Thomas Aquinas explains that “enjoyment” (frui) is part of human action in a way that it is not part of a non-rational creature’s actions. Animals act according to their appetites—the desire for food, survival, and reproduction. Humans, however, are able to pursue higher ends because we perceive certain things as goods in themselves rather than means to satisfying a desire. Thus, “the full meaning of enjoyment applies to rational creatures, something short of this to animals, but nothing of the sort to other creatures.” (ST, IaIIae qII, a2) For Aquinas, ultimate enjoyment for humans is attainable only in union with God, but we can glimpse something of that ultimate enjoyment here on earth.
But even if animals cannot experience real enjoyment, is there something about enjoyment we can learn from them? Aquinas talks about enjoyment as voluntary action done for an end that is good in itself. In common parlance, we call that kind of act-for-its-own-sake as “play.” It takes a rational will to identify and pursue a good like that, but Aquinas admits that “something short of [enjoyment belongs] to animals.” A recent book has explored that hypothesis in some detail. In Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself, David Toomey explores what play is and whether animals can do it.
It seems fair to say that animals play in some way. Gordon Burghardt described several elements of play that he used to judge whether animals perform this type of activity. To qualify as “play” for Burghardt, the activity must be non-functional, voluntary, characterized by repeated but varied movements, and the subject must be well-fed, safe, and healthy. These criteria seem meant to ensure that the activity is as for-its-own-sake as possible. The actor is not compelled to act in a particular way, the acts are not random (i.e., there is some order or intention to the movements/acts), and there is no practical or functional purpose to the actions. Simply put, the acts are pursued because they are enjoyable. For humans, think of playing a board game, a round of golf, frolicking through a meadow, or something similar. Unless you are a pro poker player or golfer, these activities are mainly done for pleasure and enjoyment. For animals, Toomey gives a variety of examples of how various species demonstrate these “play” elements in their activities, leading to the conclusion that animals play in a real way.
There are different theories about why animals play. One researcher, Karl Groos, had the theory that animals play to practice various life skills. By play fighting, for example, animals test boundaries with each other without fear of actual harm. It helps establish the dominance of members of a pack or group and to build useful individual skills: “[A]nimals are born with certain instincts, and that play develops them into skills necessary to their survival and reproduction—finding food, fighting rivals, escaping predators, and courting and mating.” (22) Other researchers have a more practical understanding of play. While they think that play lacks an immediate practical purpose in itself, it is a way for animals to develop motor skills and grow in strength and other very practical means of future survival. Alex Brownlee, the Scottish researcher, had that view. (25)
For humans, play takes on a different character because, as Aquinas notes, it is the result of a rational decision-making process. We can still spar in a martial arts class. We still play as a form of practice. But play can take on a deeper meaning for us when we choose to pursue certain ends or engage in certain activities for their own sakes. We actually need play, according to Aquinas, to be fully human: “Therefore, unmitigated seriousness betokens a lack of virtue because it wholly despises play, which is as necessary for a good human life as rest is.” (Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 16, 854)
“Play,” for humans, goes beyond mere enjoyment. One of my favorite books, Hugo Rahner’s Man at Play, talks about this in depth. For Rahner,1 human play is a participation in the play of God: “When, therefore, we speak of God the Creator ‘playing’, there lies concealed in that phrase the metaphysical truth that the creation of the world and of man, though a divinely meaningful act, was by no means a necessary one so far as God himself was concerned.” (11) Based on the nature of God—a being completely sufficient in himself needing nothing and no one else—the only motivation for creation must be love, the desire to freely share one’s life with another. As Thomas Prufer put it, God did not need to create, and does not gain by creating. (See Prufer’s discussion, “Creation, Solitude, and Publicity,” in Recapitulations, at 34)
God’s act of creation was not necessary or practical considered in itself. Creation is “an order directed by the Logos after the manner of a graceful game, a Logos who is separate from the created world, not identical with it.” (Rahner, at 15) Creation and, for Christians, the Incarnation, “are expressions of God’s love, and . . . this love, though full of meaning and purpose, is a love that works in creative freedom wholly ungoverned by necessity or constraint.” (Rahner, at 24) Acting with “creative freedom wholly ungoverned by necessity or constraint,” as Burghardt defined it above, is to play.
