Art as Play

 

     A dramatic performance is aptly called a play, though a sonnet or a sonata might deserve the name no less.  All art is a form of play, though not all play is art.  When goat kids tussle and cats knock a ball around, they are playing.  Their end is amusement, just as opera-goers and sonnet-readers are pleasantly passing the time, though art aficionados might call what they are seeking beauty.  All are enjoying recreation in a diversion from the pursuit of practical goals.  The dog slavering while pursuing a stick and the gallery visitor cocking a discerning eye have a good deal in common. 

     Play might be defined as activity done for its own sake without any function other than the satisfaction arising from the act itself.  Throughout the centuries those defending the arts from moralists who regarded aesthetic pursuits as frivolous or hedonistic have maintained that exposure to aesthetic objects makes the consumer more noble and more moral, but, should it ever happen, this effect is incidental.  The same is true of more modest claims that art increases sympathy or sensitivity, or, indeed, that its study benefits general intelligence.  While it is true that art encodes and transmits cultural values and spiritual convictions, this function, too, is nonessential.  Pleasure is the chief and essential end of art, though critics yet today, in an odd vestige of moralism, shrink from admitting it.

     This week’s New York Times Opinion section, for instance, includes the promise that the study of art will “improve your taste, your judgements, your conduct.” [1]  The notion that culture will sharpen both cognitive and moral discernment, while broad and unqualified, seems modest when juxtaposed to the article’s extravagant title “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,”  Such claims are likely to be in part defensive, reacting to today’s educational stress on science and devaluation of humanities.

     For centuries of European criticism had accepted a compromise in the authoritative formula “delight and instruct,” with the second term justifying and diluting the first.  Yet recognition of people’s fondness for symbolic  representation goes back to Aristotle who recognized this distinctive human taste, saying “from childhood to imitate is inborn in people and in  this they differ from other animals,” since “by nature we have an instinct for representation.”  The contemplation of such symbols or representations or “imitations” in Aristotle’s term, brings us “pleasure.”  [2]  in the Politics Aristotle is quite clear about the uselessness of art, saying that the young must not be taught skills that are merely functional (he uses the term χρήσιμος, useful or serviceable), as his activities should not be corrupted by what is “not free” (ἀνελεύθερος),  This is, of course the basis for the value long placed on the “liberal arts,” those of free men, unbound by compulsion, wages, or practical ends. [3]  This sort of disinterested pastime is a self-justifying activity, the highest human occupation.  For the ancients this noble purposelessness characterized not art alone, but all intellectual activities. 

     For Schiller more than two millennia later human beings are motivated by both a constantly mutating sensuous drive (sinnliche Trieb) arising from physical stimuli and an unchanging structural drive (Formtrieb) which, like mathematics, leads toward the rational. [4]  For him the dialectic of these opposing tendencies is resolved through the play drive (der Spieltrieb), which mediates between the world of phenomena and that of ideas. 

     The sensuous drive excludes all independent activity and freedom from its subject, the passive receiver of sense data, while the structural drive, situated in the conceptual realm, excludes all dependence and all pain from its purely formal values.  The exclusion of freedom reflects a physical reality, while the exclusion of suffering is a spiritual inspiration. Both drives therefore involve the mind, the one through natural laws, the other through cognitive operations.  In the play instinct both work together, and, when one is led both by inclination and by reason to love another individual (or, likewise, an objet d’art) the synthesis generates a playful attachment in which coercion has no part.

     Building on these conclusions in the twentieth century Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens derives art from play while accepting the biological origins of a play instinct in “the habitual tendency of every living creature to leap; and the human creature, by acquiring, as we said, a sense of rhythm, generated and brought forth dancing ; and since the rhythm is suggested and awakened by the tune, the union of these.” For Huizinga “rhythm and harmony,” surely mathematical elements Schiller would have considered “formal,” are “invariably accompanied by pleasure.” (263)  

     He usefully defines the nature of play, listing five distinguishing characteristics.

 

1.  “Play is free, it is in fact freedom.” (8)

2.  Play is separated from the rest of experience.  It is a wholly voluntary activity.

3.  Play is isolated from other activities both in duration and location.

4.  Play “creates order; it is order.”  “It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.” (10)  “All play has its rules.” (11)

5.  Play is connected with no functional end whatsoever beyond recreation.  “It interrupts the appetitive process.” (9)

 

     On this basis he concludes that  Poetry “is born in and as play – sacred play, no doubt, but always, even in its sanctity, verging on gay abandon, mirth and jollity.”  (122)  He proceeds to provide anthropological data to support the conclusion that myth, art, and religion are all founded in play.   While “Poiesis is, in fact, a play function,” (119), he notes that poetry sometimes rises to the level of  “ideation and judgment,” but “music never leaves the play sphere.” (158)

     Though the similarity is profound, distinctions remain between the frisking lamb and the balletomane, the Superbowl fan and the cinemaphile.  All may be said to be playing, but only the film and dance aficionados are engaged with art.  The unique aspect of art is that its play involves manipulating symbols and patterns rather than objects or other creatures.  In this way art is distinguished from such human activities with no end other than pleasure, such as travel, gourmet dining, and certain sexual encounters, each of which depends on stimuli more substantial than the play of images and ideas in the mind.  In most music and much dance and abstract painting the gap is even greater, as the formal design of the work dominates while reference to the world of lived reality is absent or slight.

