Leisure is the comprehensive category of life because it is the world which plays us, not vice-versa. At the very least, whatever need he saw for eternity was satisfied in his Ethics by the autotelism of doing rather than of making, with no need to invoke the virtue of scientific necessity in order to purchase enough footing for leisure. This is the time of large and recurring natural units, to avoid frantic disintegration of actions into the separate fragments which things have, especially machines, more especially clocks. Even without it, the following is available. The merit of Huizinga's work, contemporary to Pieper's and unmarginalized by its apt criticisms in Callois' and Ehrmann's developments, is to locate in play the features which provide sufficient local eternity to satisfy the needs of classical leisure theory.
Playtime is distinguished from other times.
Even the timed periods of other major sports are bent by timeouts, incompletions, delays, penalties defined in their rules and nowhere else. Its experience is not so much the one of derivative pleasure for which Aristotle rejected paidia or play, as it is the completeness of the event. Classical leisure can be as fully realized in these pedestrian and democratic forms of sports, of games, and of narratives, as in the exacting and excluding forms of speculative philosophy. A second contemporary theory of leisure takes and turns this objective formation into its opposite. Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues affect the social psychologists' factual objectivity while driven by the critical theorists' moral imperatives.