Rest
This week’s concept is rest. Cuddle, care, and collect your intuitions, or just float on in. With an updated worksheet and method, we welcome you once more to our collective, collaborative Philosophy Café.
Plan
📍Casino for Social Medicine (Sonnenalle 100, 12045 Berlin)📆 Wed. 16.07.2025
⏰ 18:30 - 20:30
Some reflections after the session
Expression of rest as tempo. The b-side, the modulation of RPM, of BPM, of the rhythm of engagement. Beyond the immediate, beyond the surface, to be informed rather than challenged. Little by little, step by step. The choice is ours, to pick and to plot our concepts in tune with the perspectives from which we play them.
A re-cap:
How do we get to know rest? If you’ve felt frustrated while sitting around doing nothing, you’ll know that boredom is not restful. If, after an intense session of exercise, you’ve felt too exhausted to sleep, you’ll know that rest is not guaranteed after intense activity. Rest is a dense and complex concept that confronts bodies, minds, and the bodies and minds of others. Indeed, rest questions the very dichotomy upon which the distinction between body and mind, self and other is set. The philosophy café explores intuition. Where do our intuitions about rest direct us? From what, from where, and how can we learn something about rest, something that is at once individual and shared, generated from within and enabled from without, something that straddles the liminal space between beginnings, endings, and in-betweens, a well-spring of activity as well as a resistance against it?Our intuitions are bridges between ourselves and the world, they are consolidations of meaningful experiences that transect awareness, ignorance, intentionality, and accident. Intuitions are idiosyncratic, yet depend upon interpersonal, inter-structural, and inter-institutional relations. Intuitions, like everything, are mediated by the body; the content of intuitions are embodied, in the sense that they inextricably register the impact of the world upon our bodies, bodies that bump into others, that twist and swivel, agitate and decompress, expand and interact, collapse and regenerate. The content of an intuition, more immediately and explicitly, is mediated, and modulated, by these bodily comportments. What can we render articulate about our intuitions that could capture this embodiment, and how can this provide a grasp upon concepts such as rest? Each apprehension is an interpretation, and the act of reception is also one of modulation, of modification according to the form and dynamics of the receiver. Our concepts, too, are embodied, though tacitly, less obviously so. At each and every point, we feel a certain way as we learn, explore, and integrate concepts into a repertoire of capacities of articulation, conceptual thinking, imagination. We feel a certain way that is registered by our heartbeat, our muscle tension, the fluctuation and vibrations in our bellies, the expression of our faces.
The bodily nature of rest poses a difficulty for a conceptual discussion of rest. If rest is a bodily state understood biologically, then it would be reduced to a name that tags a position of homeostatic balance that is figured out purely by biological mechanisms below conscious control. This being the case, rest is simply a consequence that is received in experience, rather than achieved. There is something to this, of course. Try too hard to rest, and restfulness flies out through the window. Ignore your body, and the mind will find no respite. However, as those of you who have spent hours on dark evenings adventuring through the coordinates of thought while laying still in bed will know, the body, while crucial, cannot manifest rest on its own. As above, the reception of a signal, regardless of its source—here, biological processes within a body—are interpretations, and require articulations in order to be conceived, and acted upon.
This speaks to the dynamic relationship between mind and body that underlies rest. Rest, it seems, neither involves only the body, nor simply the mind. In fact, understanding rest requires an interrogation of the very dichotomy upon which the mind-body distinction is based. Sleep arose as a prominent example. Sleep, for many, is the paramount example of rest. You sleep, you do nothing but rest. However, taking sleep to be rest foregrounds a number of interesting questions. For one, if you sleep, you rest unaware, which, while isolating the mind from the body, presumes that one can rest without experiencing the rest itself. Again, it seems that rest is the consequence of a process that one cannot, in principle, be aware of, nor consciously engage with. If rest is sleep, then one only experiences the consequences of rest: one can be rested, waking up with hopeful eyes and a growling stomach, but one does experience rest itself. Sounds counter-intuitive, but this is exactly where a closer look at sleep and rest is instructive. The point at which we are in our deepest sleep, the stage in the sleep cycle most crucial to the function of sleeping, occurs when we dream. In REM sleep, the stage in the sleep cycle where our brains and internal bodily processes are most active, we dream. When we dream, our bodies and minds become one, and we are in our most restful and restorative sleep. Experiences are processed, and processes of recovery and detoxification within the body are initiated. The rest within sleep is therefore, at the height of its intensity, experienced… in some way. This example highlights the active nature of rest. While certain kinds of non-action or inactivity are associated with rest, such as peacefulness and silence, dreaming makes clear the active component of restfulness. Not only does this example highlight the activity of rest, it additionally makes clear how, in rest, the body and mind are unified; indeed, rest is a demonstration of the inseparability of body and mind as an expression of a reciprocity between body and mind, thought and action.
