Sometimes I feel like people have lost their sense of freedom, their sense of playfulness. People seem to be very focused on themselves and seem to follow very strong societal norms and rules. Whenever I wander around with my headphones on, when I close my eyes and dance, whether I am casually walking through the city or waiting for my train at the station, something weird happens. People look at me as if I am acting strange, as if they can’t comprehend the fact that what I am doing is not necessarily weird. I am dancing, I am carefree and I am enjoying the experience of play. They will start filming me, as if it is something unusual to have fun. And I am very sorry to say this, but nowadays it does seem unusual to have fun, without having a care in the world.
In this essay I will discuss whether the philosophical notion of play can be the central concept of a critique on western modernity. I will use some examples from my own experience of living in a modern western society, because I believe we can find the most contemporary truth in the experience of life and nature.
The concept of play is viewed very differently by many philosophers, so I decided that, in this essay, I will not stick to one conception. I will explain and employ three different, although somewhat similar conceptions of play. By using multiple conceptions, I will be able to look at the role that play plays in modern western culture from several points of view. In this way I will be able to take a greater number of important matters into consideration, since using either conception of play would limit the number of mentionable critiques.
I will discuss possible critiques on daily life subjects such as work, free time, entertainment and art and I will relate these to the conceptions of play proposed by philosophers such as Moritz Schlick, Eugen Fink and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Work- and Leisure Time
First of all, let me explain what exactly is understood by western modernity and what aspects of it have effect on or are affected by play. In the common conception of western modernity, it characterizes a society that is associated with an individual subjectivity that comes with freedom. Western modernity ensures the rational organization of production and administration through a scientific culture, in which scientific explanation and rationalization are central. It also stands for a rational legal order. With these three main goals it aims to establish a fully rational society. There are however downsides to it, such as, but not limited to, a decline in emphasis on religious worldviews, the emergence of bureaucracy and rapid urbanization.
My first point of critique is on the influence that jobs and labor have on play in modern western society. Nowadays our jobs take away most of our time, we have twenty-four hours a day, of which we work at least eight and sleep the same amount, which leaves us with eight hours of time to spend on playful activities a day. Moritz Schlick had a similar remark almost a hundred years ago. He stated that we fill up our days almost entirely with activities that serve to maintain our life. Which means that the content of our existence consists in the work that is needed in order to exist. To say that this is something new to modern western society would be ignorant, since man had to put in work in order to exist since the beginning of their existence. Schlick however says that installing work as the center of our existence, to settle with work as life’s highest meaning, is bound to be an error. If that would be the case, then every work-activity as such is always a mere means that would only have value in terms of its goal. In case one was not able to turn their passion into profit, their play into pay, that is. Because then one would find meaning in the work-activity itself, but this is very uncommon. Anyways, we can already tell that what Schlick mentions, is happening in modern western capitalism. From a young age we are encouraged to settle for a future that involves our job. When asked about our dreams, we are asked about our dream job, which to me seems like we are already moving towards a world in which work is portrayed as life’s highest meaning.
The modern western system requires most people to work a fulltime job, which means working five days for eight hours a day, if not more. Even new parents are not able to take time off of work after their maternity leave and have to send their young babies to daycare centers. Even worse, I have come across plenty of people that work two jobs, if not three to be able to provide for their family. One can also see this in the way that many family households have no unemployed adults, and a lot of teenagers have to work in order to help their families sustain. Obviously this is not the case for each family, I am aware that there are multiple sides to everything, but that does not take away the problem I would like to state.
As a person that grew up in a place where it was common for teenagers to work before the legal age of employment, it opens your eyes to see that a lot of other children did not have to. It makes you even more aware of the problem that lies here, when you realize that the people from lower classes in this country are privileged compared to the median of wealth in many other countries. Taking this into consideration you can imagine that once I surrounded myself with people of higher classes, it troubled me that I considered myself lucky for making it out of such an environment, while the people that surrounded me once I did, did not even consider themselves lucky for having such privilege. It was precisely these people that would complain the most about things in life, including work. Where the ‘rich’ would have the room, time and therefore the ability to play instead of focusing their time on providing for their family, it seems that their lack of gratitude takes away their ability to enjoy this.
On the contrary, the people that had to work from a young age on seemed to find gratitude and happiness in the fact that they could provide for their family. We see that these people find a meaning in life, through the goal that their work-activity achieves. According to Schlick this is not the meaning in life we should seek. We should seek for activities that carry their own purpose and value in them, independently from their goals. He aims at activities that are not work, activities that we call play. He says that play is the name for free, purposeless action. Actions which in fact carry its purpose within itself.
