Recreation

'Recreation' is one of those words that gets used so casually that attention is rarely paid to what it actually expresses. In the normal usage, it carries the connotation of idle fun. Many have first encountered it in the phrase 'rec room', referring to a place in a home in which might be located a TV, a stereo, a ping-pong table, etc. Now, the abbreviation 'rec', along with the short 'e' pronunciation in even the whole word, contribute to the glossing over of what is actually there: 're-creation'. But even that term has a less than honorable typical employment--to describe a laughably artificial simulation, usually on television, of a serious real event. Still lost, then, is the kind of profundity possible from its literal meaning, as, for example, invoked by John Dewey in his work on Aesthetics. The long tradition of Art appreciation has been centered on the Contemplation of Beauty, on which has been based philosophies in which the highest human state possible is a contemplative one, often a disembodied one, and with respect to which physical practical activity is inferior. Dewey counters with the analysis that meaningful contemplation is more than passive cognitive reception of a piece, but, rather, entails an active re-creation of how the artist produced it, which serves one of his more general cultural projects--to close the gap between dreary productivity and unproductive leisure. For sure, it cannot be expected that an obscure philosophical usage of a term should be on anyone's mind in its everyday employment, but in this particular case, the most familiar connotation of 'recreation' is hardly literally that, and is, rather, closer to 'uncreativeness', describing an aspect of routine life that is no more than an adjunct to business as usual.