Life is not (just) a Game
Sociology by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Part 4: Play is an Evolutionary Driver
This is part 4 of a series on the sociology of times and spaces. If you haven´t read the prior parts (part 1; part 2; part 3) I suggest you to read them. Though this article is pretty easy to understand even without them.
So far I´ve talked about philosophy and it´s limitations, that language emerges out of the we (part 1), the way language transforms us (part 2), the nature of reality being double-timed and double-spaced, and how we can find the first inventory of the forces of reality in the illusory life of our imagination (part 3).
In this article I will talk about play (games) and seriousness and reflect (inside / reflexivum) on the different forces of reality. You as a reader are also an expert in this, as you also have played. Through this “door” we can talk to each other about life.
The Dance of Disaster and Child´s Play
When we play a game we can let dolls have a wedding, soldiers fight a war or land on the moon as an astronaut. When we do we preempt experience already gained by the human race. We are re-enacting and repeating experience simultaneously.
“The game thus has a Janus-face in that it retrospectively repeats an old experience - the young boy plays war as his ancestors did in earnest - and that it playfully preempts a serious stage in the child's life.” - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
So every game we play comes after and before at once. According to Huessy our failure to realize this double-timed nature of play is the root cause why we are not seeing that every thought is an after-thinking and before-thinking. Both thinking and play happen in our leisure and can begin and stop at any given time arbitrarily, as they rely on another time “next door”. This is also the way we know if something is play. If we are forced to play it stops being a game.
“[...] people like to play and think because they feel like masters of the situation. Play-space and thinking-space are stages of freedom. The more the time can be arbitrarily scheduled or canceled, the more playtime is available.” - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Playground and playtime share the same nature of being embedded into reality, but not part of reality. Both allow us to recover from the serious part of life. The same goes for football-grounds, tennis-courts, rugger-fields, swimming-pools and so on. All these places form a “second world” in the real world for play or physical exercise, just as classrooms and lecture-halls are training rooms for reflection and thinking.
Just like the lesson ends with the kid leaving the classroom, the game ends with leaving the place. Everything that only happens in a specific place is play or at least is in danger to be seen as play. This is how we can distinguish between play and seriousness.
In game, you can switch and govern spaces and times, but not in the seriousness of real life. The purer a game is, the more clearly its time and place is set. The less pure it is, the more serious it becomes. Our “civilized” life processes settle in this spectrum between pure seriousness and pure play. When we do something we try to bring in a bit of freely determined time and predetermined place. Where this can happen we live in peace. This mix is missing in disaster and child´s play. They form the poles of all communal life.
The Missing Balance
Most of us have an inclination towards play and a reluctance to face disaster. Then play and seriousness are not balanced on the scales of life. The scale with the playtimes has the upper hand. If we want balance and we should want it, it can only be restored explicitly, with effort and renunciation.
“The fact that we have to forcibly tear ourselves away from the games of the body and mind makes the balance between play and seriousness itself the most serious and difficult task of society.” - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
I´m still trying to find the right balance in my own life. Currently I spend a lot more time playing than doing the things I have to do. And there in the pain of humanity I see a billion more things that want to emerge. Yet I´m just one broken man, addicted to play and “wasting” my time. Do you ever feel like that?
The Four Forms of Play
Today it´s still common practice to sell things on the ‘serious’-side as child´s play to the unsuspecting. The “right” words disguise the truth. Just take a look at the army and the way they recruit new soldiers. Society allows its members to lure the newcomer with the appearance of mere play. There are laws against fraud and forgery but no laws against lying - at least here in Germany.
As the individual game is free, playing as a whole is not indifferent. Moments of play are woven into every civilized and peaceful activity. Books like Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga or Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal highlight this. The homo ludens (latin for the playing man), they write about, is not playing next to life but experience and recovery of playing is flowing back into it´s seriousness.
“Play reflects and studies and thereby allows rest from any more serious life process until it becomes easier itself. “ - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Play is one condition for the change of the human race. In play we anticipate the change and enact it.
“All state constitutions have been thought through and played out on the shoulders of Christianity for a thousand years, until former students realized them on the barricades.” - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Play is an evolutionary driver and a pillar of freedom. We need play to practice how we want to live in peace and thrive as a species. Viewing games as a purely random realm leads to the games becoming self-defeating. The empty leisure of today, that is advertised to the 40-hour-worker, has nothing to with true play and it´s purpose.
While real play tries to master and transform destructive forces into forces of creation to liberate our species, many of the games of today just try to distract one from these forces. Is this the reason so many of are playing video-games? To run away for the destructive forces inside of us and not learning to transform them?
“Perhaps this book is the first to decipher the particular order in these players' attempts at liberation. But then the deciphering happens so late precisely because the order of playful reflection itself is so ancient. Its scientific knowledge was never needed before the machines overrode the calendar of seasons and days. The games were familiar to every child, the customs to every adult, the arts to lovers, sport to warriors. In all four forms of recreation, people prepared themselves for renewal and caught up on experience.” - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The world of play subdivides into four forms:
the raptures of the inner world
the fighting-games of the external world
the solutions of the stage, that secure the glory of posterity (“after-world”)
the rites and ceremonies that repeat ancient sacred knowledge of the primeval world (“before-world”)
Inner world, external world, after-world and before-world can be viewed with the pedantry of the sociologist. As of today I can´t be sure that everyone of you has played fully with all four of these worlds. I´m not even sure I have played with the after-world fully yet.
The Difficulty of Embracing
If you went to school you´ll probably have some difficulty embracing this. In school they don´t differentiate between play and seriousness. School talks of phenomena and the appearance of the world on one side and, in a different context, about reflection and the inner self-awareness on the other side.
What schools teach is that outward appearance and inner self-awareness are vastly different things. Though Huessy´s sociology acknowledges the difference between the inner and outer reflection of reality, it doesn´t rate it very high. With this he embraces the millennia before schooling.
“When the peoples enjoyed the reflection, the mirroring of both their inner and their external, both the reflection of their origin and the reflection of their ultimate destiny.” - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
You can encapsulate all four, “self”-awareness and appearance (double-space) and origin and destiny (double-time) as refractions of one reality. When we only see our “self”-awareness as important, as many of todays spiritual traditions do, we can never embrace our true destiny as humans.
After all it´s you and me, he and she, all of us who are called by the universe (or call it god) as carriers of the whole reality. Why? Because only of us we know that all the forces of reality can enter into. All animals and inanimate things are subject to fate, expediency and necessity (destiny) and thus belong to the natural part of reality and are governed by its laws. Animals even have a common will, an inner space of agreement, yet they aren´t able to reflect on their destiny. Only humans - as far as we know - are in presence of the full cross of reality.
The Transition to Play
While the title says “Life is not (just) a Game” I have to add a “yet”. I do believe that our future is the homo ludens - the playing human. Life is a process, a story manifesting all-encompassing love. It´s by our conscious agency that we create this world where everyone can embrace and play life without being forced into the seriousness of it due to external circumstances.
How long this transition will take depends on us. It´s written in our collective heart. If you wanna know all you have to do is listen to it and fall in love with it´s guiding beat.
Thanks for reading my beautiful readers.
Marco.