The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once described play as ‘[b]ecoming and dissolution, building and destruction without moral implication, in eternal innocence’ – as an act to be found ‘in the world only in the play of the artist and child’. When I ask my six-year-old Jeanne what happens when we play, she says: ‘If all the children in the world play at the same time, it grows. It grows and grows.’ Playing is like a dream, for, as the poet Paul Valéry wrote in 1914, in dreams ‘we have a combination of EVERY POSSIBLE MEANS of diverse impressions’. Play is an opening of multitudes.
Yet, paradoxically, for all its emphasis on multitudes and freedom, play involves strict rules, making it a skill that can be honed. Various play specialists, such as Fink and the social scientist Roger Caillois, have attempted to define the necessary criteria to reach the state of play, one that Fink describes as bringing light, or ‘day-ing’ the world. According to another play expert, the psychiatrist Stuart Brown, our need to play stems from our biological neoteny: we are the only mammals with an 18-year-old childhood. For Brown, play possesses certain key attributes: it is purposeless, voluntary and inherently attractive, while offering freedom from time, diminished consciousness of self, improvisational potential and continuous desire. When we play, we exist outside of time, and don’t want to stop.
Source: Play is cathartic, allowing people to sit with their shadows | Aeon Essays