A lot of people have latched on to the value of play today. The gamification of all sorts of things—from learning languages (Duolingo), to saving money (Yotta), to exercise (Peloton)—have been suffused with an element of play. We thrive on meeting certain goals, keeping up a streak, having some community competition (even if virtual), and making the activity fun. Even these practical activities can have an element of play that make them more desirable and make it more likely that someone will continue to engage in them.
I don’t go to casinos, but I was traveling through the Las Vegas airport recently and saw first hand how the gamification of gambling works. These are not slot machines as one might envision them. These modern gambling games are meant to give the user small dopamine hits, to make winning (and even losing) money a thrilling and suspenseful experience—and because it’s all done out in the open between gates, there is a community aspect to it as well.
But efforts at gamification are really attempts to make something that could be tedious (like learning a language) a more interactive and enjoyable activity. We see what true play is when we see a master of a craft—the way a virtuoso violinist performs on stage, the way an actor fully embraces a role, or the way an athlete performs on the field. Once someone is a master in a field, their activity is much more like play because it contains a freedom of activity that others do not have.
Play is, for Rahner, the way we can be most like God, the best way to express the imago Dei in us. “It is only after we have spoken in all reverence of Deus ludens that Homo ludens can be understood.” (Rahner, at 12) “The man who plays after this fashion is one who is earnest about life, because he knows two things and holds them both together: he know that his life has meaning and that his existence is not the product of necessity.” (Rahner, at 26)
The goal for humans is, in fact, to become a “player”: “the best thing about [man] is that he himself should be a player—one who, in all the multiplicity of activities that proceed out of the nature of his created being, imitates, as far as in him lies, the quality of God’s own creative power by his lightness of touch, by his regard for beauty, by his wisdom and by the sober seriousness of his endeavor.” (Rahner, at 26)
This is not a uniquely Christian understanding. The Greeks knew this, too: “To them, the art, superhuman in its difficulty, of a spiritual culture that is truly humane, appeared—and rightly—to reside in the ability to take life seriously and yet be able to play and while playing ever to keep a serious corner in one’s mind.” (Rahner, at 30) As Plato put it, “Without some recognition of the ridiculous, it is impossible to understand properly the serious aspects of things, as, in general, when we are dealing with contradictories, one factor in the contradiction cannot be understood without the other.” (Rahner, at 32, quoting Laws, 816DE) Perhaps with an ode to Groos’s hypothesis above, Rahner concludes that “all that appertains to play is only a rehearsal for what is serious.” (32)
And there are few things more serious that one’s eternal happiness. As Aquinas says, “That which is simply ultimate for life as a whole, and which is delighted in is our last end: this assuredly is the fruit, and this we are said to enjoy in the full and proper sense of the term . . . [such that] rest is not utter and complete except in our ultimate end.” (ST, IaIIae qII, a3) “Play and dance, therefore, when they genuinely succeed in expressing here on earth what is in the heart, are an anticipation of heavenly joy.” (Rahner, at 8)
For a religious believer, the most profound sense of “play” is contemplation. Contemplation is a distinctly human act, to the extent one is acting at all, that expresses much about what it is to be human. It’s done for its own sake because the rational soul recognizes its value. All of our play, whether we know it or not, is ordered toward something beyond us.
“It is that in the last analysis there is a secret, a mystery, at the heart of every form of play, and that in it all, from the playing of children to the playing in heaven, there is one intent—the blessed seriousness of which, as Plato saw long ago, God alone is worthy. All play, wrote Plotinus, . . . arises from the longing for the vision of the divine; for in play all that is gay, lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find the expression which a man of the spirit and of enthusiasm is ever seeking to attain.” (Rahner, at 65)
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best,
Aaron
*If you have any recommendations for summer reading, please leave them in the comments.
Hugo Rahner, SJ, was the older brother of the more famous theologian, Karl Rahner. Hugo was a prominent theologian and Church historian in his own right, and was the president of the University of Innsbruck in Austria in the 1930s and 1940s.