Horner's Corner

Playpower

by on Jan.28, 2010, under art, culture, philosophy

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To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play -Nietzsche

Freud was right when he said getting work and love right are essential for a good life, but he should have added a third: play. What is play? I think it’s something like a pure means, without any ends.  When we play we do something that has no real utility, no end, no extrinsic reward. It’s done for its own sake. As such, it is the exercise of our freedom.

When a child plays with something everyday -like a box, a cup, a coaster – she turns it away from its fixed meaning as a tool, a bit of equipment, and recreates it as a thing subject to the play of her imagination. Its potential to be a thousand things is there; the child makes it in imagination a multitude of them in an hour.

When we play, as adults, we release ourselves from the means-end  logic of the day. Play here reveals its affinity with art. Both, I think, have a utopian aspect: negating the sad realm of necessity, linking the infant we were to the joyful adult we are. Or might be.  I’d go so far as to say that making this possibility real for everyone should be the  ultimate aim  of politics. Stendhal called beauty the promise of happiness; play is the thing itself.

Play is the unneurotic unhurried childlike absorption in the present, a sign of maturity. To to be childlike is to be in the opposite state to childishness. It’s childishness that our mass entertainment industry stimulates in us, an endless distraction, without real focus on anything, the finger of the depressive hedonist flipping from channel to channel. Childish: the promise of satisfaction, forever witheld, just out of reach of the tetchy kidult. The full absorption in what one is doing is utterly different to this.

So we need play, we need it as we need freedom and love. Are they even possible without it?

For truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Michel de Montaigne

I know of no other way of dealing with great tasks than as play: this is a sign of greatness -Nietzsche

children-playing-sun


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