David Egan Philosophy

Next week is my first week of teaching at Koç University. Thankfully I’m only teaching a single course as I ease my way into Istanbul life. The course is a variation on a course I’ve taught a couple times before on the topic of games and play. Needless to say, this topic is hardly a staple of the standard philosophy curriculum. But, besides being interesting in its own right, I think the topic of play and games offers an intriguing lens through which to look at human life more broadly.

One of the pioneering works in the modern study of play is Homo Ludens, a 1938 study by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Huizinga shows how a range of cultural activities, from law to intellectual study to war, are inflected with a spirit of play—and, writing on the eve of the Second World War, warns darkly that “that blend of adolescence and barbarity which has been rampant all over the world for the last two or three decades” is antithetical to play in its productive guises.

The most influential idea in Homo Ludens is that play unfolds in what Huizinga calls a “magic circle” that is bracketed off from ordinary life on three dimensions: spatial, temporal, and social. Take, as a simple example, the sport that Europeans call football and North Americans call soccer. The game unfolds inside a chalk rectangle with play coming to a stop when the ball goes outside this spatial boundary. The game has a fixed temporal duration, with two forty-five minute halves whose beginning and end are signalled by the referee’s whistle.

And within that chalk rectangle and those ninety minutes of play, players take on distinctive social roles. In ordinary life, no particular value attaches to kicking a ball into some netting suspended from wooden posts. But for the duration of a football match, nothing is more important. The twenty-two people absorbed in this pursuit wear distinctive uniforms. They also observe rules that only matter within the magic circle of the game, most notably not touching the ball with their hands (with the exception of the goalkeeper inside the penalty area).

There’s a special kind of make-believe that takes place in a football match. The players don’t pretend to be anyone other than who they are—Lionel Messi is Lionel Messi both on the pitch and off it—but the various elements of the game take on a special significance that they have only within that magic circle. The otherwise meaningless action of kicking a ball into a net counts as a goal only in the magic circle of a football match.

Now consider a very different activity: the celebration of Mass in a Roman Catholic church. Here, too, we find a version of Huizinga’s magic circle with its spatial, temporal, and social boundaries. The space of a church is specially consecrated in a way that marks it off from the world outside, with a special role reserved for the chancel. A service normally begins and ends with the procession of the priest and other ministers up and then back down the nave, delimiting the celebration of Mass in time.

And the special role of the priest and choristers are denoted not just by their distinctive garments but also by what they do. Most notably, the blessing of the Eucharistic bread and wine takes on a distinctive meaning only within the context of a celebration of Mass. Just as touching a soccer ball only counts as a hand ball within the context of a soccer game—outside the game, you’re just touching a ball, not incurring a foul—so does eating bread and drinking wine take on a special significance in the context of the Eucharist that these activities lack in ordinary life.

The parallel I’ve just drawn—where a religious ritual shares many of the formal characteristics of play—isn’t meant to be disparaging to religion. I’m not saying, “this religion nonsense, it’s no more serious than a child’s game.” I’m inclined to say the reverse: that play can hold the sort of depth and significance that we associate with our most sublime cultural activities.

One thing football and the Roman Catholic church have in common is that they’re institutions. Human social existence is profoundly institutional. Our very identities are shaped by the institutions we participate in: think of your job, your nationality, your marital status, your lease or title deed to your home.

A defining feature of institutions is that they have what the philosopher John Searle calls “deontic powers.” That is, they have the power to create rights, duties, obligations, requirements, and authorizations—the sorts of things that come with an “ought” or “must” or “may.” The institution of football instructs us that we must not touch the ball with our hands. The institution of the church states that only a priest is authorized to consecrate the Eucharistic bread and wine.

The deontic powers of institutions confer what Searle calls a “status function” on particular objects. The ball counts as something special in the context of a soccer game. Bread and wine count as something special in the context of a Mass. And when you start to look for it, you notice that almost everything around you counts as something within the context of a particular institution. I’m in a room surrounding by my belongings. Why do these things count as my belongings? Well, according to the institution of property law… One of the more striking instances of status function is the significance we attribute to money. A bunch of paper and metal discs count as objects of considerable worth within the institution of our monetary system. When a currency collapses, those tokens suddenly lose their value.

