Eric Buys writes at Mimetic Margins

A FAMILIAR SCENE BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

“Why don’t you girls get along with June anymore?” Regina’s mother asked. Regina and her two friends, Gretchen and Eve, stared at her in bewilderment. They were about to go on a shopping spree. For weeks they had gone out without June. “She has changed so much,” Regina answered. “Yes, she spoils the whole atmosphere of the group,” Eve added. “Quite frankly, mother, June has become this ordinary slut,” Regina concluded. Now it was her mother’s turn to stare at the three girls in bewilderment. And off they went.

About a month later, Gretchen accidently ended up next to June in the bus to school. The silence between them was awkward enough to make them talk to each other. Gretchen learned that her pretty companion had been going steady with Lysander for several months. And then it dawned on her: Regina had been gossiping about June being a slut because June had run away with Regina’s big crush, Lysander!

As soon as she had the chance Gretchen confronted Regina. “I talked to June and she is still the same old friend I knew!” she exclaimed. “You’re just jealous of her, that is the truth! You two are the same, you want that Lysander guy as much as she does! June in no way is a slut!” At that moment Eve stepped in to defend Regina and claimed both of them would turn their back on Gretchen if the latter didn’t change her opinion on June.

All of a sudden the clique of three were arguing about who betrayed who and they accused each other of being delusional. Their internal peace at the expense of an outcast had been broken. One of them had shown love for their external enemy, and had thus created internal enmity, within their own household. A new expulsion seemed imminent. Or would they all eventually be able to reconcile themselves with their former enemy?

RTWT : https://mimeticmargins.com/2019/11/05/the-point-yuval-harari-misses-of-myth-bringing-rene-girard-to-the-table/

Belmont Club's Richard Fernandez on Wokism's Cult Following

https://pjmedia.com/columns/richard-fernandez/2020/06/12/cult-following-n514914

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

About Nietzsche

https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/nietzsche-the-diabolical-saint-of-acceptance/

Friedrich Nietzsche is a strange mixture of conflicting impulses; so chronically sick that writing was a physical agony for his eyes and his stomach permanently bothered him, yet he wrote paeans to the strong and mighty. A brilliant analyst of resentment, he had every reason to feel ignored being unread during his lifetime and self-publishing books that he mostly could not sell. He admired Dostoevsky, which itself is admirable, writing in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Nietzsche first stumbled upon Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in a bookstore in Nice in the winter of 1886-87 and immediately loved it, though Dostoevsky never knew of Nietzsche. Notes from Underground is psychologically and anthropologically penetrating, exploring themes of mimesis and resentment that were of immense interest to Nietzsche.
Unlike Dostoevsky, there is something perennially adolescent about Nietzsche, perhaps because young adults are often trying to decide what values they should hold, often temporarily in contradiction to their parents, as they prepare to make their way in the world on their own. Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values” fits this model nicely. There used to be a certain kind of young man magnetically drawn to Nietzsche’s mixture of cleverness, perversity, sense that he had a secret understanding of things, and man alone and against the world demeanor, and perhaps there still is.
God is ultimately the source of all value. It is because we are made in the image of God and are thus connected with eternity, God, and Freedom that the Person has supreme intrinsic value.  There simply is no way around this fact. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is famous for the notion that God is dead. This is usually understood to mean that God is dead as a cultural phenomenon; that all the smart people have become atheists. René Girard argues in Dionysus Versus the Crucified, however, that this is a misunderstanding and that the truth is far more complicated. Nietzsche rejected Christianity in favor of a return to pagan religion and Dionysus. Dionysus is a trickster god who stirs up trouble, encourages his own murder by challenging the social hierarchy, only to magically reappear unharmed afterwards. This is because Dionysus represents the scapegoat who is falsely blamed for generating a complete social breakdown in a way that only a god could achieve, who is then murdered, bringing the community together in shared hatred, unanimity  minus one, and is then credited with creating widespread peace, again in a god-like manner. The Bacchae by Euripides, “Bacchus” being another name for Dionysus, depicts the threatening, implacable, and undefeatable nature of the scapegoating dynamic. Dionysus, a long-haired beautiful and effeminate youth, has a reputation for stirring up the Bacchae, the female followers of Bacchus, into a mad murderous frenzy that would likely include wild drinking. Pentheus, the king of Thebes, wants nothing to do with Dionysus and tries to eject him from the city but, failing that, ends up imprisoning him. Dionysus warns Pentheus that he will be sorry for interfering with a god, an earthquake sets Dionysus free from his prison, and everything goes to hell for Pentheus who loses his head, literally, at the hands of his own mother who has become one of the bacchants.
Nietzsche rejects the Christian God of compassion, and opts for the pre-Christian Dionysus who is killed and then revives. God is dead, long live God. Dionysus dies that we may be saved over and over again. The strong murder the weak; and the mob are always stronger than the individual, as Socrates points out in The Gorgias, much to the disgust of Callicles. Nietzsche sides with Callicles in praising the strong, but his position suffers from the same defect. The many, the rabble, can beat the few. Nietzsche then finds himself in the ludicrous situation of defending the strong against the weak, a logically and rhetorically contradictory position. In Christianity, as Nietzsche sees it, the slaves have risen up against their masters and denounced brutality, praising forgiveness and compassion, tricking the strong, the masters, into feeling guilty for callously mistreating their social inferiors. Nietzsche is correct that the weak are prone to resentment, that unlovely emotion and attitude, but it is better than the strong’s treatment of the weak. Repressed violence is better than violence expressed.
Unlike many nineteenth century anthropologists and critics who equated the savior aspect of Dionysus and other sacrificial religions with Jesus’ death, Nietzsche recognized that Dionysus is the antithesis of the Crucified. The immolation of Jesus reveals the scapegoat mechanism because he is recognized as an innocent victim murdered at the hands of the mob. Up until then, this habit of murdering the scapegoat went unnoticed partly because the victim was not alive to complain about his unjust treatment. With Jesus, the disciples were steadfast in maintaining Christ’s innocence with supernatural courage, since defending the scapegoat puts someone at odds with the mob who are likely to treat him with the same rough justice they meted out to the victim. So, Nietzsche had enough insight to recognize what made Jesus different.
Thus Spake Zarathustra is where Nietzsche announces the death of God and has the prophet claim that we have murdered him with our bloody knives. Girard points out that this is simply not taken seriously by many critics who imagine that he is referring to the Christian God and that the reference to knives is strictly metaphorical. But it is Dionysus the god, the scapegoat victim, that we kill with our knives whereupon he is resurrected as immortal savior, to begin the process all over again.
Nietzsche wants a transvaluation of all values, but since the Christian God is the source of all values and Nietzsche is an atheist, he is unable to generate value at all. What he calls “master” morality in The Genealogy of Morals is the absence of morality. It is in line with Callicles’ description of the strong who simply take what they want. Here Callicles uses the demi-god Heracles (Hercules in Latin) as his example, swooping in to take another man’s cattle. The fact that Heracles is half-god is relevant. Heracles, the man who murdered his whole family and thus is the arch-villain scapegoat victim, also plays savior as the most heroic of all Greek heroes. One thing Nietzsche claims to like about the “masters” is that they do not hate or resent anyone. They have no envy and anyone below them socially is unworthy of their attention. They have eyes only for their social equals with whom they might compete, but who they also respect. The weak are simply beneath contempt.
Nietzsche is concerned that Christianity and the morality of his time were a kind of cult of equality and thus mediocrity. Rather than admiring the cultural high achievers, like himself perhaps, Nietzsche worried that it was the meek, the humble, and most of all, the innocuous, who were esteemed. Many of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity are really attacks on the Christianity of his time which had many unappealing features. He certainly was not a fan of boring bourgeois sentimentality or the idea of eternal damnation. The difficulty is that there is no way to get value from a Godless, naturalistic, view of reality. So Nietzsche is reduced to impotency. He wants an alternative to values derived from theism, but is noticeably and initially perplexingly unenthusiastic about “master” morality. His heart was not in it. Mastery morality seems to play the role of a place-filler until he can come up with something better, but of course, he never does and he just flails around.
Nietzsche rejects the boring, mediocre, and banal aspects of the morality and religion of his time, but then he accepts the equally boring and banal aspects of scientifically inspired metaphysics, naturalism, also popular in his era. This is a total failure of imagination. But it also represents a genuine dichotomy. Once a belief in the Kingdom of God, of heaven, the transcendent, and the divine is abandoned, what is left is mere physical reality, and physical reality as a sequence of events is deterministic and thus meaningless and unlovable. It is only when some of those events point back to their origins in the spiritual realm of subjectivity, and thus agents, that determinism can be escaped.
What Nietzsche needed to do was to criticize socially-derived malformations of Christianity and replace them with a more genuine Christian vision. This can be difficult because science and religion as social phenomena have the great mass, Das Man, backing them up. This creates orthodoxy and makes of the free thinker a heretic. Nietzsche’s acquiescence to many scientific tropes is surprising given his iconoclastic attitude to religion. Clearly religion and myth inspired his imagination more than science did. Dostoevsky’s character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov at least criticizes a very sophisticated version of Christianity and attacks it well, despite Dostoevsky’s pro-Christian sentiments.

