Does play constitute the good life? Suits and Aristotle on autotelicity and living well

ABSTRACT

Bernard Suits’ account of play as an autotelic activity has been greatly influential in the philosophy of sport. Suits borrows the notion of ‘autotelicity’ from Aristotle’s ethics, formulating different iterations of the notions of ‘play’ and ‘game play’ that challenge the Stagirite’s views of the good life. In particular, Suits questions Aristotle’s identification of the good life with the one that involves engaging in contemplation, which Aristotle regards as the only fully autotelic and self-sufficient activity. Thus, Aristotle’s notion of ‘autotelicity’ and its connections to the good life are key to comprehend Suits’ views of play. Particularly, Suits draws on and revises Aristotle’s response to the question about the good life, as well as his notion of play (paidia), in order to identify game play as the purely autotelic and self-sufficient activity in which the good life consists.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• autotelicity
• games
• Suits
• good life
• Aristotle

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of the journal, Paul Gaffney, for their insight and comments on earlier versions of the paper. I’m also grateful to the History and Philosophy of Sport graduate students and faculty in the Kinesiology Department at Penn State for their feedback on the paper. Also, I’m thankful to Cheryl Ballantyne, Suits’ widow, and the staff at the Suits fonds in the Special Collection and Archives at the University of Waterloo for giving me access to Suits’ unpublished works.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. To be clear, for Aristotle, activities show diferent degrees of completeness or autotelicity (i.e., some activities are more complete than others). Thus, many activities are autotelic. However, only one of them is the most autotelic or, in Aristotle’s words, ‘unconditionally complete’ (NE I.7, 1097a30 – 1097b1). ‘So if one thing alone is complete, this will be what we are looking for, but if there are more, it will be the most complete of them.’ (NE I.7, 1097a25 – 30). Note that the terms ‘complete’ and ‘autotelic’ are interchangeable.

2. Kidd (2016) analyzes the roots of the term ‘paidia’ (‘παιδία’) and argues that play derives from ‘παῖς’ (‘child’). Play, thus, is a childlike activity, that is, the activity that best defines what children do. This does not mean that only children engage in play. Rather, already in the Odyssey, ‘play’ refers to adult pastimes.

3. In ‘Words on Play’, Suits uses the Greek term paidia to refer to play and play-related elements. For instance, he calls ‘paidiatricians’ the experts on the study of play and uses the proper noun ‘Prudence Paidia’ to mention a highly gifted amateur athlete. (Suits 1977, 117 &, 127).

4. Suits’ interpretation of Aristotle is controversial. Several Aristotle scholars have argued that Aristotle’s view of happiness encompases human activities other than contemplation (Barney 2008). For instance, Richard Kraut argues: ‘Aristotle would say that if someone equates happiness with contemplation, but thinks that no other kind of activity is good enough to serve as the ultimate end of a well-lived life, then he [sic] has a serious misunderstanding of what happiness is’ (Kraut 1989, 322).

5. Suits extends this claim to activities such as playing the trombone, reading books, and vacationing as play (Suits 2005, 32).

6. This aligns with Aristotle’s view of play, where play serves the primary function of helping us rest or recuperate from work.

7. Play and work, thus, are codependent. The existence of one requires the existence of the other. Should we remove scarcity (i.e., instrumentality) from life, play would be impossible. Like Aristotle, Suits regards play and work as codependent activities. However, Suits provides a significantly different view of play and argues that living well involves engaging in certain forms of play activities, namely game play activities.

8. The lusory attitude is central to Suits’ account of game play. Thus, he argues: ‘the lusory attitude is the element which unifies the other elements into a single formula which successfully states the necessary and sufficient conditions for any activity to be an instance of game-playing’ (Suits 2007, 9).

9. In a similar vein, Christopher Yorke (2018) argues that ‘the purpose of gameplay is to help us become more fully realized humans, by turning on certain types capacities that cannot be aroused in any other fashion.’

10. Even the activities non-Utopians refer to as ‘instrumental,’ such as fixing the kitchen sink, running large corporations, and building houses as examples (Suits 1984, 11), would be games if they existed in Utopia.

11. Thi Nguyen connects game play to agency and argues that ‘games are the art of agency [. However] the point of games is [not] to experience that agency, or to experience freedom … agency is the medium, and not necessarily the experiential purpose’ (Nguyen 2020). Nguyen’s emphasis on autonomy goes in line with an interpretation of Suits’ Utopia that I provide elsewhere (Lopez Frias 2018).