ON THE MULTIPLE REALITIES OF LEISURE - A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TOTHE OTHERNESS OF LEISURE

The point of departure in this article is that human beings are fundam entally unable to know or understand objective reality in its entirety . Reality is seen here as an intersubjective and limited construction. The relevance of the notion of an intersubjective and limited reality to the understanding of leisure activities is that aspects of the obv ious, ''natural'' attitude towards everyday life are put into brackets . Leisure offers opportunities outside the dominant reality of everyda y life that put standard notions of time, mastery, space, truth and so cial relations into parenthesis. The rationalization of our everyday l ife and ''disenchantment'' with the religious-metaphysical world has l eft leisure as an increasingly articulated domain of action. Because r ationalization is linked to the production system, we are inclined to define this leisure domain as ''non-work'', but this definition fails to include the more fundamental meaning of the otherness of leisure.