Utopia and the meaning of life: ludic reason versus instrumental reason in Bernard Suits’ work

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the existential aspects of Bernard Suits’ Utopia. We first provide a philosophical analysis of the concept of ‘utopia.’ Then, we analyze two key distinctions in Suits’ work: (a) technical versus autotelic rationality, and (b) play and game playing. By drawing on the analysis of both distinctions, we contrast two types of approaches to life. One is guided by the imperatives of instrumental reason, the other by those of ‘ludic rationality’ or ‘ludic reason.’ In doing so, we regard Utopia as a heuristic tool that Suits deploys to argue that the life guided by ludic reason is the most worth living. To conclude, we argue that the existential lesson of Suits’ Utopia is that individuals must go about their lives searching for challenges to overcome for their own sake, not for the instrumental goals achieved through them.

KEYWORDS:

• Games
• meaning of life
• instrumental rationality
• ludic rationality
• lusory attitude

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript, their recommendations on future avenues to explore, and their suggestions for literature to read. Also, I am grateful to John Philip Dattilo for his comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Francisco Javier Lopez Frias is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Valencia, where he also completed a master's program in Ethics and Democracy at the Department of Moral Philosophy. He has published numerous papers in International Journals, as well as book chapters, book reviews, and books in the Philosophy of Sport. He has been a visiting scholar at Penn State University, the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University, the Franklin Institute of the University of Alcala de Henares, the University of Rome (Foro Italico), and Swansea University. López Frías was awarded the Robert Scott Kretchmar Student Essay Award from IAPS (International Association for the Philosophy of Sport) in 2013 and participated in the 29th Seminar for Postgraduate Students on Olympic Studies organized by the International Olympic Academy (IOA) the following year.

Xavier Gimeno Monfort is a high school principal and teacher of history of philosophy at Colegio Aula 3 in Valencia, Spain. He obtained his PhD from the Moral Philosophy Department at the University of Valencia. His dissertation explores the work of Spanish philosopher Juan David Garcia Bacca.

ORCID

Francisco Javier Lopez Frias http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7278-7656

Notes

1 In this paper, we will use the terms ‘good life’ and ‘happiness’ interchangeably.

2 The emphasis on achieving goals makes instrumental activities dispensable and tradeable whenever another activity allows for a more efficient achievement of the goals pursued. For instance, as Sigmund Loland (2017) argues with regard to physical exercise, if individuals exercised only for health reasons, they would embrace any other activity, such as taking the so-called ‘exercise pill,’ that allowed them to achieve a healthy state more efficiently. When seen from this perspective, physical exercise – and thereby the skills developed and challenges overcome in physical exercise activities – becomes dispensable and tradeable.

3 For this reason, in ‘Words on Play,’ Suits argues that aesthetic and religious activities are only instances of play in very limited situations.

4 It is worth emphasizing that Suits regards the decision between instrumentality and autotelicity as an existential choice, that is, as something each individual must decide on his or her own: ‘[T]he opportunity to work‒or whatever other instrumental activity it might be which is desired‒should not be left to chance in Utopia. If at any given period of time, everyone in Utopia wanted to work at something, then such work should be available for them all … So, while game playing need not be the sole occupation of Utopia, it is the essence, the ‘without which not’ of Utopia’ (Suits, 2014, p. 191).

5 To further illustrate the two lifestyles in Utopia, Suits provides the examples of William Seeker and John Striver. For the sake of brevity, we will focus only on Seeker. He is a scientist who takes the pursuit of scientific truth to be his main goal in life. However, in Utopia, there is no need to engage in such an activity because everything is known. All a Utopian must do to know something about the world is consult a computer. Therefore, the only way for Seeker to do what he values the most is to play a game. That is to say: he must forego the use of machines in order to attempt to overcome the challenges involved in the scientific pursuit of truth. To put it differently, by refraining from using the machines to know about the world, he would voluntarily set himself unnecessary obstacles (engage in the scientific pursuit of truth, for instance, by conducting experiments, collecting data, and reading papers) to achieve a goal (knowledge). When seen in this way, the pursuit of scientific truth becomes an end in itself; it becomes an activity which is engaged just to overcome the obstacles that it presents.

6 A life devoted to game playing realizes Aristotle's notion of happiness, which ‘is believed to be complete without qualification, since we always choose it for itself and never for the sake of anything else’ (Aristotle, 2004, pp. 10–11). However, it must be noted that Suits criticizes and goes beyond Aristotle. In Suits’ Utopia, the intrinsically valuable activity that Aristotle regards as conducive to the good life, namely contemplation, does not lead to the good life (Suits, 1977). According to Suits, contemplation is not purely autotelic because it often contains extrinsic goals: ‘if a given instance of [contemplation] is really (although perhaps scarcely consciously) valued because of its usefulness for some further purpose, then it is not really autotelic behavior, and so it does not really qualify even as a candidate for the name ‘play.’ Now, I suggest that activities that are very highly valued –which [contemplation is], by those who value them at all – are very nearly always valued at least in part because they are thought to be, in one way or another, good for us, and not solely because they are thought to be good in themselves. At the very least, [contemplation is] thought to improve us’ (Suits, 1977, pp. 128–129). For Suits, contemplation often has an instrumental value – unless it is engaged in as a game. For instance, individuals contemplate the world to know more about its origin and functioning, or to be wiser than other people and gain social recognition.

7 This does not mean that the mere addition of challenges suffices to increase engagement. In games, a balance must be found between challenges that are too easy, and challenges that become too difficult. Individuals would lose interest in the former very soon, and they would simply lack the ability to engage in the latter: ‘The gamewright must avoid two extremes. If he draws his lines too loosely the game will be dull because winning will be too easy. As looseness is increased to the point of utter laxity the game simply falls apart, since there are then no rules proscribing available means. (For example, a homing propellant device could be devised which would ensure a golfer a hole in one every time he played.) On the other hand, rules are lines that can be drawn too tightly, so that the game becomes too difficult. And if a line is drawn very tightly indeed the game is squeezed out of existence’ (Suits, 2014, p. 32).