Interestingly, hygiene arose as a widely agreed-upon example of rest during the philosophy café. The relationship between hygiene and rest is worth articulating because it highlights how activities that are an expression of the inseparability of body and mind seem to capture something distinct to rest. Not only that, hygiene also brings into the picture the sociocultural and interpersonal aspects of rest. Clean body, clean mind, or so they say. Corporations know this, and have attempted to capitalize on it, creating a commodity form of rest let’s call, for convenience, ‘wellness’. The wellness industry markets rest as a state that one can achieve by purchasing certain kinds of products, whether this be bath bombs, wellness retreats, or tutorials. This is not to deny that certain products facilitate rest. It is to deny that the process of rest, the acquaintance with the self and with others required to figure rest out, can be outsourced to a product. Despite disagreement regarding curiosity, memory, creativity as processes or consequences of rest, there was resounding agreement that rest cannot be achieved when exogenous (stemming from the outside) constraints are imposed. Rest, thus, involves crucially a kind of self-understanding and curation of intuition that is gained through soft exploration and an acceptance of uniqueness and idiosyncrasy. Hygiene, as a cradling of the self, and an intimate expression of personal care, embodies just this. Melting under the warm water of an end-of-day shower; luxuriating and releasing in a scented bath; routines of hygienic maintenance that pamper and protect the body while stabilizing and fortifying the mind; simply staying clean, deciding the boundary between the body and environment, willfully embracing the marks of the world upon us, and willfully washing them away in due time. It is the embodiment of these semi-structured regimes of care that is itself a form of rest, not just the squeaky-clean result: the dirtying, the cleaning, the clean—a cycle of open-ended habits that intertwine bodies, minds, and environments. Clearly, hygiene is not an exclusively biological affair, an extension of our immune system into the world beyond the boundaries of the skin.
Yet, for all its idiosyncrasy and personal flair, hygiene is also not exclusively individual either. Practices of hygiene are interpolated by sociocultural norms that circumscribe the ways in which people are allowed to practice hygiene as well as be unhygienic. At any given point in time, certain practices are more popular than others, certain external standards for hygiene—whether aesthetic, sensory, or scientific—are used to evaluate, praise, or sanction, and varieties of sociocultural artifacts are at our disposal. Moreover, practices of hygiene regulate the ways in which people rest with each other by specifying certain kinds of bodily comportments as standard or hygienic. Massage and sex are both practices that are specified by and refer to norms of hygiene, and are both candidates for rest that depend upon the presence and reciprocal engagement of others: a good masseuse is highly responsive to the needs of the massaged expressed in their body, their words, the flow and tempo of their breathing, and the non-verbal sounds that they utter; the reciprocity of a sexual partner is crucial to the sexual encounter, the blurring of boundaries between skin, thought, and inertia: both can be forms of rest, and in both cases, the restfulness of these practices depends on the unity of body and mind—they are embodied practices that are poised to dissolve the artifice between the two, transitioning the person into a flow-state from which holistic, restful activity can be practiced.
Much has (had) been said about examples of rest. But conceptual work is not satiated by lists of examples, but rather by definition, construction, and explanation. During the philosophy café, a category term that stuck with me was proffered: rest as a natural institution. I feel that this term captures the complexity and multi-dimensionality of rest quite well. There is a biological basis to rest. Humans need sleep, need to dream, need to be clean, and are driven to interpersonal engagement. How each human chooses to unfold this basis is an interesting mixture of idiosyncrasy, inter-personality, and institutionality. How corporations profiteer form this mixture is yet another layer of complexity in which humans reflect upon rest from the perspective of profit.
In closing, we ask: what kind of process or state is rest? If it has limits, what are they? Is it dependent on or derivative from other processes or states? Or, is rest fundamental and facilitative, a place from which other processes and states grow, but from which nothing is behind? For some, rest is thinking, free from the chores and mundanities of daily life, a register of comfort and curiosity. For others, rest is a settling down, an unfocused enjoyment of the present. Some associate rest with guilt, with shame in the face of a never-ending thrust towards productivity. Perhaps it wasn’t always so, but in the times we have been born into, rest requires exploration, a confrontation with enigma, even—or perhaps especially—if this exploration stops on the comfortable cushion of a couch.
Rest, in Absentia (or the Off-Voice of Rest)
I wasn’t there. And paradoxically enough, rest is what I needed, and what took me away.. That absence, simple as it seemed, opened up a quiet question that has echoed ever since: what is rest?
