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Play is the highest form of human activity. At least that’s what Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” when he described a three-step development of the human spirit. First, the human psyche has the form of a camel because it takes on the heavy burden of cultural duties — ethical obligations, social rank, and the weight of tradition. Next, the camel transforms into a lion, which represents the rebellion of the psyche — the “holy nay” that frees a rule-governed person from slavish obedience to authority. Finally, this negative insurgent phase evolves into the highest level of humanity, symbolized as the playing child — innocent and creative, the “holy yea.” Cue the Richard Strauss music.

Bertrand Russell argued that ‘the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.’ But he didn’t have much company.

As usual with Nietzsche, we can debate the precise meaning of this cryptic simile (e.g., is the child supposed to be the nihilism-defeating Übermensch?), but it’s clear at least that Nietzsche considered play vitally important for humanity. Apart from such a rare paean, however, philosophy has had little interest in play, and where it does take interest it is usually dismissive. For many hard-nosed intellectuals, play stands as a symbol of disorder. Plato’s reproach in “The Republic” of artists as merely playing in the realm of illusion famously set the trend, as did Aristotle’s claim that play (paidia) is simply rest or downtime for the otherwise industrious soul. He calls it a “relaxation of the soul” and dismisses it from the “proper occupation of leisure.”

Leisure, for Aristotle, is serious business. We get our word “scholar” from the Greek word for leisure, skole. It should not be squandered on play, in Aristotle’s view, because play is beneficial only as a break or siesta in our otherwise highbrow endeavors.

The Roman poet Juvenal (circa A.D. 100) used the expression “bread and circuses” to describe the decline of Roman civic duty, in favor of mere amusement. The selfish common people, he scolded, are now happy with diversion and distraction. They care not for the wider Roman destiny because play has distracted them from social consciousness.

To be fair, philosophy has not been completely devoid of proponents of play. Bertrand Russell, in his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” offered a positive view of “idleness” and leisure, lamenting “the modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” He also argued that “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” If we reduced our workday to four hours, he suggested, we would have the leisure time to think and reflect on every topic, especially the social injustices around us and the manipulations of the state.

So, is play a cultural “cheesecake” that emerged from Homo sapiens’ big-brained adaptations, like language and imagination? Or is it a common feature of animal life? We now know, from animal ethology and affective neuroscience, that play is widely distributed in the mammal class. Juvenile play in mammals is an important means of social engagement that helps animals become familiar with bodies, learn dominance and submission relations, form alliance friendships and experience something that looks a lot like joy. The neuroscientist and “rat tickler” Jaak Panksepp is famous for detailing how rats play, and amazingly how they even “laugh” (with 50 kilohertz ultrasonic chirps). Play is underwritten by an innate brain system, where rough-and-tumble play is motivated and anticipated by spikes in dopamine, while the play itself seems to release pleasurable opioids and oxytocin.

Animal scientists suggest that play evolved as an adaptation for social bonding. Peter Farb’s “Man’s Rise to Civilization” puts forth the theory that play probably increased substantially for early humans when childhoods became safer — as fathers and mothers hit upon a new division of labor through pair-bonding. Safer, stable family structures during the Pleistocene created greater leisure for our big brains to fill with learning, creating and playing. Even more recent hunter-gatherer tribes, like the Shoshone of the Great Basin, enjoyed surprising leisure time because their subsistence labor was carved so efficiently. (The subject of animal play is nicely summarized in Gordon Burghardt’s 2014 survey (pdf) in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.)

All this suggests that play is also a crucial part of the full life of the human animal, and yet philosophers have said very little about it. Usually, if we see an appreciation of play, it’s an attempt to show its secret utility value — “See, it’s pragmatic after all!” See how playing music makes you smarter at other, more valued forms of thinking, like math, logic or even business strategy? See how play is adaptive for social evolution? All this is true of course, but one also wonders about the uniquely human meaning of play and leisure. Can we consider play and leisure as something with inherent value, independent of their accidental usefulness?

A philosophical thought experiment might help us here. The storied tradition of unrealistic scenarios — like Plato’s “ring of Gyges,” John Rawls’s “original position,” and Harold Ramis’s movie “Groundhog Day” — often help us isolate our hidden values and commitments. So, consider for a moment what life would be like if we did not need to work. Don’t merely imagine retirement, but rather a world after labor itself. Imagine that the “second machine age” (currently underway) brings us a robotic, A.I. utopia, where humans no longer need to work to survive. Buckminster Fuller imagined such a techno-future, saying “the true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

The point of this thought experiment is to isolate Aristotle’s question for ourselves. What is the proper occupation of leisure? The very phrase “occupation of leisure” demonstrates the trouble. What is the use of the useless? What would, and what should, we do with our free time? After the world of work, will we have the time, energy and ambition to do philosophy, make art, study history, master languages and make craft beers? Will we play creatively as “holy yea-sayers,” or will we just watch more TV?

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

In consideration of this, I want to suggest that we divide play into two major categories; active and passive. The passive

forms — let’s call them amusements — are indeed suspicious, as they seem to anesthetize the agent and reduce creative engagement. From our “bread and circuses” television culture to Aldous Huxley’s soma culture in “Brave New World,” the passive forms of leisure are cheap pleasures that come at no effort, skill or struggle. On the other hand, active play — everything from sport to music to chess, and even some video games — energizes the agent and costs practice, skill, effort and calories. Even the exploration of conscious inner-space, through artificial or natural means, can be very active. The true cultures of meditation, for example, evidence the rigors of inner-space play.

Philosophy should come out to play. At the very least, we need an epistemology of play (that investigates how play produces knowledge) and an ethics of play (investigating the normative issues of play). We might start with Aristotle, despite his suspicion of it. He saw music, for instance, as a pastime that befitted free and noble people. No apologies or justifications are needed for music, he concluded in his “Politics,” because “to seek for utility everywhere is entirely unsuited to people that are great-souled and free.” I am suggesting that the same charitable logic of civilization be applied to many other forms of play as well.

The stakes for play are higher than we think. Play is a way of being that resists the instrumental, expedient mode of existence. In play, we do not measure ourselves in terms of tangible productivity (extrinsic value), but instead, our physical and mental lives have intrinsic value of their own. It provides the source from which other extrinsic goods flow and eventually return.

When we see an activity like music as merely a “key to success,” we shortchange it and ourselves. Playing a musical instrument is both the pursuit of fulfillment and the very thing itself (the actualizing of potential). Playing, or even listening, in this case, is a kind of unique, embodied contemplation that can feed both the mind and the body.

When we truly engage in such “impractical” leisure activities — with our physical and mental selves — we do so for the pleasure they bring us and others, for the inherent good that arises from that engagement, and nothing else. That’s the “holy yea.”

Stephen T. Asma is professor of philosophy and fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of seven books, and a blues guitarist.

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