My Grand Apologetics Project Part 3b

See these previous posts:


http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-1.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-2-cont.html?m=1

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-grand-apologetics-project-part-3-a.html

b. Play & Eternity

Note that this partially a repost of this:

http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-theology-of-play.html

Just as our experience of the humorous involves the momentary creation of a new reality, so our experience of play also involves the construction of a world different from the one we normally experience. All play is in part play-acting. The activity of imagining as a child opens us up to the possibility of world-building. When we formalize this process of world-building and institute a kind of language through rules and order that can then be transmitted to just about anyone who is properly instructed, we get true games and sports. 

Just as there is 'something it is like' to laugh and engage in humor, there is 'something it is like' to play. The mechanics of play can differ widely, as can the setting, but the experience of play is remarkably consistent. Given our earlier discussion of humor, the first thing that should be obvious to anyone is that play, like humor, creates a world where joy is of supreme import. We experience the world as a joyful place, in play. But play  is more easily corrupted into something where joy ceases to be the end of  the experience. It is quite easy to make a game or a sport all about winning and losing, about competition. But in point of fact we acknowledge this to be a corruption of the true center of the experience, even if we don't always live it out. Joy of the game itself is supposed to be the center even of professional sports, and once that is taken out of the equation, we take it to be a failure to live into the experience that sports is a part of, the experience of play.

But the ease with which play becomes about competition, makes me hesitant to say that joy is inherent in the experience of play in the way I think it is inherent in the experience of humor. Here I want to stay close to the broadest possible description of the phenomenologies I am engaging. So while I would say it is true that joy is almost always a part of the experience of play, it is not the center of the counter-world created. 

I think one of the broad truths about play is that it brackets off time. When we play, we step out of our normal experience of time. Think about football for example. It isn't 3:00 PM on Sunday. Not for those playing, and not for those watching. Instead it is 4th down, 1 yard to go, 2:39 on the clock in the fourth quarter. It isn't true that time simply flies when you are having fun. On the contrary, a single moment, a single throw of the ball, can be an eternity. No, in play we step outside of time. Eternity is willed and known intimately. Play brackets off time.

And just as it brackets time so it brackets the seriousness of the world. Whatever pain or tragedy a person is going through, it melts away the moment that joystick, ball, or crossword puzzle is picked up. This is why plays and musical groups' activities can go on even as the city around them crumbles due to an invasion. It is how Christmas could be celebrated by warring parties in WWII. Of course when we watch a football game, on one level we know that who wins this game is of miniscule import compared to, say, what is going on in congress at the moment. But within the experience of play that level of 'knowing' is subverted under another level where we experience the outcome of the game as the most important thing in the world. The experience of play is 'subversive' in the strictest sense of that term. It subverts our normal way of knowing, believing and valuing and helps us experience life in a topsy-turvy way.

Play and humor thus have this in common: they turn the world upside down. In humor, the homeless man can become king of the world, and the king of the world can become the butt of his joke. In play, the insignificant game becomes of supreme import, and what is truly 'important' is bracketed off as insignificant. In humor, the seriousness of the world is overtaken by joy. In play, the reality of time and the reality of our normal way of valuing things is overtaken by the immediate action of playing itself. Again, one may at this point believe that all of these amount to illusions. I only suggest that this is what it is LIKE to engage in these activities. They will become important when they are ultimately combined with the experiences spoken of earlier: the experience of living truly and the experience of being a fully developed self, and the insight that proceeded from them (see Part 2). Until I make that combining move, all I am doing is talking about premises. If you can't accept those premises, we part ways. But our disagreement at this point would be phenomenological and epistemological, not metaphysical.