Is it something earned, a reward that follows labor, calculated according to invisible criteria of effort and merit? Or is it something stolen, taken furtively because it is desired, as though wrested from the hands of time itself? In either case, rest always seems to invoke its supposed opposite: work. Work and rest appear as twins locked together in an endless dance. But if rest is nothing more than a pause in productivity, then it is merely a shadow of labor. Is that all it is: an interruption, a suspension, a nothingness dressed up as consolation?
The word itself resists precision. Is rest something one takes, or something one receives? Is it granted, measured, portioned out like rations? Or is it wholly subjective, belonging only to the rhythms of the body and the secret needs of the spirit? Our culture, so suspicious of idleness, seems unable to think of rest outside of the paradigm of productivity. To stop, to withdraw, to linger without purpose: all of these are too easily condemned as laziness, as unproductivity. Yet that condemnation already betrays a profound confusion: as though being had no worth outside of doing.
I cannot help but think of the world we inhabit, one governed by what could be called a neoliberal ethic, in which productivity infiltrates every corner of existence. Here, even rest is absorbed into the cycle of efficiency, transformed into another instrument for optimizing performance. Sleep becomes “recovery time,” leisure becomes “recharging,” and free moments are appraised only in terms of how they serve the return to labor. In this distorted mirror, rest itself becomes an accomplice to the very system that exhausts us. There seems to be no escape: even inactivity is pressed into the service of activity.
But then I remember an old friend, who once told me with great simplicity: there is no such thing as “free time.” That phrase stayed with me. For what neoliberal logic teaches is precisely the fiction that time can be divided into “free” and “imprisoned,” as though hours themselves wore chains. Yet the true division is not between freedom and captivity, but between what is one’s own and what has been expropriated. Rest, then, is nothing other than the recovery of one’s own time. It is less an activity than a way of inhabiting duration, of dwelling in time that belongs to oneself rather than to the demands of others.
I realized I did not need a break because I was exhausted in the ordinary sense, though a strange weariness clung to me. It was not exactly my own fatigue, but something borrowed, absorbed from the rhythms imposed by work, by obligation, by the unrelenting circulation of tasks. What I needed was not idleness, nor distraction, nor a holiday designed to restore productivity. What I sought was to recalibrate, to re-establish the fragile boundary between my time and the time that is not mine. Rest, for me, was not the cessation of action but the quiet re-tuning of rhythm, a return to a tempo that answered to no measure but its own.
It is curious how rest hides in places where one might least expect it. Sitting in silence, not looking at the clock. Letting the body slip into an afternoon nap without setting an alarm. Walking without destination, for the sheer pleasure of moving, with no intention of arriving anywhere. In such moments, rest is not opposed to activity; it flows through it. A slow cup of coffee without the intrusion of a screen. Waiting in line without filling the gap with distraction. The unhurried tending of a plant, or the slow stirring of a pot that does not aspire to efficiency. Here, rest reveals itself as intimacy with one’s own time, not as negation of action.
At the same time, I notice how easily rest is counterfeited. The weekend binge, the self-care routine marketed as “boosting productivity,” the meditation app promising sharper focus at work. These are not rest but simulations of it, instruments dressed in its clothing, designed to fold even the pause back into the endless economy of use. They mimic freedom while binding us more tightly to performance.
To learn to rest, then, is, to resist; to withdraw, however briefly, from the logic that evaluates every gesture according to its utility; to allow time to appear not as currency but as presence. This is why true rest can be disconcerting, even guilt-inducing. The internalized voice of productivity whispers: you should be doing something, improving yourself, moving forward. But perhaps the quiet power of rest lies precisely in answering otherwise. To say not “I cannot,” nor “I refuse,” but Bartleby’s gentle and radical phrase: “I would prefer not to.”
I have begun to notice in myself the subtle shifts this brings. Where once I thought rest had to be deserved, now I begin to see it as a right: more than that, as a mode of existence. Where once I measured value by output, I now try, however imperfectly, to measure it by how I inhabit my time. The transition is not simple; the old guilt still arises. But each moment reclaimed, however small, is a gesture of liberation.
Rest is not a luxury, nor a strategy, nor an interruption. It is the art of belonging to one’s own time, of breathing without urgency, of moving without direction, of listening without looking at the clock. It is not an escape but a recalibration, not absence but a fuller presence. And perhaps, in its quiet way, it is also resistance: the subversive act of being useless, of stepping aside from the ceaseless demand to produce, and dwelling, even for an instant, in the immeasurable gift of time that is one’s own.
Diagram