To understand what is going wrong with Nietzsche’s thought it is necessary to understand Ken Wilber’s argument that the proper existential stance requires both wisdom and compassion, Eros and Agape, symbolized by the allegory of Plato’s Cave. In leaving the cave, the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, is searching for wisdom, salvation, God, the Good, and happiness. For Plato, happiness requires wisdom because it is necessary to learn the difference between what is truly desirable and what is not. Part of man’s destiny is to develop. Misery and suffering will lead to wanting to overcome the problems and limitations that cause these things. The quest to understand the Good better is everyone’s life long goal, whether they know it or not.

So, to care about yourself and for other people, it is necessary to strive to develop and to wish them to do so as well. To wish anyone to stop developing at any age is to wish him ill. The interests and limitations of a ten year old are fine when he is ten, but ridiculous when he is fifteen. But a proper existential stance also requires compassion. Compassion is acceptance; unconditional love symbolized by returning to the cave out of concern for the philosopher’s fellow prisoners.
Wilber calls the quest for development and improvement “Eros,” related to the love man has for God, and equates it with a more masculine-style conditional love, and unconditional compassionate love he calls “Agape,” the love God has for man, which he regards as being more nurturing and feminine in nature. He argues that both Eros and Agape are necessary for either one to exist properly and thus that each individual should embody both of these tendencies. Traditionally, the proper raising of a child entails a father demonstrating an Eros form of love, pushing the child to develop and setting standards, and a mother who loved her child unconditionally no matter what wrongs he might commit, loving all her children equally. Men and women can play both roles as needed, though boys without actual fathers are statistically more likely to end up being violent, drug or alcohol addicted, and to have worse vocational and educational achievements.
The quest for development can be taken too far. Puritanism and Gnosticism strive for salvation only and regard the body and physical reality as evil; as a nasty hindrance barring our way to happiness. Sparta represents an example of a culture that over-emphasized Eros. The Spartans, driven by fear of an uprising by the Helots, the usually Greek slaves they kept that far out-numbered them, embraced a very brutal, friendless, social existence designed to generate the ultimate warriors. They represent a very Eros-only form of life. A Spartan mother is supposed to tell her son to come back either with his shield or on it.
The urge for compassion and acceptance can be overdone as well. Fertility Cults unconditionally accept nature just as it is. Culture can come to be seen as life-denying. To strive to develop is regarded as rejecting reality as you find it. However, since failing to develop is failing to live well, this excessive compassion in isolation is bad.  Idiot compassion, as Wilber calls it, involves accepting everything with no urge to develop. A parent gives his kids candy and TV because “it’s what makes them happy.” One spouse allows the other to beat him up because he loves her. Medals are given for just showing up, Valentine’s Day cards are given by school children to every single classmate, rendering the cards meaningless, and children are told “good job” when the activity was not done well at all. Compassion without wisdom is not compassionate and caring at all. Instead it hurts people.
The traditional two parent family had the tough love Dad making the child do his homework and piano practice, sending him to bed with no supper, and the unconditionally loving mother sneaking him something to eat late at night. Genuine love involves complete acceptance of your children no matter what. Even if they become ax murderers, the parent will visit them in prison. It also involves pushing them to develop themselves and to develop their talents rather than becoming useless to themselves and to other people.
Nietzsche goes wrong in his philosophy by being half right. A major problem and source of error involves mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth.[1] It is often difficult to extricate ourselves from this error because the thing that is being emphasized is true. The person knows he has hold of a truth and will not relinquish it. This is part of Nietzsche’s problem. He knows that compassion and acceptance are good and he is willing to promote them to the utter demise of compassion and acceptance! But he is also driven to this partiality through his metaphysical commitments. Nietzsche says there is no heaven, no transcendence. There is nothing higher to aim for. What is real is here on Earth and what we see is nature. Thus, there is no way to exit Plato’s Cave and nowhere to shoot for. This forestalls the possibility of Eros.
At times, Nietzsche longs to escape the human condition, existing in the metaxy; between God and animals. He fantasizes about the Übermensch, the beyond-man, the over man, the superman, breaking free from the herd, the mediocre, who would create his own values. However, if God is the source of value, then the Übermensch is impossible. Man creates value only through the conditions God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Ungrund) provide. For one thing, without the transcendent, determinism reigns, and thus there is no creativity of any kind, no agents as centers of feeling, thinking, willing decision-making, because Freedom would not exist. Man as the image of God is partly free and creative and embodies supreme value in himself. That value is not created by him, but once so endowed, he can provide his own meaning to his endeavors.

Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche, unlike the weak and slave-like people he despises, wants to say yes to life. His test for whether someone is saying yes to life is whether he would assent to an imaginary scenario. Do you assent, in principle, to living the same life you have just lived over and over again for all eternity without changing anything at all. If the answer is “yes,” then you are a saint of acceptance. Total acceptance means saying yes to life in all its aspects and mistakes.
It should be pointed out that Nietzsche definitely did not believe in actual reincarnation. This idea of eternal recurrence is just a thought experiment to determine a person’s fundamental attitude to life. The question is how someone reacts to the mere thought of this situation. This is where the partial truth enters. It can sometimes seem nice to fantasize about editing our lives; taking out all the boring bits, and the suffering and the times we acted badly.  But saying yes to life is accepting it just as it is. However, what the test of eternal recurrence misses is embracing development; the striving part. Living the same life over and over would be a kind of hell because a person would never get to develop. A good life combines development and acceptance. In abandoning development, it is Nietzsche who is rejecting an important aspect of life.
Suffering is fine, as far as it goes. Suffering is a motive to change, to grow and develop. New parents must develop new capacities for patience or end up abandoning or murdering their new baby. However, the kind of suffering Nietzsche is recommending – never learning from your mistakes and thus never developing, is hell. Developing does not mean the end of suffering. Old problems are solved and new developmentally appropriate ones replace them. There are the problems of youth, of mid-life, and of old age; getting an education and useful skills at one point, managing a household at another, and finding a way of having a fulfilling retirement at yet another.
Acceptance is a virtue. We should accept two year olds, for all their limitations. They cannot  read, or write; they may not even be toilet trained, but they may still be a perfect little two year old. We are all at some level of development and are perfect in this way too. But loving that two year old also means not condemning them to the same mistakes, the same interests, the same level of cognitive development for all eternity. In some sense, we are all that two year old. By trying to say yes to life, Nietzsche says no to life.
What does Nietzsche see in nature? No morality. The strong eat the weak. It is brutal, but it is the way it is. For Nietzsche, morality says no to life. Morality tries to uplift the weak, it says that lending a helping hand is the moral thing to do.. Nietzsche argues that morality says no to life, to nature. Any attempt to change these basic facts of life is to say no. We must say yes, and saying yes means accepting everything. Nature is on the side of the strong, so we should be too.
Those driven by excessive compassion, Agape, are sometimes attracted to Nietzsche’s nonjudgmental acceptance. Fans of Eros can admire Nietzsche’s emphasis on strength, independence, and the self-reliance in this image of things, where a person is not looking for handouts or support from others.
In reality, Nietzsche’s view even of nature is inaccurate. “Nature” features animals working together for mutual survival, both prey and predator. Mother lions, birds, pandas, wildebeest, etc. care for and nurture their young. It is not all unrelieved brutality.
There is a certain type of smart, young person who thinks that accepting total nihilism is manly and admirable. Any deviation from unrelieved awfulness is mere escapism and fantasy. Ivan Pavlov wrote: “There are weak people over whom religion has power. The strong ones – yes, the strong ones – can become thorough rationalists, relying only upon knowledge, but the weak ones are unable to do this.”[2] Since rationalism can only analyze, but not create value, beauty, and love, only the weak, in this view, will avoid nihilism. In addition, Pavlov falsely assumes that empiricism produces knowledge but that philosophical and religious speculation do not. Near unanimous agreement about the trivial is often possible, while important truths remain debatable, and this provides the opportunity for human creativity, imagination, intuition, and freedom.

Evidence of Nietzsche’s acknowledgement of the horror of what he is arguing and his willingness to accept this horror can be seen in his comments about Indian “untouchables;” the lowest members of the Indian caste system. They can wear only used clothing. They may not wash in fresh water because they would pollute it. They may drink only from the water that fills where the muddy hoof print of an animal like an ox has fallen. Nietzsche pretends to delight in this, after going into graphic disgusting detail. Cultural relativism, that instance of idiot compassion, would acquiesce to this. “This is the Indian way, we must not judge.” Unconditional acceptance.  And paradoxically, this attitude might be attractive to lovers of excessive Eros, seeing the untouchables as the weak who get what they deserve.
Nature, Nietzsche thinks, says yes to “master” morality while Christian charity is keeping mankind down. Nietzsche claims that Kant celebrates mediocrity and bourgeois virtues like punctuality as though that they are the peak of human achievement. If mankind is to achieve anything, Nietzsche thinks, it must leave the heaving masses behind and the true genius must rise above the petty self-protective whining of hoi polloi. The Übermensch will prevail.
Callicles, that Platonic character who inspired Nietzsche, might be right that generally the many, the weak, are fans of “justice” as law-abidingness because laws against stealing, violence, and murder protect the vulnerable more than those able to defend themselves. Their motives are often selfish, not moral. The weak hope for protection under the law, and value charity because they hope to be its recipients.  Much of the time their apparent love of morality is just self-interest. This may well be true. But their selfish motives do not mean that kindness, charity, and laws, are wrong. It is possible to love genuinely good things for the wrong reasons.
Nietzsche, the diabolical saint of acceptance tries to accept everything as a consequence of unconditional love. But when he tries to accept Nature, he finds a charnel house of death and destruction, the strong consuming the weak. Out of love and compassion he will send the weak to the gas chambers and deny their pleas for help because in not accepting their fate, the weak are rejecting life. They must be shown the light. Those who seek to protect the weak he regards as the naysayers.
One senses, at times, Nietzsche’s reluctance to keep following this line of thought. He is going to overcome his disgust at brutality in a heroic act of acceptance. It is his idiot compassion that leads him to embrace ruthless domination and name Napoleon as a hero. Like some kind of wannabe savior, Nietzsche takes on the weight of the world. In his desire to supplant God and Jesus and to get people to embrace godlessness, Nietzsche strongly resembles Dostoevsky’s character Kirillov in The Devils, also known as The Possessed. Both become the rivals of God and Christ. They will save us from salvation, unredeem redemption and promise us eternal death. To do this, we must embrace our own nothingness and give up dreams of the divine; except the transcendental vision remains intact because to do this would be an immense overcoming. Nietzsche and Kirillov are grandiose in their aspirations and retain strong intimations of religiosity. Zarathustra is a prophet after all. They are as god-fixated as any theist.  Apparently, Kirillov confused critics because he has many of the same virtues as Dostoevsky’s Christ-like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. But Dostoevsky did this to show that truly demonic behavior can arise from the best of intentions.
Kirillov points out that the major draw card of religions is the promise of eternal life. No billionaire can offer such a thing. Kirillov hopes to overcome the fear of death through his suicide. If death is not to be feared, then religion becomes that much less attractive. Kirillov is in competition with Christ. Nietzsche is too and in fact is quite indignant about his inferior status. It seems likely that now, at least for some people, Nietzsche is indeed to be preferred to Christ.
Nietzsche can be compared to a naïve well-meaning undergraduate moral relativist. Relativism is taught to school children to teach them to be tolerant. Students will at times attempt to tolerate some of the greatest horrors ever perpetrated by mankind in order to be good people. They too, like Nietzsche, strive to be saints of acceptance and they do so by holding their noses and attempting to embrace slavery and the Holocaust. It is, however, evil to tolerate evil. Apparently, some of the children’s teachers who promulgated this rot actually promote this kind of thinking.
Nietzsche can at times be an excellent psychologist and aphorist. His claim that each person’s philosophy is a kind of self-confession is trenchant. He was right to be horrified by John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism, and by Kant, to a much lesser degree. However, he shared their rejection of Christian morality and imagined, like them, that he could improve upon it – but his beyond-man, his Übermensch, never did arise and produce new solely self-created values. Nietzsche’s naturalistic metaphysics precludes the attribution of value or the discovery of it. God is the source of all values. Without him, there is nihilism; nothing. The materialist and atheist Karl Marx also tried to supplant Christianity, but just borrows Christian compassion and charity, but distorts it by making it compulsory. Goodness only exists, is only good, if it is free.
Nietzsche finds some appropriate targets of nineteenth century bourgeoise morality and Christianity to criticize but does not come close to finding any alternative. At the most, Nietzsche can be seen as a truth-seeker and someone willing to accept unpleasant realities, but in the end his philosophy fails amid a mass of contradictions.
[1] Many truths are partial, but some more damagingly so than others.