     Further, whereas in play one amuses oneself and only possibly fellow players or perhaps a bemused parent, art is typically made by one individual (in a process that may or may not be subjectively pleasant) and then consumed  by others.  Play is open-ended while art aims at a coherent unified object, finished in some sense and an artifact thereafter whereas non-aesthetic play is generally forgotten after it is enacted.  Finally, the rules for art are remade with every work, while those of chess or a game of catch are unchanging. 

     Art, then, is a recreational amusement, a way to pass the time while waiting to die.  Its primary end is always pleasure.  In this a play by Sophocles and the “playing” of a violin resemble the “play” of bridge players or that of frisking kids in a meadow of sweet grass. The painter may wish to make money and the gallery goer may consider his purchase an investment, but art is in its essence free of motive outside itself.  It is born of the exhilarating exercise of the human expertise at the manipulation of symbols when done for its own sake, or rather purely for fun and, with the more sublime works, perhaps some moments of that satisfying (if mysterious) sort of fun experienced as mental equipoise. 

     Artists build symbolic structures in the chambers of the imagination.  Beyond giving pleasure the works they create can, though their beauty and their order, serve as a “supreme fiction” (in Stevens’ term) redeeming a world known imperfectly, in fragments, and too often laden with suffering.  Art may realize that grand ambition or it may simply serve as diversion (doubtless itself a useful goal).  In a dark theater members of the audience amuse themselves with the play of entering another consciousness.  In an easy chair one reads a sonnet of Shakespeare and enjoys playing that, one day someone may spoken such lines direct from the heart, though the reader knows it is all make-believe.  The universality of both play and the entire spectrum of art – poetry, drama, music, sculpture, dance, and painting – throughout the world and in all ages, among hunter-gatherers and among urbanites, demonstrates the critical value of such activities in making human life livable.

 

 

 

1.  David Brooks, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society,” New York Times January 28, 2024.  Note the.  Brooks, a Yale professor but not a literary scholar, would have agreed for the most part with James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism (2016), the most compelling exposition of the humanistic value of literature in recent years.

2.  Poetics 1448b μιμεῖσθαι σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, ἐκ παίδων  ἐστὶ καὶ τούτῳ διαφέρουσι τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων and “κατὰ φύσιν δὲ ὄντος ἡμῖν τοῦ μιμεῖσθαι.” The word for pleasure, which appears in this passage in several forms, is “ἡδύς.”

3.  Politics 1337b.  Note also the origin of school in σχολή, meaning “leisure” or “that in which leisure is employed.”  Such men could, of course, attain freedom only by depending on slaves to perform the labor to support them.

4. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), letters twelve through Fourteen.  The quoted lines are in letter fourteen.

The Mannerly Hedonist

     In the fifties James Olds and Peter Milner demonstrated that rats allowed to electrically stimulate a particular area of their brains, thought to be the “pleasure center,” would do so in preference to all other activities, including eating, to the point of exhaustion and finally death. This happened not only to rats with addictive personalities or those with insufficient self-discipline, but to all rats. How could it be otherwise? All creatures seek to avoid pain and to experience pleasure. I cannot tell to what extent the human brain might make a telling difference, but I feel as though, in their situation, I would prove more rat-like than angelic. Desire makes the world turn – whatever other motive could exist? From where could it come?

