What’s the point if we can’t have fun?

Updated Jan 15 2024

• pleasure-and-play
• working-theories

In the essay What’s the point if we can’t have fun?, David Graeber argues that we’re fools for focusing on rational explanations and economic terms in animal behavior, and for undervaluing play.

Why do animals play? Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting strike us as mysterious? What does it say about us that we assume that it is?

We can’t reduce all living beings to rational, market actors. This tendency has been present since the 19th century beginnings of Darwinian science. Darwin, after all, borrowed the term “survival of the fittest” from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, that darling of robber barons–who was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories.

Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe. But why?

An alternative school of Darwinism emerged in Russia emphasizing cooperation, not competition, as the driver of evolutionary change. cf. Mutual Aid by Pyotr Kropotkin. It’s not just about cooperation as a means to an end though—Kropotkin posits that pleasure and play is an end in itself.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality.

This argument gets ignored, since cooperation for pleasure, as an end in itself, is difficult to recuperate for ideological purposes.

Emergence is well and good, but is it enough to explain what’s going on? For example, if an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly, but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as “self-organizing systems”?

This gives us ground to unthink the world around us.

Graeber says when he taught at Yale, he would assign a reading of the following Taoist story, offering an automatic “A” to any student who could tell him why the last line made sense. (None ever succeeded.)

Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling on a bridge over the River Hao, when the former observed, “See how the minnows dart between the rocks! Such is the happiness of fishes.”
“You not being a fish,” said Huizi, “how can you possibly know what makes fish happy?”
“And you not being I,” said Zhuangzi, “how can you know that I don’t know what makes fish happy?”
“If I, not being you, cannot know what you know,” replied Huizi, “does it not follow from that very fact that you, not being a fish, cannot know what makes fish happy?”
“Let us go back,” said Zhuangzi, “to your original question. You asked me how I knew what makes fish happy. The very fact you asked shows that you knew I knew—as I did know, from my own feelings on this bridge.”

The anecdote is usually taken as a confrontation between two irreconcilable approaches to the world: the logician versus the mystic. But if that’s true, then why did Zhuangzi, who wrote it down, show himself to be defeated by his logician friend?

After thinking about the story for years, it struck me that this was the entire point. By all accounts, Zhuangzi and Huizi were the best of friends. They liked to spend hours arguing like this. Surely, that was what Zhuangzi was really getting at. We can each understand what the other is feeling because, arguing about the fish, we are doing exactly what the fish are doing: having fun, doing something we do well for the sheer pleasure of doing it. Engaging in a form of play. The very fact that you felt compelled to try to beat me in an argument, and were so happy to be able to do so, shows that the premise you were arguing must be false. Since if even philosophers are motivated primarily by such pleasures, by the exercise of their highest powers simply for the sake of doing so, then surely this is a principle that exists on every level of nature—which is why I could spontaneously identify it, too, in fish.

• Debunks Richard Dawkins and The Selfish Gene, likewise Dennett
• Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline 🤣
• Physicists are the poets of the scientific world (more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists— partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics)