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ABSTRACT
In this analysis, I employ Husserl’s three-part description of intentionality to show how a player/play act/play object model for consciousness helps us see play more clearly. I review Suits’ logic-based attempts to amend Huizinga’s overly inclusive characterization of play. However, I do so on what I see as stronger phenomenological grounds by describing four kinds of experience embedded in Suits’ work-play dichotomy. I analyze two species of play-fortified work – namely, work that requires intrinsic enhancement and work that does not. I also describe two species of play – namely, play that is compromised and play that is unfettered. I conclude by summarizing advantages of phenomenological analyses and underlining the important distinctions this philosophic method uncovers within traditional work and play categories.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Paul Gaffney and two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This is not entirely accurate. Huizinga made three basic claims about the nature of play. Two of them (play is not ordinary, and play takes place in limited space and time) are actually relational in nature. However, Huizinga’s primary claim, the one he attributed to all forms of play, is that play is free, voluntary, and autotelic.
2. Suits was not the first or only philosopher to come upon the notion of relationality as a feature of play even if he was the first to cast it in logical terms. Huizinga (Citation1950) described play as ‘not-ordinary’, as something that ‘interrupts the appetitive process (9).
3. Husserl was not an opponent of scientific research. However, he was adamant that science needed to be grounded in and complemented by reflective analyses. Husserl wrote, ‘Positivism, in a manner of speaking, decapitates philosophy’ (Citation1954/1970, 9).
4. Husserl would question Huizinga’s methodology for the same reasons he critiqued empirical science. The selection of particulars of any category presupposes an understanding of the nature of that category. And categorization is a function of consciousness, of intuiting or seeing similarities amidst differences.
5. The inevitability of play’s demise was articulated by Suits vis-à-vis a hypothetical tennis match in which Utopian Tommy More reported he cannot be at play because this activity is ‘not a temporary reallocation of my time. It is just the kind of thing I do with all of my time’ (1977, 127).
6. Suits analytic tendencies caused him to ignore lived experience when he contemplated the question of what a youngster was playing with when gamboling on the green without a toy or other play object (Suits Citation1977, 125). Suits claimed the boy with playing with the scarce resource of time. A phenomenologist would reject this claim as nonsensical. The boy was playing toward the hillside and the various delightful gamboling affordances it provided.
7. When I say ‘onus’, I do not mean play-handicapped individuals can always be blamed or held responsible. Both nature and nurture can intervene to make play difficult or impossible for a given person. When certain essentials for life are missing – for instance, basic medical care, good nutrition, a safe home environment – it is no wonder that some children’s play potential is never realized or, at minimum, is severely compromised. While we humans have some control over our play capabilities and opportunities, we certainly do not enjoy total control.
8. See Eisen (Citation1990) for an interesting and moving account of childhood play, even in life-threatening situations during the holocaust.
9. Twain’s original satirical comment was in reference to the proliferation of royalty in King Arthur’s Court (see Twain Citation2001).
10. Some philosophers have identified different species of utility. See, e.g. Arendt (Citation1958) who drew a distinction between work (aspirational, product-targeted striving) and labor (necessitated, recurring striving). Both however fit the utility, exotelic, means-end model of behavior.
11. In reflection, of course, these elements can be teased apart and analyzed separately. In lived, everyday experience, on the other hand, we count on judgments being made continuously and automatically on the basis of unified meanings, recognitions, or understandings.