When Life Becomes a Game: A Moral Lesson from Søren Kierkegaard and Bernard Suits

ABSTRACT

Hidden among the many fascinating things that Bernard Suits says in his classic The Grasshopper is a passing observation he makes about one of the works of Søren Kierkegaard, the Seducer’s Diary. The seducer in Kierkegaard’s narrative, Suits says, is playing a game. I propose to follow Suits’s suggestion to discover a surprising number of valuable truths: that a certain class of games, Real-Life Games, carries with it a certain kind of moral danger; that this particular sort of immorality is no minor one but in fact constitutes the natural result of a life dominated by the classic vice of acedia or spiritual apathy (Kierkegaard’s aesthetic sphere of life); and finally that this immorality can frequently be found in a somewhat disguised form in the academy, as the result of another of the classic capital vices, vainglory. We are left with a moral lesson: beware the danger of turning your life into a game.

KEYWORDS:

• Suits
• Kierkegaard
• real-life games
• capital vices

Notes

1. This sort of game therefore involves a kind of ‘gaming up’ of ordinary life, but of a different sort than that identified by Kretchmar (2008).

2. And so Suits would be wrong were he to say that Real-Life Games are always, without exception, vicious. I am unsure whether to interpret him as having implied that, since he was addressing a different question: the possibility of using game-playing as a model or metaphor for the entire moral life. He is right to say that treating all of life as a game by imposing artificial obstacles to our goals would be terribly vicious.

3. For the idea of a conceptual metaphor, see Lakoff and Johnson (1980).

4. Aquinas’s definition of acedia is ‘boredom or sadness regarding a spiritual and interior good’; I have collapsed ‘boredom or sadness’ into the more generic ‘aversion’. Aquinas (2003), Question 11, article 1, p. 363.

5. For a summary treatment of the immediate vs. the reflective aesthete, see Evans (2009), chapter 4.

6. For a development of this account of the value of games and sports, see Johnson and Reed (unpublished). This account of the value of sport belongs in the same family as that of Hurka (2006) and that presupposed in Kretchmar (2005).

7. Suits (2005), 85–88. It seems to me that Suits should have applied this solution to sports like diving and gymnastics, which he later decided were not games (in Suits (1988)), because he could not identify a goal or constitutive rules that limited the most efficient means for attaining that goal. But if we allow limitations in principle to count, it becomes (it seems to me) relatively easy to find constitutive rules in these sports: in both gymnastics and diving, for instance, we wouldn’t allow miniature rockets to be attached to the athletes’ bodies to facilitate their flips and spins and to help their balance. So diving and gymnastics fit the picture of a game: one tries to achieve a goal (balancing or flipping or spinning and so on) while accepting certain limitations in principle (not using artificial aids of certain sorts) simply for the challenge of trying to achieve the goal within those limitations. I don’t see why that doesn’t substantially defeat the reason for his late-career resistance to the claim that all sports are games.

8. There may be a third thing to which glory can refer: the excellence itself, with reference to the idea that excellence deserves to be manifested and appreciated. See Aquinas (2003), Question IX, article 1, p. 342. That makes the discussion of vainglory even more complicated, but we can safely ignore that complication for present purposes. For a discussion of the concept of glory in connection with the divine glory defense against the problem of evil, see Johnson (2016), section 3.1.

9. I have skipped over much of the controversy that might accompany my characterizations of glory and vainglory, as there is a long history of debate and engaging with it will take us too far afield from our main purpose. I can summarize somewhat here. Much of the tradition defines glory primarily as what I called the second sort of glory, the response of recognition or appreciation, and so its discussion of vainglory has focused mainly on my second sort of vainglory. My take on glory is inspired by Edwards (2009), and one contemporary account that is very close to mine (and to Edwards’s) is Chappell (2013).

10. This is not to say, of course, that all desire for novelty is inordinate, and it may in any given case be difficult to identify which desires for novelty are rooted in vainglory and which are rooted in laudable desires.