Human life is much more densely institutionalized than the lives of other animals. Other animals mate for life, for instance, but only humans get married. But humans aren’t the only animals that play and in play you see the rudiments on this counting-as relation. A cat stalking a toy mouse counts the toy as prey. The toy, in effect, has a special status function in the context of the cat’s play, which it loses the moment the cat stops playing.

The situation of the cat at play is different from a stick insect disguising itself as a stick. If the camouflage works, the stick insect doesn’t “count as” a stick to its would-be predators—the predators actually mistake the insect for a stick. The playing cat, by contrast, knows perfectly well that the toy isn’t a mouse. It’s that ability on one hand to know that the toy is a toy but on the other hand to count the toy as something else for the purposes of the game that makes the activity playful. And in that playful counting-as, we find a foundation piece for all our other institutional practices.

So here’s a bold, undercooked proposal. Almost all of what makes human social existence distinctive and complex—from religious practice to government to art to marriage to commerce—has an institutional structure. Institutions essentially involve assigning a special status or function to objects or activities within the context of those institutions. And that basic capacity to count something as something builds on our deep propensity for play. If human social life is more densely structured and institutionalized than the social lives of other animals, that’s due at least in part to the fact that we’re very playful animals.

That’s the idea in about 1250 words. I’ve got fourteen weeks to go deeper into these ideas (and much else besides) with my students. Judging from past experience, that won’t be anything close to enough. 

1. Three fascinating facts from an excellent New York Times Magazine piece about the penny. First, the US penny is the most minted coin in the history of civilization. There are about 724 pennies for every person in the United States. Each one costs about three cents to produce but the US Treasury keeps minting more because businesses have to give them out as change but people rarely use them, so minted pennies quickly fall out of circulation and so need to be replaced. (source)
2. Second, the reason so many goods are priced at 99 cents—$2.99 instead of $3, etc.—isn’t primarily to hoodwink mathematically clueless customers but to prevent theft by employees. The idea was that requiring a cashier to give change would force the cashier to open the cash register, which they could only do by keying in a sale, which would then create a record of the transaction.
3. Third, when the US Mint was founded in 1792, an act of Congress declared that no person, presidential or otherwise, should be depicted on American coins. Instead of heads, the obverse of the coin should have some emblem of liberty. That tradition held until the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt in the early twentieth century, who decided to put Lincoln’s head on the penny. He got around the law by including the word “liberty” on the penny, making Lincoln’s likeness an emblem of liberty.
4. And three facts from a London Review of Books article on Indigenous history in North America. First, the authors of the US constitution considered including an Indigenous government as a fourteenth state with its own representatives in Congress. (source)
5. Second, the last Confederate general to surrender in the United States Civil War was a Cherokee chief named Stand Watie.
6. Third, Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was a member of the Kaw Nation, making him the first person of colour to serve as vice-president, pre-dating Kamala Harris by nearly a century.
7. Tim Walz is the first person without a law degree to appear on the Democratic presidential ticket since 1980. (source)
8. Over the 200,000 years of human history, mosquitoes are responsible for the deaths of about 52 billion people. (source)
9. The electroencephalogram was first used by Hans Berger in 1924. Berger, a pioneer in the study of brain waves, was motivated by a deeply held belief in human telepathy. (source)
10. Take any four-digit number, say 4931, and arrange its digits from highest to lowest and subtract the digits arranged from lowest to highest. So, if we take the example of 4931, you go 9431 – 1349 = 8082. Then repeat the procedure (in this case, 8820 – 0288 = 8532). Repeat the procedure enough times—seven at most—and you will always end up with 6174, which then repeats itself (7641 – 1467 = 6174). (source)
11. Intensively farmed animals produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than free-range animals due to a combination of farmers being able to grow animals quicker with less feed and the animals taking up less land. It’s also, obviously, much, much worse for the individual animals involved. (source)
12. People have taste receptors not only on the tongue but also in the gastrointestinal tract, liver, brain, lungs, and a number of other places. (source)
13. More than half the sensory receptors in the human body are located in the eyes. (source)
14. The United States earns more money exporting blood plasma and other blood products than it does exporting coal or gold. (source)