Besides the point Schlick makes, this dichotomy between classes shows an interesting case regarding play in modern western society. Whereas I would say that jobs take away the possibility of play, especially at a younger age, when play is supposed to have a bigger role than for adults, I noticed through my experiences that those who work in order to provide and survive often find more fun, gratitude, meaning and purpose in their jobs than people who come from environments where having a job is not as indispensable. This alone could serve as a critique of western modernity regarding play, because it presents an obvious problem in the situation that children, or young teenagers, enjoy purpose in labor because they lack the freedom, or rather free time, to experience play in their passion.
It is by itself a problem that most people lose one third of their day on something that they do not want to do, for it is time spent on things without purpose. But it is also a foundation for other problems that arise when considering the role of play in the western modern society.
Modern Western Entertainment
I would like to continue by delving deeper into the way that most people tend to spend the little amount of free time that they have nowadays. I will not speak of chores or cleaning one’s house, because that is not new to western modernity. I would like to talk about the kind of entertainment we engage in. Before western modernity, people would spend their leisure time engaging in arts, in social interaction or by playing with objects that would require our imagination for a meaningful interaction. Whereas nowadays, the technological advancements of western modernity provide us with so much entertainment that we usually do mindless things in our spare time. Most of us sit on the couch and watch a movie or series on Netflix, we grab our phone and spend hours scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or we start up our game console and play video games for hours on end. I call these mindless activities because they ask nothing of our mind in return in order to be entertaining.
In my opinion, these too are activities that find their purpose in their goal, namely in being entertained. They seem to lack play, and even if they can be considered as play, they are an entirely different form of engaging in play than what Schlick calls creative play. This kind of play can be seen in the creation of an artist, in which the activity is a work shaped by inspiration. In which the activity itself is the pleasure, from which by accident values derive. The same thing happens to the scientist, for whom puzzling their way towards truth is an end in itself. They find their rejoice in setting their own mental capabilities against the riddles that reality sets against them. Both the artist and the scientist play, regardless of the benefits that may bestow them on accident. So then, if this and modern entertainment both cause a mindless form of pleasure, with no reward into consideration, then why would I consider modern entertainment as a lesser form of play?
That has to do with the meaning that is acquired from it. According to Schlick, we only acquire meaning in our individual existence insofar as it contributes to the improvement or development of our species. We are not being pulled into the world of play the way ‘older’ forms of entertainment would do. When one watches a movie, all the colors and sounds are already established, characters have their faces, environments have their details, and we cannot go around these. When one would read a book, one would be pulled into a world of play, a world of our own imagination, where the letters of a book are merely the red thread of the story we are experiencing. When we create, write or even when we imagine, we add something to existence, for which we are able to create a chance to develop our species. In modern forms of entertainment this is just not the case. We are obviously not forced to entertain ourselves in this way, but it is the most promoted and the most easily accessible one. Most people, because they only have little time and little energy left in their leisure time, tend to prefer something that does not require a lot of energy and that is easily accessible over activities that require a little more effort.
This is not only a problem for entertaining oneself after work, I believe this causes a huge problem in the way that children grow up nowadays. I believe a huge decline in the ability of imagination and creativity is on its way. Children and teenagers grow up with their eyes glued to any kind of screen instead of engaging in a state of play with toys or nature, where they are able to create their own imaginary world and their own rules. They do not learn to give meaning to things through play, because they often partake in already established fictional worlds, through for example video games, where the rules and meaning are already made up for them. In this case too, the visuals and audio are already established and filled in. These rules lay down limitations on the meaning making of the individual. Rather than being a player they are directed by the rules, they seem to become a chess piece with limited movements rather than the player that conducts the game.
Obviously rules are the exact things that make games fair when played with other individuals, for example in sports. But even sports are played more digitally nowadays than in real life. One might argue that this is an improvement to games of play, because the modernization of these games makes it harder to break the rules and breaking rules could end the game of play. However, this could be easily countered by the fact that there are still cheaters and hackers in every digital game.
Not only do I believe that the digitalization and rapidly growing technological advancements take away our imaginative abilities, I also think that they leave little room for new experiences. We get to see the entire world and almost every thinkable action or scenario by looking it up on a small device that we are able to take anywhere we go. We can see a polar bear with their cub at what is left of the north pole at one moment and look at the Giza Pyramids lining up with the Orion constellation a couple of seconds later. We can see people do the most amazing or the most stupid things, just by typing in the words that describe the action. However, we are watching this through the same screen each time. The screen shows something different, but this does not really seem like a different experience. We continuously have the same experience of seeing X through a screen.