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYQhmm_2hU4

twisting the tail of the cosmos: What If We Didn't Invent God—And Where SBNR's Go W...

twisting the tail of the cosmos: What If We Didn't Invent God—And Where SBNR's Go W...: There was a time when I would have identified myself as SBNR—spiritual, but not religious. Now I'm more SAR—spiritual and religious; sor...

Serious play: More serious and more playful than one would think or imagine.

http://www.spaziofilosofico.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Roochnik.pdf
(for footnotes see original at link)

David Roochnik 

PLAY AND SERIOUSNESS: PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 

Abstract:
 The paper begins with a contrast between two competing paradigms of play: the child and the adult athlete. It then argues that Plato rejects the former but strongly affirms the latter as a model of philosophy–indeed, of the best human life–itself. By contrast, Aristotle rejects both conceptions of play. He is an entirely serious man. 

1.Competing Paradigms of Play 

We begin with play. Two quite different models can be summoned to represent it. The first is offered by Heraclitus, and then embraced by Nietzsche centuries later.
  
“Lifetime (aiôn) is a child playing (pais paizôn) [...] the kingdom is in the hands of a child.”

Oblivious to serious concerns, (young) children spontaneously move forward with no goal in mind. Unburdened by rules or structure, interested in whatever comes their way, laughing and fueled by imagination, immersed in the present and free from regret or anxiety, children just play. As such, the pais paizôn [child playing] exemplifies the Heraclitean worldview, one which is bereft of stable purpose or configuration, and which is best imaged by the flow of a river into which no one can step twice. Nietzsche explains: 

“In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence.”

At play, aiming to achieve nothing (“innocent”), the child symbolizes a world in which there is no stable reality, no being, no telos... only becoming. Nietzsche elaborates on Heraclitus’ behalf: 

 “I see nothing other than Becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you believe you see land somewhere in the oceanof coming-to-be and passing You use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured; yet even the stream into you step a second time is not the one you stepped into before.”

Nietzsche acknowledges that this essential Heraclitean thought –everything flows, nothing, not even the dear self, abides –can lead to despair. 

 “The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be [...] which constantly acts and comes-to-be but is [...] is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one’s loses one’s familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth.”
  
Nonetheless, it is possible, he thinks, to transform the potentially paralyzing thought of radical becoming “into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment.”5 And this is precisely what the pais paizôn does. Amazed by the world, active and alive, released from the burden of a formulated life plan, the child just plays. No surprise, then, that the first of Zarathustra’s speeches begins thus:

 “Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.”

 After bearing the burdens of its own culture (camel), and then destroying the values that structure it (lion), the spirit reaches its greatest height. 

“But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a play (ein Spiel), a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’”
  
