Playful
Johan Huizinga (1872-1945)
Final Inspiration of Game Gene Theory
Geoffrey Hamilton
MARCH 23, 1997
Play, as a serious concept with which
to view the world, began to gain respectability with J. Huizinga's
Homo Ludens in the 1930s. He posited and attempted to demonstrate that all
culture is purposeless play. He argued that as play is within a deterministic
universe, and yet just happens to mean something that is not deterministic,
then play must be outside nature: "In play there is something 'at play'
which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to
the action. All play means something".
However, Huizinga makes several mistakes. Among them he confuses universal
purposes and limited purposes. He doesn't see the limited purposes in play
and the role such limits could 'play' in the universe. Secondly he believed
in a determinism for a universe which is demonstrably chaotic. As a result
of his confusions he failed to see play as being only within games (limited
purposes) which creates the incidental meaning he describes. Meaning may not
match the universe, but chaos can be tamed through the meaning which play
creates. Thus the meaning play creates is not superfluous but essential to humanity
in a chaotic and irrational universe.
Huizinga's confusions allowed him
to position himself against Shakespeare's period in an attempt to prioritize his
own discovery: "...in the 17th century.... in a glittering succession of figures
ranging from Shakespeare and Calderon to Racine.... It was the fashion to liken
the world to a stage on which every man plays his part. Does this mean that the
play-element in civilization was openly acknowledged? Not at all. On closer
examination this fashionable comparison of
life to the stage proves to be little more than an echo of Neo-platonism"..
Though Huizinga may have been mistaken in other ways, Platonism was indeed
fashionable in this period.
And no one seems more fashionable to the
English of the period then Sir Philip Sidney. In his The Defense of English Posie
the echo of platonism is made clear -- but so is the bridge to Aristotle: "There is no
art delivered unto mankind that hath not the works of nature as his principal object ....
Only the Poet disdeining to be tied to
any such subjection ... doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things
either better thannature bringeth foorth, or quite new..." . With this book
Sidney makes it plain that coexistence is possible between the two paradigms, but that
he leans towards Plato's side.
So it is perhaps in response to Sidney's position
that Shakespeare paradoxically uses the metadrama opportunity which Sidney allows and
says as King Lear that "Nature's above art" in one respect: we are moved more by what
happens in our lives than what happens on stage (IV,vi,86).
Sidney see nature
as inferior artistically, it is what makes the whole of nature more significant than that
part of nature we call art.
While Huizinga dismissed Neo-platonism as not akin to play, such offerings
as the following passage explains why there is more to Neo-platonism than he seems
to have perceived: Lear. "When we are born, we cry that we are come / To
this great stage of fools" (IV,vi,187). The passage is reflecting nature by commenting
on how what we do is a pointless game. This is hardly a Neo-platonic bettering of
nature, though it is referring to its own artifice as having more in common with
nature than Sidney would allow.
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