What is important in play is that it is post-teleological and anti-machinic.
A machine is built for its ends; A machine cannot play. A machine is a worker. A machine will end the universe if it meant being delighted to death.
Man is not a machine. We don’t predominantly care about ends, but means. There is satisfaction that comes in about living within our means. Doing what we can where we can so that we may be awed at how things unfold.
As the machinic becomes reified in the world, play becomes supreme.
Interesting that Plato or perhaps I mean Socrates approves of play and not of laughter which he refers to somewhere in the Republic as an 'unripe fruit', I think because it perceives disjunction or disharmony in the scheme of things. I think of play and laughter as intimately connected, yet animals play but they don't laugh, and children play terribly seriously.
Whenever I read Huizinga or Roger Callois’ Les jeux et les hommes, I can’t help but lament what lost potential there was—or perhaps still is—for a rather different kind of “game theory.” A game theory with flirtation at its axiomatic beating heart, to put it in your terms here. Anyway, nice piece!
What is important in play is that it is post-teleological and anti-machinic.
A machine is built for its ends; A machine cannot play. A machine is a worker. A machine will end the universe if it meant being delighted to death.
Man is not a machine. We don’t predominantly care about ends, but means. There is satisfaction that comes in about living within our means. Doing what we can where we can so that we may be awed at how things unfold.
As the machinic becomes reified in the world, play becomes supreme.
Interesting that Plato or perhaps I mean Socrates approves of play and not of laughter which he refers to somewhere in the Republic as an 'unripe fruit', I think because it perceives disjunction or disharmony in the scheme of things. I think of play and laughter as intimately connected, yet animals play but they don't laugh, and children play terribly seriously.
Whenever I read Huizinga or Roger Callois’ Les jeux et les hommes, I can’t help but lament what lost potential there was—or perhaps still is—for a rather different kind of “game theory.” A game theory with flirtation at its axiomatic beating heart, to put it in your terms here. Anyway, nice piece!
Thank you, Vincent! Yes - I totally agree. Why tabulate everything? One must stay a little bit naughty!