For Nietzsche, then, the pais paizôn represents both Heraclitean Becoming as well as the most affirmative human response to Becoming. Insofar as the child is counted as paradigmatically playful, this is the world view lurking behind it. The second paradigm is the adult at play. Typically this means playing games tightly structured by rules, which in turn establish precisely what is missing in the play of a child: an end, goal or telos. Athletes, for example, compete for a prize and so strive to win. To do so they must play by the rules. In basketball two points are awarded when the ball goes through the hoop, and players are not allowed to use their feet to kick the ball. In football one point is given when the ball goes into the goal, and players are not allowed to handle the ball. (By contrast, a child with a ball feels free to use hands or feet or nose to move it.) Such games have strict spatial and temporal boundaries. A basketball game lasts for 48 minutes and its court is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide. Such constraints are required in order for the game to take place. For they establish what counts as victory, and thereby make it possible for the athletes to compete against each other7.The temporal and spatial limitations of an athletic competition are artificial, and they create a play-world whose meaning is entirely insular. A basketball hoop is placed precisely 10 feet above the floor. While it could not be 100 feet, since that would be beyond the capacity of a player to reach it, it could just as well be 9 or 11. A football game lasts 90 minutes. It could not last 900, for this would be beyond human endurance. But it could be 85. In short, the rules of a game, and therefore the telos they constitute, are not only artificial but (relatively) arbitrary. They generate a self-contained space in which certain physical movements are allowed and others are forbidden. As a result, a game can look absurd to an external observer. Why should grown men and women strive so intensely to put a ball through a hoop that just happens to be 10 feet above the floor? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to kick it? Why should they care so much about scoring more points than their opponents after exactly 48 minutes of play? After all, doing so has no meaning or value outside of the strictly conventional, and radically temporary, arena in which the athlete competes. For this reason, the overwhelming majority of athletes –those who are “amateurs” (from the Latin amare) and play neither for riches nor fame but simply for “love” of the game –quickly forget the results of a competition. And this discloses the extraordinary feature of athletic play. Within the confined space and time of the play-world, athletes –from the Greek athlon, “prize” –struggle passionately. They “agonize” –from the Greek agôn, “contest” –for they are entirely concentrated on winning. In this sense, they are serious. But the telosof their sometimes furious activity is not serious. Putting a ball through a hoop that just happens to be 10 feet above the floor has no significance outside of the enclosures of the play-world. For this reason, then, taking it seriously is absurd. And yet taking it seriously, at least while they are playing, is precisely what athletes must do. In short, this second paradigm is a blend of seriousness and play. And the result is precarious. The temptation to take the game too seriously –to cheat or hurt the opponent, or to risk injury to oneself –is ever present. After all, victory is the telos. So too may the athlete be tempted to dismiss the outcome as meaningless and so unworthy of concentrated effort. After all, victory is determined by an arbitrary conglomeration of rules. But the athlete who does not try to win is not really playing the game. For the goal is victory and so the athlete, however unserious the goal may actually be, must seriously compete. The following sections of this paper will argue for this thesis: for Plato the athlete, not the child, is the paradigm of play. And this he valorizes. Indeed, for Plato serious play is the model of human beings at their best. By contrast, Aristotle is dismissive of play in either of its paradigmatic manifestations.  

2.Platonic Play

 In Book 7 of the Laws, rather near its center, the Athenian Stranger makes the following comment. 

 “I assert that what is serious (to spoudaion) must be treated seriously (spoudazein), and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete blessed seriousness, but that what is human, as we said earlier, has been devised as a certain plaything (paignion) of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing (paizonta) the most beautiful games (paidias)”.

 This pronouncement is startling because the Athenian Stranger hardly seems to be a playful man. The Laws is a monumental and laborious dialogue that rarely if ever seems to deviate from utmost seriousness. (The Greek for “serious,” spoudaion, is derived from speudein, “to urge on, hasten, quicken.”) Nonetheless, in the passage above the Athenian counsels us to spend our lives in play! Quickly, however, he qualifies this pronouncement. 

 “Of course, the affairs of human beings are not worthy of great seriousness, yetit is necessary to be serious about them. And this is not a fortunate thing”.

 Human beings are constrained by some sort of necessity to be serious about what is not worthy of being taken seriously: namely, ourselves. And this is unfortunate. It is also puzzling. Perhaps, though, the Athenian offers us a clue in his next remark. 

“Don’t be amazed, Megillus, but forgive me! For I was looking away toward the god and speaking under the influence of that experience, when I said what I did just now. Solet our race be something that is not lowly then, if that is dear to you, but worthy of a certain seriousness”.

 The Athenian was “looking away” from the human (political) world and toward the god when he offered his stunning encomium to play. And then he caught himself, and apologized. He next issued an imperative to himself, apparently to appease Megillus: because we must, “let our race,” he says, be taken seriously. He forces himself to return to the serious business of city planning on which he has been embarked since the beginning of the dialogue. He forces himself to take seriously what is not in fact serious. As such, he is rather like an athlete playing basketball. Should the player’s mind wander to other concerns, should she “look away” from the court, she may well feel the game to be pointless. She may laugh at herself and her fellow competitors for taking such an absurd exercise so seriously. On the one hand, this would be appropriate. After all, it is only within the insularity of the basketball court that her activities have any meaning at all. But, qua athlete, she must resist the temptation to disengage. To compete well she cannot be anywhere but on, and cannot look to anything but, the court where victory can be won. She must take this seriously. She must not laugh. The Athenian Stranger’s admonition to take seriously what is not serious is reminiscent of Socrates. Consider, for example, what Alcibiades says about him in the Symposium: he “lives his whole life being ironic and playing (paizôn) with human beings”. He pretends, for example, to take beautiful young men like Alcibiades seriously, when in fact he “holds them in contempt” and counts them as “nothing”. As such, he practices what the Athenian preaches.Or consider what Socrates himself says in Book VII of The Republic. After having completed his outline of the subjects future rulers of his city (in speech) must study –arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, harmonics and dialectic –he turns to the question, “to whom shall we give these studies?”.  He insists that only “the steadiest and most courageous” among the young citizens should be educated at the highest level in order to become leaders of the city. Their most important qualification, however, is that they show a “keenness at studies.” They must have sharp minds, strong memories, and the ability to “learn without difficulty” in order to master the demanding curriculum Socrates has just proposed. Socrates then digresses. He mentions the problems infecting philosophy as it is actually practiced in the Athens of his day; what he calls the “current mistake in philosophy”. Its glaring deficiency is that unworthy men have donned its mantle. For only those who are “straight of limb and understanding” can become genuine philosophers, and these are hard to find in flesh-and-blood Athens. At this point, Socrates catches himself. 

“But I seem to have been somewhat ridiculously affected just now [...] I forgot [...] that we were playing (epaizomen) and spoke rather intensely. For, as I was talking I looked at Philosophy and, seeing her undeservingly spattered with mud, I seem to have been vexed and said what I had to say too seriously (spoudaioteron)”.

