Sapiens are fulfilled only in play

Sapiens are fulfilled only in play

Properly understood, Freud’s doctrine of infantile Xuality is a scientific formulation and reaffirmation of the fact that childhood innocence, as displayed in their delight with their body, remains wo/man’s indestructible unconscious goal.

Children on one hand pursue pleasure and on the other hand are active in that pursuit. A child’s pleasure is in the active pursuit of the life of the human body. What then are we adults to learn from the pursuits of childhood? The answer is that children play.

“Play is the essential character of activity governed by the pleasure-principle rather than the reality-principle. Play is ‘purposeless yet in some sense meaningful’…play is the erotic mode of activity. Play is that activity which, in the delight of life, unites man with the objects of his love, as is indeed evident from the role of play in normal adult genital activity…the ultimate essence of our being is erotic and demands activity according to the pleasure-principle.”

As a religious ideal childhood innocence has resisted assimilation into rational-theological tradition. Although there is a biblical statement that says something to the effect that unless you become children you cannot go to heaven, this admonition has affected primarily only mystics. However, poets have grasped this meaning in its philosophic-rational terms.

In his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” Schiller says that “Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.” Sartre says “As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom...then his activity is play.”

H. H. Brinton, modern American archaeologist, considers the essence of man is purposeful activity generated by desire. The perfect goal generated activity is play. Play expresses life in its fullest. Play as an end, as a goal, means that life itself has intrinsic value. Adam and Eve succumbed when their play became serious business.

Jacob Boehme, a German Christian mystic, concluded that wo/man’s perfection and bliss resided not in religion but in joyful play.

John Maynard Keynes noted modern economist, takes the premise that modern technology will solve wo/man’s need to work and thereby lead to a general “nervous breakdown”. He thinks we already experience a manifestation of this syndrome when we observe the unfortunate wives of wealthy men who have lost meaning in this driving and ambitious world of economic progress. He says “There is no country and no people who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without dread.”

From the Keynesian point of view it will be a difficult task to transfer our ambitions from acquiring wealth to that of playing. But for Freud this change is not as difficult because beneath the habits of work acquired by all wo/men lay an immortal instinct for play.

Huizinga, a noted anthropologist, testifies to the presence of a nonfunctional element of play in all of the basic categories of our sapient cultural activity—religion, art, law, economics, etc. He further concludes that advanced civilization has disguised this element of play and thereby dehumanized culture.

The author, Norman Brown, concludes that psychoanalysis have added to these expressed statements regarding the importance of “The play element in culture provides a prima facie justification for the psychoanalytic doctrine of sublimation, which views ‘higher’ cultural activities as substitutes for infantile pleasures.”

Quotes from “Life against Death” by Norman Brown

 

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Which speaks against a society based on the assembly line.

 

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It defiantly speaks against the assembly line. It rings an important bell for me because I have been a self-learner for 25 years and this theory about play points to why I find such pleasure in this intellectual activity.

 

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Coberst, haven't we previously debated the questionable value of Freud's outdated and bankrupt thinking?

 

Remember when they told us in school that technology was labor saving. Of course this is true. But the % of people doing repetitive work, has it really gone down. So, now many of them do it sitting in front of computer screens or security screens, but the promise of leisure and creativity implicit in that school room justification of all technological 'progress' rings a little hollow. I agree with you that schools stifle creativity and really are assembly line based themselves (Ford and others like him directly having a share in their development).

But what would happen if we did shift to creative, child centered schooling?

What would all these creative, subversive, curious people do when they hit the job market?

Who's going to be telemarketers, computer chip checkers, assembly line workers, call center operators, number crunching gnomes in the coming generations?

I am not arguing that THEREFORE schools should be the dead machines they are, but in the back of my own mind I wonder if it's truth in advertising. We don't respect you and your input on a daily and creative basis is not necessary.

 

That remark sounds a bit sophomoric. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and Freud is one of the biggest. It is not dignified for an adult to fail to appreciate what we owe to those who came before us.

 

I think that we can keep our schooling as it is to prepare us to get a job just as long as we become self-actualizing self-learners when our school days are over.

 

Maybe the question should be, rather, do we really need "telemarketers, computer chip checkers, assembly line workers, call center operators, number crunching gnomes" and all they bring as much as we think we do?

 

Interesting .....especially seeing as how you can only spout the writings of others here. Why is that? Are you only "learning" from rote memory, then regurgitating it for others? Is that what you call "learning"????

Baron Max

 

Return of the craftsman(surely a "player")! PLEASE! I'm sick of buying crap and then calling people to complain about the crap.

Everyone desires a "job" that is so fun, the money is all bonus.

 

Means instead of paying thousands of dollars to be told what books to BUY and read. He just goes to a library or buys himself books he WANTS to read.

 

Thank you for crediting me with at least some form of education.

Speak for yourself. I decidedly stand at their feet, looking up in awe.

That is debatable. While some would agree with your position, others would argue that Freud was wrong about so much, that he created more confusion, misunderstanding, not to mention much human misery through the nonsense of pscho analysis, that he was a liability.

I fully appreciate the contributions made by those who made contributions of value. In case you missed the point I am seriously contesting that Freud did contribute anything of value.

You still didn't answer my question. Didn't we debate this already?

 

If so I probably made the same reply.

 

That doesn't seem to be quite responding to what I meant. It seems a parallel point. Basically you have said that schools to not teach people to learn or be creative. They teach them to regurgitate and obey. Isn't this actually good training for what most people face in adulthood?

 

And I agree (with potential, implicit assertions in your question).

 

coberst, BM is still making a valid point. Appeal to authority and quoting from authority make up the bulk of your posts. Soemtimes you ask questions, but this is more a way of getting us to critically respond to the quotes. You may very well be self-learning but it comes off more as distribution.

Is it possible that the way an engineer relates to texts still affects the way you relate to texts?

 

It is good training for maximizing production and consumption, which is valuable. But we need more.

 

Independent thinking grounded in learning is great. Independent thinking not grounded in learning is generally just so much hot air.

Essay writing is an important part of my learning process. Curiosity and caring drive me to seek understanding. Understanding and caring drives me to a desire to communicate, i.e. to share my understanding with others. Ergo I post on these forums.

My message to all who will pause and listen is that not only is an intellectual life fulfilling for the individual but it has great relevance to the success of a democracy.

 

But why do you persist in subjecting us to your learning process?? You can write out the crap, but you don't have to post it so as to bother other people, do you???

Ahh, but you're not sharing YOUR learning and understanding, you're post what someone else has said ...sometimes verbatim!! Why not just tell us to read the book that you read, instead of typing it all out and posting it?

Your message??? Most of "your" posts are simply copied articles from some fuckin' book you've read. "Your" message????

Is the success of democracy dependent on bothering the hell out of others by posting bullshit copied from some fuckin' book???

Baron Max

 

Because he handed in his essay to us Baron and apparently your giving him an F. He will take that however he wished