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The Importance of Play for Embodied Consciousness in Post-Kantian Philosophical Anthropology and Psychology

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The Importance of Play for Embodied Consciousness in Post-Kantian Philosophical Anthropology and Psychology University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Philosophy ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-25-2016 Finding the Self in Tension: The mpI ortance of Play for Embodied Consciousness in Post-Kantian Philosophical Anthropology and Psychology Jaime Thomas Denison Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/phil_etds Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Denison, Jaime Thomas. "Finding the Self in Tension: The mporI tance of Play for Embodied Consciousness in Post-Kantian Philosophical Anthropology and Psychology." (2016). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/phil_etds/1 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jaime Thomas Denison Candidate Department of Philosophy Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Adrian Johnston , Chairperson Dr. Iain Thomson Dr. Brent Kalar Dr. William Bristow i FINDING THE SELF IN TENSION: THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY FOR EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS IN POST-KANTIAN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY by JAIME THOMAS DENISON B.A., Philosophy, University of the Pacific, 2005 M.A., Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, 2008 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July 2016 ii DEDICATION To my parents Erika and Tommy Denison for their unconditional love and life-long support of my education. To my partner Jason Wilby for his love, patience, and guidance during my entire graduate studies and our shared adventures. AND To my partner Brian Rasmussen for his love, enthusiasm, and encouragement when writing the dissertation was challenging. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express the deepest appreciation and thanks to my committee chair, Professor Adrian Johnston, who has been incredibly supportive throughout this project and always offered valuable feedback on my work. Without his guidance and persistent help this dissertation would not have been possible, and his numerous seminars that I have taken over the years have greatly shaped my philosophical outlook. I would like to thank my committee members, Professor Iain Thomson, Professor Brent Kalar and Professor William Bristow, whose seminars and individual perspectives have greatly contributed to the conception and methodology of this project. Without them, I would not have the depth in German philosophy that I have today. In addition, I would like to thank Professor Étienne Balibar, who was my mentor at the Critical Theory Institute at University of California, Irvine, and an avid supporter of my work on Schiller, Hegel and Spinoza. Also, I would like to thank Professor Martin Schwab, who first introduced me to the area of Play Studies through Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as I was gaining interest in Schiller at UCI. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Eleanor Wittrup, who introduced me to Kant and served as my advisor for my honours thesis project on Nietzsche, and Professor Lou Matz, whose first-year seminar motivated me to transfer from mechanical engineering to philosophy while I was studying at University of the Pacific. Without their guidance and friendship, I would not be where I am today. iv FINDING THE SELF IN TENSION: THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY FOR EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS IN POST-KANTIAN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY by Jaime Thomas Denison B.A., Philosophy, University of the Pacific, 2005 M.A., Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, 2008 Doctor of Philosophy, Philosophy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2016 ABSTRACT My dissertation looks at how four figures in the German philosophical tradition employ a similar concept of play in their models of the “Ich”, often translated as “Self”, as they explore the complexities of establishing a unity within embodied consciousness. These four figures are: Friedrich Schiller, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. I situate this concept of play within the contemporary debate of the interdisciplinary field of play studies, showing that what emerges is a theory of play that avoids marginalizing it to children and leisure, but rather recognizes it as a state of consciousness that provides a semblance of self and a meaningful engagement with the world. However, these models of self that emerge provide an alternate conception compared to the mainstream versions that put emphasis on autonomy and self- transparency. Instead, these four figures acknowledge that consciousness is embedded in the world, thus it must consider its local relationships to its physical and social environment, as well as the embodied unconscious that it emerges from. As I progress through the four chapters, it will become apparent how these revised understandings of the self have a significant impact in how we approach areas like moral philosophy, v political philosophy, critical theory, philosophy of biology, cognitive science, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of art. Specifically we will see in what important ways consciousness is decentred in these accounts, thus in turn denying any particular consciousness a transcendental view that can finally settle fundamental philosophical, political and cultural issues. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: PLAY THEORY AND THE SEMBLANCE OF SELF ............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: FRIEDRICH SCHILLER’S DEVELOPMENT OF THE PLAY CONCEPT IN THE AESTHETIC STATE.........................................21 CHAPTER 2: F.W.J. SCHELLING’S USE OF PLAY IN SYSTEM DES TRANZENDENTALEN IDEALISMUS...........................................................77 CHAPTER 3: PLAY AS AFFIRMATION IN FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S CHILD............................................................................................................ 128 CHAPTER 4: PLAY AS THE AMBIGUITY OF THE EGO IN SIGMUND FREUD’S METAPSYCHOLOGY................................................................ 183 CONCLUSION: THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY FOR EMBODIED CONCIOUSNESS.......................................................................................... 231 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... 240 vii INTRODUCTION Play Theory and the Semblance of Self “This masculine kind of dogmatic abstract reasoning usually overreaches itself, thinks itself mature, and falls into the trap. Self-conscious man cannot use conscious reason to overcome his own impatience; for that he must surrender his conviction of the supreme importance of his own awareness and of the maturity of his reasoning; only if he can do that is he saved from humiliation. He must take his self-awareness with a little irony.” – Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud In the passage above, Whyte discusses his central concern that the twentieth-century does not fully understand the significance of Freud’s conception of the unconscious, a development that is in fact indebted to an intellectual history going back to the eighteenth century. Given the rapid progress of technology and science in the late modern period, it is easy to use the narrative of progress to occlude the aspects of our society that are repressed, held under an order structured by an impatient rationality that thinks itself as already mature and enlightened. As Paul Bishop notes in “The unconscious from the Storm and Stress to Weimar Classicism: the dialectic of time and pleasure”, the ego that emerges as a thinking thing in Descartes’ cogito has traditionally been thought of as self- transparent, since all one’s being is what one thinks consciously, and therefore is only consciousness (Bishop 31). In conceptualizing the identity of the mind as consciousness, which Freud objects to explicitly in his work, we philosophically relegate out the possibility of parts of the self that are not visible to the stated “I” or the ego. Yet Whyte argues that developing within the Enlightenment, a period in which it was hoped that self-transparency would be possible through rationality, another understanding of the self emerged that made room for the unconscious and the continual changing limits of the 1 self. It is this thread that Whyte feels we need to research more if we are to get passed some of the major issues we face in modernity. One prominent issue in late modernity is finding a way to consistently think about the self that includes autonomy and freedom. Although many of these projects tend to be embedded in conceptions of the ego and its autonomy, thus relying heavily on self- transparency, issues of alienation and narcissism point to deep problems in how Western thought has attempted to frame the individual within the larger society and environment. The fact that the individual finds herself in material conditions that were not of her choosing that in turn shape her choices and values (often revealed through models of subject formation) undermines the autonomy that one should experience in these philosophical models. On the other hand, with the individual being overly concerned with her own freedom, the concerns about one’s duties to society often fall on the side of burdens
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