 The Athenian Stranger in the Laws “was looking away toward the god;” that is, he had forgotten that he was engaged in a serious, albeit all too narrowly human, political discussion. As a result he denigrated human beings as unworthy of serious concern. But then he caught and corrected himself. Similarly, in the Republic Socrates “looked at” the current condition of Philosophy, got carried away by his indignation, and then caught himself becoming too serious. In both cases, the precarious blend of seriousness and play was momentarily disrupted when each speaker became distracted.To reinforce this point: the Republic seems to be a serious attempt to formulate a blueprint of a perfectly just city. Nonetheless, Socrates confesses that “it doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere”. In other words, the game “we were playing,” the telos of which has been the construction of a perfectly just city in speech, is not an entirely serious enterprise. And yet neither is it entirely playful, at least not in the Nietzschean sense. Instead, Socrates is much like the athlete. Playing hard, trying to win, even if victory makes no difference. Consider this simple fact: several dialogues are set in a gymnasium, the place where “naked” (gumnos) men engage in athletic competition. For example, having just returned from the battle at Potidea, Socrates immediately goes to the “wrestling school of Taureas,” which he describes as one of his “customary haunts”. The Lysis opens with him heading to the “Lyceum”, a gymnasium and meeting place. He is intercepted by Hippothales who brings him to another “wrestling school”. And it is to the Lyceum again that he heads immediately after having drunk Agathon and Alcibiades under the table in the Symposium. The presence of the athlete looms large in these dialogues.Still, and obviously so, a great deal more textual evidence and argumentation would be required to substantiate the claim that Plato actually takes the paradigm of the athlete seriously. For now, let it stand simply as a proposal that he does. In a similar fashion, the subsequent arguments will also be only thinly defended. The best they can hope for, then, is to be suggestive. Just as Heraclitean Becoming is the worldview lying behind his (and Nietzsche’s) valorization of the pais paizôn, so too is there a Platonic worldview lying behind the athlete construed as the paradigm of play. To describe it schematically: the telos of Platonic philosophy is to give a logos, a rational account, of the Ideas, the salient feature of which is their ontological independence. But the ontological independence of the Ideas can never be conclusively demonstrated. Therefore, the telos of Platonic philosophy is irremediably elusive. Yes, it should be taken seriously but, because it can never be definitively attained, it should be leavened with a healthy dose of playfulness. Consider the Symposium. Speaking through the person of Diotima, Socrates describes the Idea of the Beautiful as follows:

 “First of all, it always is, and it neither comes to be nor perishes, neither grows nor decreases. Nor is it beautiful in one way, but ugly in another. Nor does it exist at one time but at another time it does not exist. Nor is it in relation to the beautiful but also in relation to the ugly. Nor is it here beautiful and there ugly, or beautiful to some but ugly to others [...] instead, it is itself in virtue of itself with itself, singularly formed, and it always is. All other beautiful things participate in it”.

 The Idea of Beautiful (or Beauty Itself) depends on nothing other than itself. By contrast, all beautiful (particular) things depend on it. While a beautiful painting or sunset comes and goes, The Idea of the Beautiful is permanent, absolutely stable and objective. It is, therefore, the highest object of the philosopher’s striving, of his erôs. There is, however, a problem: precisely because, as Diotima emphatically says, the Idea is the ultimate object of the philosopher’s erotic longing, it is impossible to determine whether its reality is in fact fully objective (independent) or not. For erôs has the power to cloud the judgment of the lover (erastês). In turn, the lover may well be driven to exaggerate and thereby distort the beauty of the beloved. Hippothalesin the Lysis, for example, has been driven “mad” (mainetai) by his love for Lysis, a nice boy, to be sure, but hardly worth the hyperbolic praise Hippothales lavishes upon him. This impulse to magnify the beauty of the beloved is a possibility intrinsic to erôs, and it is illustrated in the prologue of the Symposium. The bulk of the dialogue is narrated by Apollodorus, a man who for three years has been spending most of his time with Socrates and, as he says, “making it my concern to know what he says and does every day.” He is not only obsessively devoted to Socrates, he is convinced that prior to his own initiation into (what he takes to be) philosophy he was “utterly miserable”. So too, he thinks, is everyone else who is not a philosopher. It his clear that his companion (Glaucon) has heard this fervent refrain from Apollodorus many times, and that he is quite tired of it. What he wants is not a diatribe but an account of what transpired during the famous dinner party hosted by Agathon. Apollodorus, however, was not there himself. But he did hear the story from one of the attendees, Aristodemus, a man rather similar to himself. For he too was a “lover” (erastês) of Socrates. Indeed, he went so far as to go “barefoot” in mimetic homage to his famously shoeless master. Apparently Aristodemus memorized the speeches that were given at the party. In Apollodorus and Aristodemus, two strikingly unimpressive human beings whose only distinction is their mindless devotion to Socrates, we see the epistemic risk inherent in erotic longing. Simply put, lovers can exaggerate the beauty of the beloved. On the other hand, it is only because these two men are madly in love with Socrates that they bothered to pay such close attention to him. In turn, it is only because of them that we know what happened at Agathon’s house (if, in fact, their reports are truthful). In other words, erôs can be both an epistemic positive –it can supply the necessary energy to keep the lover’s view concentrated on the erotic object –and a potential impediment: it can lead to the sort of hyberbole spouted by Hippothales. The lover can either see the beloved clearly through a lens highly focused through erotic energy, or through a kaleidiscope that distorts the nature ofits object.To approach this same point from a different angle, consider Socrates’ examination of Agathon in the Symposium. Through this elenchos, Socrates formulates his own conception of erôs by articulating four of its essential features (which I paraphrase). First, it is always “of something.” When S loves, S loves some P. Erôs is, in other words, intentional. Second, P is not possessed by S. When S is hungry and desires to eat, it is because he lacks food. (Why “desires” has replaced “loves” will be discussed shortly.) Erôs is negative. This statement, however, cannot quite stand as is, for there is an obvious counterexample to it. If S now possesses health, S may still desire to be healthy. To put the point more generally: if S possesses P, S may still love P because S does not possess P permanently. S may well desire to retain P as time passes. This, then, is the third feature of erôs: it is a response to temporality. Human beings are caught in the flow of time. We are ephemeral, incomplete, and aware of our incompleteness, which in turn we strive to overcome. We are continually lacking and so we are continually loving. These three features all rest on a fourth, which is simply assumed throughout Socrates’ account. Erôs is a desire, a going after its object. It is a motive force, for it impels the one loving to pursue, to move toward, a beloved or desired object. It is, then, essentially “epithumotic” (from the Greek eptithumia, “desire.”) Because erôs is “epithumotic” and negative, and what is ultimately lacking in human experience is permanence, what human beings love most of all, even if they are hardly aware of doing so, is permanence itself. For this reason erôs is, in Diotima’s words, “love of immortality”. The most basic human longing is to transcend temporality, to jump out of our own skins and become like a god. But this we, embodied beings that we are, cannot do. Nonetheless, it is that for which we strive. Like the prologue of the Symposium and Hippothales’ foolishness in the Lysis, this account suggests that the danger of distorting the nature of the erotic object is intrinsic to erôs. Because we are aware of our transience, we desire permanence. Even if this statement is true, it does not imply that there actually are any permanent objects in the universe. Human beings may simply wish that there were or believe that there are.In this context, consider what Socrates says when he introduces the Idea of the Good in Book VI of the Republic: it is “what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything”. Human beings strive for what is Good. This is a psychological observation and not a description of an entity that is ontologically independent. Even if it is true, it does not imply that an Idea or anything else simply is Good. Socrates’ statement only discloses an essential feature of human beings and their (erotic) longings. A few pages later, the Idea of the Good (or simply, “the Good”) is indeed described in terms of its ontological independence. It is the cause of “existence (to einai) and being (ousia),” but is itself somehow “beyond being, exceeding it in dignity”. In the language of the divided-line, it is “free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole”. It depends on nothing other than itself. But, to reiterate, it was initially broached only as the supreme object of human striving. For this reason, then, its ontological status is ambiguous. Plato leaves open the possibility that the Idea of the Good may be a wish projection. To sum up so far: the Platonic philosopher seeks to understand and articulate the permanent structures of reality; namely, the Ideas. But time and again Plato suggests that unimpeded epistemic access to the Ideas is hardly a given. Their essential attribute is that they are ontologically independent, but there is no guarantee that they are not somehow infected, even generated by, by the erotic energy of the philosopher who loves and pursues them. Because we are temporal beings acutely aware of the transience of all we hold dear (including ourselves), we crave permanence, and so are tempted to say that something just is, and neither comes to be nor passes away. But maybe there is not. For this reason, in pursuing the Ideas –that is, in the practice of philosophy –it would be a mistake to forget that, as Socrates put it, “we [are] playing.” At the same, however, and precisely like the athlete immersed in a competitive game, it would be an equal mistake to dismiss philosophical activity as unserious. Instead, what is needed is a delicate and precarious blend of seriousness and play. The athlete helps show us what this might be.