This experience, according to Eugen Fink, only exists through the medium and not in reality. I will take as an example a video, this could be any video, for example of a cat doing something silly. As a video it is real, because it is a reflection of the original event, but it is merely the event represented on a screen. The appearance of the video does not hide the surface of the screen. The cat in the video is real qua being a reflection of the cat in the real world, it is still a light-phenomenon, a real thing, but it is an ‘unreal’ version of the cat appearing on a screen. An illusion of this kind is an autonomous form of Being and has an unreal element in its fundamental reality. However, Fink says that this ontic illusion can occur as a structural element of the play world, which means that it is an image that is derived from behavior in the real world.
We can, however, use this to our advantage too. In an advantage of moving towards Schlick’s notion of play I mean. Not everything we can see through the screen is merely entertainment, we can also use this for educational and thus developmental purposes. We can look at things that could educate us in our passion for example, in order to improve our engagement in our art performance. It could also, by showing you art, awaken an interest in engaging in art or it could, by showing you nature, move you in a way that you want to go see nature for yourself.
Art in Modern Western Society
I keep talking about art, but I have not really delved deeper into it yet. Earlier I said that one could engage in play or imagination while performing art. Why this is related to imagination is obvious, for most art is the embodiment of putting your imaginative thought into the physical world by using your creative abilities. There are no rules to art, it does not require meaning in order to be something, so how is this related to play? According to Hans-Georg Gadamer there is meaning making in art. According to Gadamer, the Being of play can be found in an artwork itself, because play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play. Play also exists without any subjective experience. By experiencing art, the person experiencing it is changed. A part of play is that it comes without goal, purpose or effort. This does not mean there is an absence of effort, but it refers to a phenomenological absence of strain. It can be experienced subjectively as a moment of relaxation.
Play absorbs the player into itself and frees them from the actual strains of their existence. Something you will see that Fink and I agree on and is just as true for the performance of art. Gadamer explains play as a reality that surpasses the player, it draws the player into its dominion and fills them with its spirit. When reality is understood as such, the reality of play emerges, which Gadamer calls the play of art. The being of all play in this reality is always self-realization and pure satisfaction, which have ends in themselves. Gadamer speaks of a recognition of things the way they truly are, when experiencing the world of a work of art, in which play can express itself in the unity of its course. So experiencing pieces of art can put oneself in an almost transcendental state of being.
What art in modern western society often does, is taking the experiencer into the world of play of the artwork. We can tell by the way many people ‘binge-watch’ Netflix tv-shows. People cannot stop watching because they are caught up in the world of play. Music can do the same thing, especially now that technology is capable of giving more dimensions to music and since it allows us to take music anywhere and play it right into our ears without external sound interruptions. So, in that sense, western modernity has improved the experience of play worlds according to Gadamer. I think the biggest problem here is how art is presented nowadays. We are not observers or experiencers, we have become consumers of art.
As where Gadamer proposes the world of play in engaging with already constructed works of art, Fink speaks of a world of play in creating art. According to Fink, play is supposed to function as the occasional pause of human life and actually seems to have a limited, recurring place over the course of our lives. It is thought of as a temporal stay in a carefree realm of phantasy and limitless potentialities, as an escape from the dystopian reality to a dream-like utopia. Play is existence centered in itself and it has a motivation that cannot be compared to other human activities. Even when these activities have purpose in themselves or when their goals are creation or even ultimate happiness.
In my experience, when performing or creating art, the creative or artist completely loses themselves in the world of imagination, in the world of play. It’s like when you are drawing something, and the colors and shapes form themselves on the paper before you put your pencil on it. You get completely lost in the work of art and it is as if it starts to create itself as you are just tracing the lines that your imagination is showing you. You get in a certain state of trance where you seem to be both aware and unaware of what you are doing, whilst at the same time being completely unaware of the world around you. You lose all track of time in a way that reminds me of how children lose track of time while playing. Some people might put it as: “Time moves quicker when you’re having fun.” It is almost as if the real world and the world of play coincide into one reality.
The same goes for performing arts such as dancing or singing, one could close their eyes and lose oneself completely in the moment as the music starts to guide their every movement. I myself experience this even more so in singing or rapping, I close my eyes and start improvising words to the melody and beat until I come to a point where it just happens. As if my mind is turned off or taken over and my body becomes the mere conduit of creation, sometimes uttering sentences I only recognize as pure poetry after listening back to the recording. I guess one could call it an act of your subconscious mind being able to do way more than one would think it’s capable of. Some people also call this state of automatically doing something without thinking about it, being in the ‘flow.’ It’s this almost blissful experience where you forget about the reality that awaits you once you exit this state of play.
