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Free to Play: An Analysis in Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious Movements Heather C. Ohaneson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Heather C. Ohaneson All rights reserved ABSTRACT Free to Play: An Analysis in Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious Movements Heather C. Ohaneson In this dissertation, I investigate five forms of play with reference to freedom and constraint in order first to ascertain what relationship holds between play and liberty and then to see how the activity of play—and the attitude of playfulness—might contribute to a full and flourishing human life. To do so, I turn to an interdisciplinary set of figures, including Erik Erikson, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Blaise Pascal, Plato, and the contemporary scholars of improvisation Gary Peters and Danielle Goldman. It is my contention that the dialectical interrelation of liberty and limitation constitutes the essence of play and that the free engagement of constraints is a proper feature of eudaimonistic ethics. Instead of being regarded as a dispensable disposition, then, playfulness should be upheld alongside traditional virtues as a trait worthy of deliberate cultivation in adulthood. Seeking to enact the claim that boundaries give rise to expansive possibility, I provide a firm structure for this study and organize my analysis according to Søren Kierkegaard’s conceptions of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of existence. Liberty and limitation appear differently under each of these categories. Further, their forms change depending on whether they are viewed in light of children’s play, videogames, gambling, puppetry, or improvisation, the iterations of play and playful identity under consideration in this study. Learning about the apprehension, negotiation, and appreciation of boundaries that occurs in play grants us a more nuanced understanding of play as a fundamental component of a good life. At the same time, this project affords the chance to reconsider the nature of freedom and constraint, and to reimagine what it means to be at liberty. “I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.” —Psalm 119:32 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii INTRODUCTION 1 PART I. AESTHETIC PLAY Chapter 1. The Value of Children’s Play: More than a Developmental Good 45 2. Avatars, Agency, and the Limited Possibility of Fantasy 73 PART II. ETHICAL PLAY 3. Rational Decisions for Christian Theism, or How Pascal Redeemed Play 118 PART III. RELIGIOUS PLAY 4. Strange Puppets: The Lowliness of Divine Playthings in Plato’s Laws 168 5. Strenuous but Unstriving: Christianity, Improvisation, and the Liberated Effort of Graceful Play 205 CONCLUSION 244 BIBLIOGRAPHY 258 APPENDIX 281 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the generous and continual aid of my advisors, Wayne Proudfoot and Mark C. Taylor, and the different ways you model scholarship. Wayne, thank you for your steadfast support and patience. I am proud to be your student. Mark, I owe you special thanks because your seminar on Hegel and Derrida gave rise to this project in the spring of 2008. Your enthusiastic endorsement of the topic of play has been a source of encouragement for me along the way. I would like to thank the other members of the dissertation committee, Eric Gregory, Rachel Fell McDermott, and Katja Vogt. Your kindness and the carefulness of your thought are guiding examples for me. Thank you, Elizabeth Castelli and Celia Deutsch, for all of the ways you invested in me at Barnard College. Together, you helped set me on this path. I am honored to have learned from all of you and to continue benefiting from your wisdom. Susie Andrews was a daily writing partner for a substantial part of this project. Thank you, Susie, for your faithfulness and understanding. I owe thanks to my students who make me sharper, and my friends who make me gentler. Knarig Arabshian, and Lance and Michelle Rousseau Laytner, thank you for your deep friendship and abiding love. You are a blessing to me beyond measure. Armand Tcheklian, the player par excellence, I am grateful to you for showing me what joyful Christianity looks like. Alice Boone, knowing you is one of the great fortunes of my life. Shterna Wircberg Friedman, more than for reading and editing chapters of this work, I want to thank you for the years we have had of playing with ideas together. You bring such joy and freedom to me intellectually! Johanna Magin, your friendship has been a saving grace for me these last few years. There is no one with whom I would rather share a meal. Kate Kosloske Stricklan and Janessa Stream Graves, thank you for friendship that spans distance. ii My boss at Project Pericles, Karen E. Holt, passed away before I could share this with her. Sharon, your sister’s memory is a lasting presence in my life. Her generosity stays with me still. I would like to acknowledge the religious communities that have sustained me with their love: the 108th street home fellowship group, the Armenian Fellowship Group, and all iterations of my All Angels’ house churches. Thank you for genuinely accepting me and for making these New York years formative. To my family, thank you for your care. Mom, I am so appreciative of your ready encouragement, which has sustained me through this program. I do not know what I would do without you. Kristie, from childhood I have been learning from you how to play and study. Thank you for always being there for me. T’s Mom, thank you for the selflessness of your support. Grandpa Wampler, thank you for your generosity and for your confidence in me. And dad, thank you for never letting me win. iii To my mother, Mary Kay Ohaneson, without whom this would not have been possible, and my great-grandmothers, Mary Dunigan and Ovsanna Peters, for whom it would have been unthinkable iv 1 Introduction One definition of play posits that it, like religion, is simultaneously separate from the everyday—we play but then we return to work—yet pervasive in our lives, histories, and cultures—the more we look, the more we see play: in ancient Greece and modern China, in children’s education, in artistic creativity, in movies, in the sports psychology of “flow,” in electronic games that we play in stolen moments on a host of technological devices, in animals, in the interpersonal dynamics of love and politics (“power plays”), and in our conflicting desires to maintain and lose control. Somehow play has seeped out, blurring its neat borders. In this, it resonates with common understandings of religion. Insofar as it is characterized as holy, religion delineates separate times and spaces for its exercise. Yet religion in its intensity can claim to be much more than an activity and can make demands on our attention and very selves. Religion and play may also on occasion be dismissed for similar reasons—they are criticized or rejected as too concerned with fantasy, merely escapist, not productive enough, corrupted in violent forms, or simply things we grow out of with age. I am not concerned here to delineate the shortcomings of the phenomena of play and religion or even to offer a sustained discussion of the ways in which they overlap. Rather, in this dissertation I wish to engage the question of how the activity of play and the attitude of playfulness contribute to the well-lived human life. It is my contention that the concept of play has value for ethics, broadly construed as the discipline concerned with how we ought to live. Play is ethically instructive because experiences of play offer opportunities not only to find freedom from constraint but also, more strongly, to find freedom in constraint. Undergoing a theoretical investigation into the nature of play contributes to this effort of clarifying how play and playfulness may qualify as a eudaimonistic good and a virtue. Thus, I set out in what follows to provide a 2 dialectical treatment of play, showing how the dynamic interrelation of liberty and limitation constitutes a variety of games and amusements. Play, in this reading, is interplay, the back and forth of expansiveness and constriction. Taking the existential categories of the nineteenth-century Christian Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, I examine the concept of play as it might appear in aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions. The movement between these three areas— according to their Kierkegaardian conception1—corresponds roughly to a progression from (1) an immature freedom that eschews regulation to (2) a commitment to abiding by rules at the expense of that first sense of freedom to (3) the growing coincidence of the two, seemingly opposed elements of openness and confinement. At its height, the third stage of play is the moment of balance, harmonious resolution, or synthesis insofar as it allows for liberty within limitation. According to this view, the most robust form of freedom does not need to do away with regulation in order to show itself as such. Instead, the height of freedom is the power to transcend boundaries from within them. At the end of the play dialectic, one realizes that one is at liberty not in spite of the confines of rules but through them. One has power not only when one plays around with limits, gerrymandering them, but when one can play within them, demonstrating admirable skill in managing impediments. A player may say that she is free when she plays because she can subvert the rules by cheating or because she can leave the game whenever she wants. She may also locate freedom in the pleasure of relative consequences.
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