 3.Aristotelian Seriousness

 Unlike his teacher, Aristotle seems to be entirely serious, and thoroughly dismissive of play. A passage from Nicomachean Ethics X.6 certainly suggests as much. 

“Happiness (eudaimonia), therefore, does not consist in play (paidia). For it would be strange if our end (telos) were play, and if we exert ourselves and suffer bad things through the whole of life for the sake of playing [...] But to play so that one may be serious (spoudazêi), as Anacharis has it, seems to be correct. For play resembles relaxation, and because people are incapable of laboring (ponein) continuously, they need relaxation. Relaxation, then, is not an end: it arises for the sake of activity (energeia). The happy life also seems to accord with virtue, and this is the life that seems to be accompanied by seriousness but not to consist in play. We also say that serious things are better than those that prompt laughter and are accompanied by play, and that the activity of the better part or of better human beings is always the more serious one”

 Aristotle attributes two features to play that draw his conception of it close to the pais paizôn. He associates it with “laughter” (geloiôn) and disassociates it from “labor” (ponein) and“activity” (energeia). By his lights, the best play can offer us is a brief respite from the hard work of a serious adult. It is only because we are embodied beings and thus “incapable of laboring continuously” that we need to relax, sleep and occasionally play.In dismissing play, Aristotle identifies human excellence with seriousness. Indeed, this identification is so strong that throughout the Nicomachean Ethics the word spoudaios is a term of ethical praise. Joachim, for example, defines the spoudaios as “the morally healthy man.”  Irwin makes the same point. Aristotle, he says, “regularly uses [spoudaios] as the adjective corresponding to ‘virtue,’ and hence as equivalent to ‘good.’” Sachs states that spoudaios“is the word that Aristotle reserves for people of the highest human excellence.”  A key passage corroborating these assertions is found in Book III.4. Aristotle is discussing “wish” (boulêsis), which he says is concerned with ends. If I wish to be rich, then being rich is my goal. He then raises a question. Do people wish for “the good” or for “the apparent good?” If the former, then those people who choose to do something bad –and choice (for Aristotle) is of a means conducive to attainment of an end –do not actually have “an object of wish” . This view leads to an uncomfortably Socratic position. If the latter, “it turns out that thereis no object of wish by nature but only what seems to be good to each”. Since “different things appear to be good to different people” this view leads to an unacceptable kind of relativism. As he does so often, Aristotle finds a middle path on which to navigate between these two extremes. His solution relies on the spoudaios. To him, and only to him, “the object of wish is in a true sense”. In other words, what appears good to the serious person, and so what he wishes for, really is good, while what appears to a lower human being may well be whatever happens to catch his fancy. As Aristotle puts it, “the serious person judges each case correctly, and in each case what is true appears to him”. The spoudaios, then, is the ethical touchstone for whom the good and the apparent good coalesce. To echo the language of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws, he knows what should be taken seriously, and what should not. He gets things right. It comes as no surprise, then, that in Nicomachean Ethics X.6 Aristotle says that “serious things are better than those that prompt laughter and are accompanied by play.” As mentioned above, by here associating play with laughter he seems implicitly to affiliate it with the child.In doing so, he seems to neglect the possibility of the athlete serving as a paradigm of play. For surely the basketball player trying to win a game is engaged in some sort of energeia, and she certainly seems to be quite serious when on the court. Furthermore–and this is the more surprising point–despite his overt disdain for play, he nonetheless positions play in a place of considerable esteem.For X.6 begins his final account of “happiness”, the ultimate goal of human striving.This account culminates in X.7-8, Aristotle’s famous encomium of “contemplation” (theoria), or the theoretical life, which he identifies as the best of all human possibilities. In other words, while his language in describing play in X.6 is derogatory, the architecture of the Nicomachean Ethics demands that it be taken seriously.It is, after all, the penultimate moment of the entire work.The key reason why play assumes this prominent position is that it occurs during times of leisure. For a fundamental tenet of both Aristotelian ethics and politics is that “happiness is in leisure (scholê). For we endure the lack-of-leisure (ascholoumetha)in order that we may enjoy leisure”. The Greek ascholoumetha, is formed by the verb scholazein, “to be at leisure,” and the alpha-privative.This linguistic point suggests that “to be busy,” a common translation of ascholazein, is actually a deprivation. It is the absence of leisure, which in turn is not only a genuinely positive condition but is central in Aristotle’s conception of a good life. The Greek thus reverses the order of priority that is far more familiar in contemporary culture. For most of us, leisure is an afterthought that follows the serious business of work or industry, and its best benefit is that it helps usto return to the office refreshed. The Greeks, by contrast, ratchet “being busy,” or what we would call “work,” down a notch. Leisure is first and foremost free time during which, unconstrained by external demands, we can do just what we want. For healthy and prosperous people who do not need to worry about putting food on the table, such time is not idled away in sleep, sloth or wine. Instead, it is occupied by activities chosen for their own sake. And it is precisely this sort of activity that Aristotle identifies with the highest human good, namely eudaimoniaor “happiness,” which he famously defines as “an activity (energeia) of the soul in accord with virtue”. Happiness, understood as excellent activity, must, he argues, be such that it “is complete in itself” and is “chosen for itself and never on account of something else”. In X.7, he identifies theoria as best fitting this description. It achieves the highest level of “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia), a feature he also ascribes to happiness in I.7.The striking feature of play, then, is that it is isomorphic with Aristotle’s conception of virtuous activity, and thus with theoria. For it is enjoyed only for the sake of itself and has its own kind of self-sufficiency. For within the confines of the play-world business and serious concerns are forgotten. Even though he denigrates play, he understands that, because of its affinity with theoretical activity, he must not only address it, he must position it as the penultimate topic of the entire Nicomachean Ethics. A similar dynamic can be found in Book VIII of the Politics. Here Aristotle is discussing paideia, “education,” a word closely related to paidia, “play.” Having argued that there is no greater task for political rulers than developing an educational program for young citizens, he discusses four subjects typically found in such a curriculum: letters, drawing, gymnastic and music. The first two are “useful for life”, but gymnastic, or what we might call sport, is pedagogically ambiguous. If it inculcates “an athletic (athletikon) disposition”, it runs the risk of damaging young bodies. For the “exertion of the body” can impede the development of “the mind”. Properly moderated, however, gymnastic can “contribute to courage”. Music too is somewhat ambiguous in Aristotle’s pedagogical scheme, and it is in the context of discussing it that Aristotle again grapples with play. 