Fink speaks of a world of play that has several touching points with the experience I just described. He says that play is like an enchanted resting spot during our never-ending journey of life. One that interrupts the continuity and purposive structures of our daily lives. It brings some kind of temporal present. In this play there appears to be a possibility of the experience of timelessness in time. It is not experienced as a series of moments, but rather as one full moment, a glimpse of eternity. He says it is not like a mystical experience however, it is an activity and creativity, yet close to eternal things. In his mode of play, play is the act, a production and its product is the play world, which he calls a realm whose reality is open to question. He says that we speculate on the characterization of the essence of Being by using one example of Being, namely our reality. But our play-world reality is as much of a conceptual formula for the world as the quote-on-quote real-world reality. Once we start seeing the essence of the world as play, the logical result for a single subject will be to think that they are the only creature in the whole universe who can relate to and reproduce the activities and products of the whole of Being. If this would be the case, then the subject can find its true essence, but only in relating to that which transcends him. Here we find a means of meaning making in experiencing play again.
My point of critique, regarding this kind of experience of play in performing creative acts, is that I think that we are rarely able to experience this form of play nowadays. Simply because we have too many worries and too many responsibilities in our real-world. We are continuously experiencing stress about things which, before western modernity, would not reach our thoughts. We are continuously confronted with all the bad things that are happening throughout the entire world. There have been two changes that have led up to this. Firstly, the amount of news that reaches us has increased from local or nationwide news to news from all over the world.
Secondly, there has been a change in the accessibility of the news. We would either hear it or read it in the newspaper once a day. Nowadays we are confronted with – usually bad – news whether we look on our phones, watch tv or listen to the radio. We are not able to access any state of play because we have to worry about war, disease, economics and politics all the time, while at the same time continuously worrying about ourselves, because we have to provide for a living and make a career. It seems to become harder and harder for people to allow themselves to spend time on playfulness, because in modern western society it is often considered as wasting time. Time is money, and having fun often does not bring food to the table.
This brings me to my next point of criticism— The western modernization brings a great shift in making profit from your passion. Or in other words, digitalization brings both positive and negative effects to earning money through art or playful acts. This is important, because nowadays having money gives one freedom, time and the supplies to perform art and thus to engage in creative play.
The positive side is that art is easily distributed and shared through the internet, especially through social media. The artist can put their work of art on the internet, and it would be accessible to everyone that has access to the internet. One could easily get an audience of millions of people, if not billions. Not only is the distribution easier for the artist, but the internet makes art a lot more accessible for the audience. We do not have to go to the Louvre to know what the Mona Lisa looks like, better yet, I think it would be safe to say that almost everyone knows what it looks like. The downside to this however, is that art is not exclusive anymore. This will lower the value, not just in money, but also in the appreciation that people have for it. The ease of distribution also has its downside, namely that there are millions of artists that try to make their name known, so for one artist it can be very hard to stand out and if you ever manage to stand out, you are just as easily replaced and forgotten. The process of becoming a famous artist has become more about marketing than about the actual creative talent. Which brings another danger, one that could lead to even art losing its playfulness, because artists start engaging in art with a goal in mind.
Since the last two decades, almost every form of art can be performed digitally, whether it is filmmaking through animation, making music without instruments through a digital workstation or sculpting with 3D printers. It became easier, but in this case there is still play involved. What frightens me is the point where digitalization is coming to, now that the masses have easy access to AI. At the moment, it requires human input, but not to the point where a person can experience play. So AI can create ‘art’ and not only can it create for you, it has even won art contests. Which means that these AI generated creative works can be favored over actual art. Not only can they be favored over, a lot of AI generated songs cannot even be distinguished from human made songs. If this is, in its most early stages, already the case, then the future of art does not seem very bright. If it would go on like this it could even replace the human art industry with AI generated art, which would leave less reason for people to engage in art. If we can’t experience play in art, then what will remain?
Conclusion
I think play can be the central concept of a critique on western modernity. In this essay I have shown several points of critique involving the declination of play due to western modernity. I have argued for several critiques for the lack of actual purpose we give to our lives due to our modern work ethics, which is considered a lack of play according to Schlick. I have discussed that the entertainment we fill our leisure time with barely brings play as it was experienced in the past and I have shown ways that experiencing play through observing art and creating art have suffered from modern westernization as well. All of these subjects have shown positive effects too, but they do not seem to be positive towards the concept of play. I have named a few subjects of critique, but there are others that could be discussed as well. Take for example play in religion or the way that most forms of experiencing play, such as sports and arts, are being industrialized causing them to become entertainment to a point where they start losing their cultural significance. In the end I think play will always stay relevant and I wonder if play in its essence could even be affected by culture, since it transcends culture and even going along with the ways and rules of modern western society is a ‘game’ in itself. However, I think the critique will be mostly aimed at the way we are able to experience play due to cultural influences.