In Praise of Play

The ability and desire to play seems to be an inbuilt part of human (as well as animal) nature. Children like just messing around; years ago this meant climbing trees now fenced off by the health and safety executive; toys like lego are great because you can build anything with it – no preconceptions, just bricks. Play involves imagination and risk: imagination because play explores the boundaries of what is possible and risk because you might always stray from possibility into real danger.

Philosophy is a discipline of play. This is because philosophers play with ideas, they try them out, see where they will lead. Think of Kant for example, pushing autonomy to the limits of its philosophical reach, or the utilitarians pushing radical equality to the limits of empirical (measurable) boundaries. Recall how revolutions in human thought have generated revolutions in human behaviour, in respect for women, rights of minorities and new theories of environmental ethics for example.

At the same time, it is worrying how education has moved against play. At this time of year, ten year olds all over the country are getting anxious about SAT tests. Night after night they plough through books of Maths examples in some strange throw back to Dickensian gradgrindery. Families are at war over homework that in my judgement should never have been set – simply reinforcing the idea that Maths has no play in it, and is the dullest subject on earth. And even Philosophy exams get reduced to mark schemes with limited scope for individual flair and play – so that experienced examiners may sometimes despair. Little wonder that the first complaint of University lecturers is that students can’t think for themselves.

Strange too that in a fast-changing world where we need philosopher-scientists our education system seems less equipped to nurture them. I was fascinated this week to learn how one of the great breakthroughs of the modern scientific age, the discovery of a wonder substance called graphene, came about because two Russian expatriate scientists at Manchester University were just fooling around. (Click below for more)

How funny, they thought, to try to peel layers of carbon off a carbon block by sticking Scotch tape to it. They stuck one strip, then another, then another. After messing about like this for a while they got down to carbon just one atom thick, the beginnings of graphene. Scotch tape may in this weird way make a huge development to world welfare. In awarding the Nobel prize in 2010 for discovering graphene, the committee especially praised the “playfulness” of Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov.

The great Bertrand Russell complained that Aquinas wasn’t really a philosopher because he made his argument fit his conclusion rather than his conclusion fit the preceding argument. It’s a fascinating criticism. In a world of political correctness, how many times do you find people in the media spotlight doing just that? No facts to back up war in Iraq in 2003 for example, well let’s find something that can masquerade as fact even if it is later exposed as a massive fiction (see Panorama last Monday night).

This website is named after what is, I think, the greatest philosophy book ever written, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. When the same Bertrand Russell reviewed the book, he failed to see that Wittgenstein was dismantling the empiricism of the logical positivists and presenting a new approach to considering ancient questions. This is because Philosophical Investigations is a book of riddles and sayings with no logical structure – playing with our thought processes. Although I wouldn’t recommend you write your exam essays like this (I prefer the approach laid out in How to Write Ethics and Philosophy and Philosophy Essays) I hope you have the courage to take a risk and play around with ideas when you sit your exam.

Even if the examiner doesn’t get it, it will at least ensure you have the the sort of playful mind to try some new ways of seeing and thinking – much needed in a fast-moving world.

Image c Rebecca Dyer