     Yet hedonism is less straightforward than it might seem. To begin with, it can lead to widely various decisions. In an address to the inmates at Cook County Jail (printed in Crime and Criminals), Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney, says that the inmates, like himself, have regularly made the choices that seemed to them most likely to lead to happiness. For him it was attending law school; for them, perhaps, burglarizing a house. A man who thinks of the latter as his best opportunity needs, Darrow suggests, not some mystic moral regeneration, but more practical choices.
     Some would expect that, though the demise of the strung-out rodents did not deter their fellows from pursuing the same path to perdition, perhaps we two-leggers could imagine inevitable ill effects vividly enough to alter our compulsions. The implications of addiction, whether to over-eating, opiates, video games, money, romance, or power, suggest that such prudence is far from certain. Epicurus specifically taught his followers that the only way to increase happiness is to reduce desire. But can happiness exist without desire?
     In recent years the study of well-being has been quantified and researchers using the terms hedonic adaptation and then hedonic treadmill have indicated people’s experience of subjective well-being is highly relative. (I am thinking of Brickman and Campbell in the early seventies and then Eysenck in the nineties.) Not surprisingly, an individual in a given set of circumstances will feel satisfaction if the situation has slightly improved and dissatisfaction if it has recently declined. Such changes are temporary as the person adjusts to a new norm, reacting only when there is a fresh movement up or down. Some are happier than others, but this tends to correlate with permanent personality types more than outward conditions. Across a broad range of settings one will find populations with roughly the same distribution of happy and unhappy people. Those living with little feel no lack until they know of others with more, and even in a concentration camp people could have “good days.”
     On the other hand Socrates says in Plato’s Apology that even the King of Persia with his unlimited luxury and power still had “few” days or nights of net pleasure. The millionaire yearns to be a multi-millionaire, the privileged child becomes neurotic, the successful seducer seeks novelty, the CEO wishes to lead an even bigger corporation.
     An artist wishing to create a masterpiece may be miserable while a stamp collector may regularly enjoy more modest goals. The Buddhist pursues the big payoff of enlightenment, but perhaps that goal only sheds a more modest radiance on the small daily routines of everyday experience. The person with a satisfying marriage or a fulfilling job doubtless enjoys more net happiness than the high-stakes player who occasionally makes a hit.
     Human pleasure is often strategically based on a kind of speculative cost accounting. Though I might wish to snatch my neighbor’s venison haunch or Smartphone, I refrain from doing so if he will likewise leave my things alone. His mate may be desirable, but I expect I will find more suffering than delight in seizing her. To the Cyrenaics altruism led to pleasure. In this way nearly all moral choices may be rationalized, but human ingenuity devised a way to enhance the rewards of ethical behavior. The good person learns to feel satisfaction at doing good. The day can be a series of self-congratulations for the moral individual. The glow that even casual church-goers feel is distributed through the entire week. The selfish person is always meeting the challenges and the hostility that arises from less than open-hearted decisions and doubtless generates anxiety and apprehension, feeling isolation rather than support. The difference is central to the well-being of such a profoundly social animal as Homo sapiens.
     For the more subtle, the game goes on. Plato, in the myth of the ring of Gyges (Book II of the Republic, 359a–2.360d) posits the question of whether one might enjoy doing injustice were there no chance of being caught. For the philosopher at any rate (II, 612), virtue is its own reward because the soul is divine and it departs from its own nature when it accedes to vice. Given a continuous history of war and exploitation of others, it may seem dubious whether such a conviction has sustained many humans over the years, but the fact is that society is based on the voluntary cooperation of most people most of the time. Given the inherent selfishness of the ego, one can only conclude that this route seems most likely to bring happiness to such social animals as ourselves. No culture anywhere lacks moral rules; indeed, those of traditional societies are rigorous and demanding. To “break the law” in a small village would destroy one’s vital connections. Only a madman or one corrupted by the values of what passes for more advanced cultures would dare be a deviant.
     Religion has typically challenged the ego, asking for humility if not for the actual extinguishing of self. But surely the seeker after nirvana or heaven aims for pleasure. Mother Teresa lived the life she thought would give her the greatest joy. The Buddhist monk who told me a week ago, “Perhaps you will reach enlightenment before I do,” must have relished his own grace. The psychologists can tell us of people today who cut themselves for the good feeling that it brings.
     The definitive human skill is the manipulation of symbols; and naturally the practice of this ability gives us pleasure, pleasure of the same sort enjoyed by the house cat on the hunt. It is not the stomach full of mouse that the tabby pursues as much as the full feeling of felineness. For humans, the most common form of recreational symbolic play is conversation. Most people in the developed world experience constant stimulation by stories on television and film, lyric-like word strings in advertisements, graffiti, and bumper stickers, and a host of other inputs. With Smart phones and tablet computers, people tend even more today to be constantly absorbing symbolic patterns for the sheer fun of it. No single experience may be significant, but they supply themselves with an unending series of small and completely reliable satisfactions.
     As with the refined philosophical morality of the Platonist, there is the aesthete’s pleasure in sign-juggling, either as creator or consumer. Art is nothing if not the creation and consumption of symbolic structures for their own sake. The pleasures of decoding Chaucer’s Middle English, discerning the dance within the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet, recognizing the antecedents of a contemporary poet, feeling a minute thrill at a turn of phrase, every reader’s experience, somewhat different for each but always derived from the rich suggestibility of the text, all these joys of literature are joys indeed. The same, of course, is true of other arts and well beyond. In Heian Japan the sophisticated Fujiwara aristocrats competed in inventing new aesthetic delights like moon-viewing parties and other expressions of miyabi. One who cultivates a connoisseur’s taste whether in opera, wine, or NASCAR competitions, has simply learned how to obtain pleasures unavailable to all.
     The true hedonist, then, is no disordered dissolute boor, but the most moral, polite, and sociable of people, likely to be quick with a thank you note, well-versed in Beethoven quartets, perhaps holding a highly valued recipe for Thai tom yum soup. We cannot always dodge suffering, but we can always seek pleasure. If we share this tendency with the microbes, let us not lament the fact, but make the most of it. Finding ourselves waiting about in this anteroom of death, if we wish to pass our time in the best possible manner, we may find beautiful behavior and beautiful art more crucial to our well-being than promiscuity and intoxicants.