
