“At present most people share in [music] for the sake of pleasure; but those who arranged to have it in education at the beginning did so because nature itself seeks, as has been said repeatedly, not only to be occupied in correct fashion, but also to be capable of being at leisure in noble fashion [...] both are required, but being at leisure is more choiceworthy than occupation and an end, and what must be sought is the activity they [citizens] should have in leisure. Surely it is not play; for play would then necessarily be the end of life for us”.

 As in Nicomachean EthicsX.6, here Aristotle rejects the possibility –one that Plato’s Athenian Stanger explicitly affirms –that play could be the telos of human life. Instead, he insists that its value is merely instrumental. “Play is for the sake of rest”, and the only benefit of rest is that it lets us get back to work. For this reason, Aristotle associates play with “sleep and drinking”, things we do merely to relax, and which should not be taken seriously. Nonetheless, as in Nicomachean EthicsX.6, in the Politics Aristotle understands that play must be addressed seriously precisely because it, like the best human activity (theoria), takes place in leisure. For this reason, he acknowledges that it is easy to overestimate the value of play. 

 “But it has happened to human beings that they make play an end. For the end too involves a certain pleasure –though not any chance pleasure; and while seeking the former they take the latter for it, on account of [play] having a certain similarity to the end of actions. For the end is choiceworthy not for the sake of anything that will be, and pleasures of [play] are not for the sake of anything that will be [...]” 

To simplify the rather convoluted prose here: it is not surprising that some people would count play as the end, the telos, of human life. For the real end of human life, namely excellent activity or happiness, “involves a certain pleasure” and is “choiceworthy” for the sake of itself. Both features belong to play. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake of the highest order to think play is the telos. That description belongs to serious work alone. Therefore, Aristotle concludes, “the young should not be educated for the sake ofplay.” For the main task of education is to help the students learn, and “they do not play when they are learning, as learning is accompanied by pain”. It is in hard work that human beings are at their best. As was the case with the Nietzschean elevation of the pais paizônto paradigmatic status, and with Plato’s affirmation of the competitive athlete, a worldview lies behind Aristotle’s dismissal of play. To sketch it with laughable brevity: unlike Plato, who thinks that the telosof philosophy –namely, a rational account of the Ideas construed as ontologically independent –is irremediably elusive, and who thus has Socrates describe himself in the Republicas “just playing,” Aristotle is confident that human logoscan articulate the world as it is in itself; that it can, in other words, attain the truth. As he puts in the Metaphysics,

 “The investigation (theoria) of truth is in one sense difficult, in another easy. A sign of this is the fact that neither can one attain it adequately, nor do all fail, but each says something about the nature of things; and while each of us contributes nothing or little to the truth, a considerable amount of it results from all our contributions”.

 Attaining the truth is no easy job, but it is one thatis entirely realistic. It requires cooperative effort from a great many people; a research team, one might say. It requires work. While theoretical activity is indeed the most self-sufficient of all possible lives –depending as it does on very little from the body or the larger community –it is facilitated, Aristotle suggests, by having “co-workers” (sunergous). For everyone has at least some access to some truth. As he puts it, “human beings hit upon the truth more often than not”. Given the fact that (as he sees it) “all human beings by nature desire to understand”, it would be a shocking and thoroughly non-Aristotelian discovery –but possibly a Platonic one –were human beings to fail in what their nature impels them to pursue; were they to deceive themselves. One final way to make this point. Both Plato and Aristotle would agree that the philosophical impulse to understand and articulate, to understand, the permanent structures of intelligible reality, whether they be the Ideas or nature, is tantamount to the desire to become like a god. In Diotima’s language, it reflects the desire to become immortal and, at least if Part II above has any merit, for Plato this is a problematic enterprise indeed. As the Athenian Stranger says, only god is by nature worthy of seriousness, while the affairs of human beings, including philosophy, are not worthy of great seriousness. By contrast, for Aristotle philosophy is unmistakably serious, and seriously rewarding. As he says in the Nicomachean Ethics, 

 “But one ought not –as some recommend –to think only about human things because one is a human being, nor only about mortal things because one is mortal, but rather to make oneself immortal, insofar as that is possible, and to do all that bears on living in accord with what is the most excellent of the things in oneself”.

In short, Aristotle is the great “theoretical optimist” that Nietzsche describes in the Birth of Tragedy(and which he ascribes, mistakenly I think, to Socrates). He devoted his entire adult life to his rigorous study of animals, stars, constitutions, the material elements, poems, soul and being itself. One can thus hardly imagine him approaching death with the casual, almost jovial, indifference of Socrates in the Phaedo. Aristotle must have hated to die, for that meant he could not get back to work the next day. Not surprisingly, Aristotle attempts to ground his theoretical optimism theoretically. Unlike Plato’s description of the erotic ascent in the Symposium, or of the Idea of the Good in the Republic,or of recollection in the Meno and Phaedo–descriptions that are fraught with dramatic complications and conceptual precariousness –Aristotle offers a methodical account of knowledge acquisition that begins in sense perception, which give us initial contact with reality, and builds upward from there. What this account is, and whether it is ultimately successful, is a story far too long even to broach in this paper. Suffice it to say here that Aristotle believes that there are good reasons to take the project of theorizing with maximum, indeed relentless, seriousness. And so it is that he denigrates play in both of its paradigmatic manifestations.