From WORK -The Meaning of Your Life - A Christian Perspective, by Lester Dekoster, who argues that work is the basis of culture,:
"3. The writer who speaks of Leisure, the Basis of Culture (Josef Pieper) is confused, even though he can quote some ancient Greek thinkers in his support. Work is the basis of culture. Leisure cultivated as a way of life produces no harvests but only dilettantes - drones that absorb culture without sacrificing for it, merely thieves of others' sweat." p. 40
Dekoster contends that leisure is not foundational because it produces "no harvests", no useful things. Its justification is external.
From Leisure, The Basis of Culture,by Josef Pieper, who argues that divine worship is the basis of culture:
"Philosophy increasingly adopts - necessarily, it seems - the character of the alien , of mere intellectual lixury, of that which seems ever more intolerable and unjustifiable, the more exclusively the demands of the daily world of work take over the world of man."pp. 65-66
Philosophy's justification is internal, not from an external utility.
http://www.amazon.com/Work-Meaning-Your ... +your+life