Johan Huizinga

I would say that care is what dominates what we do.

So there was a philosopher, and by the way, a series of articles that Keith Whitaker and I wrote on the culture of care, which can be found on the foundation website, if anybody's interested, by James E. Hughes Jr.

Foundation website.

The great philosophers said, well, care is a virtue, not a value, a virtue.

And then the great question is, what do you care about? And what we're saying in this book, and people have been saying for decades, thousands of years, if we care about the other's well-being, we have some possibility of having well-being ourselves.

So this well-being idea and caring about well-being, we feel, my co-authors and I and many of us, is the core question, what do we care about? We care about each other's well-beings.

I've been researching this for months now, and this is a pretty heady philosophical territory that people have a lot of different theories ranging from sociology and psychology and beyond.

But I'm just going to talk about one definition of play, and that is one that comes to us from Johan Huizinga, the Dutch author who wrote the book Homo Ludens, that really advanced this field of study.

And so I'm going to read the definition and then I'm going to break it down piece by piece.

So Huizinga says, "...play is a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being not serious, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly." It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.

It proceeds within its own boundaries of time and space, according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.

It promotes the formation of social groupings, which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and distress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means." So before I break it down piece by piece, I want to be clear.

So go have a spontaneous dance party in the park at midnight.

When you're at your house, see if you can come up with a fun game to play with your roommates where it's not about competing with each other or punishing each other, but it's something more radical and different and open and free.

In an age when we're all supposed to be scared shitless at the thought of losing our jobs, and therefore we should devote our every waking moment to the good of the company or self-improvement or keeping up in this economy, play looks at all of that and flips the table before setting it on fire.

The extravagantly named Dutch academic Johan Huizinga put it this way.

Play is, quote, superfluous, end quote, and serves no material interests or biological needs.

But.

The metric ate the meaning.

The Dutch historian and cultural critic Johan Huizinga saw this coming almost a century ago.

In Homo Ludens, 1938, he argued that play is not marginal to civilization, but rather generative of it.

For Huizinga, law, philosophy, poetry, and war all emerge from play's magic circle, the bounded space where ordinary rules are suspended and something else becomes possible.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mario Pineda.

Erasmus and the Age of Reformation by Johan Huizinga.

Translated by Frederick John Hoffman.

Chapter 12.

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Erasmus and the Age of Reformation by Johan Huizinga.

Translated by Frederick Jan Hopman.

What buyers of the period did want was pictures of the figures in domestic interiors, recognizable people doing recognizable things at leisure or at work, surrounded by traces of their lives: babies, animals, furniture, pots and pans, musical instruments, pieces of fabric, jewelry.

"Seventeenth-century artists must indeed have had an irrepressible need to grasp things," the cultural historian Johan Huizinga has observed.

Nothing in their environment was too slate to be noticed.

Like his, [clears throat] excuse me.

But then for a lot of adults that play time is.

that play you know those moments of rest and respite that we give ourselves are spent in front of screens so often and um you know in a sense spent sort of socially isolated i love that i don't love it but i think that's a very powerful word the sort of sedentarified what is that how you pronounced it anyway we're having it we're owning it it's the thought boxes in the dictionary um is so true that that kind of not being in our own bodies anymore not being just letting ourselves be playful and joyful and and and the impact that has and you know I think um I think it's really interesting you know you can tell I've been nerding out about this because I've got all these quotes from all these different researchers but but you know there's a guy called Huizinga who um was writing I think almost 100 years ago or so and he says you know nature you could just as easily have given her children all these useful functions of discharging superabundant energy or of relaxing or training for the demands of life or compensating for unfulfilled longings in the form of purely mechanical exercises.

But no.

She gave us play with its tension, its mirth and its fun.

And that's to the absolute deficit of our survival.

And as we're seeing, you know, on a larger cultural scale, it's had a huge ripple impact.

And that's another one of kind of Huizinga's kind of famous things is he actually talks about play being intrinsic to human civilizations and that without play, human civilizations become brittle and they crumble.

Yeah.