"I don't want to be a f***ing housecat!" --- On the Schiller-Spencer theory of play as a model of human flourishing

..instead of saying, the animals play because they are young, we must say, the animals have a youth in order that they may play

-Karl Groos

— but I do not, therefore, want my life to stop being a game. That's why I subscribe whole-heartedly to Schiller's phrase: ‘Man is fully a man only when he plays.’

-Jean-Paul Sartre

S: Still, Grasshopper, I find that I have a serious reservation about the Utopia you have constructed. It sounds a grand sort of life for those who are very keen on games, but not everyone is keen on games. People like to be building houses, or running large corporations, or doing scientific research to some purpose, you know, not just for the hell of it.

G: The point is well taken, Skepticus. You are saying that Bobby Fischer and Phil Esposito and Howard Cosell might be very happy in paradise, but that John Striver and William Seeker are likely to find quite futile their make-believe carpentry and their make-believe science.

-Bernard Suits

It was a bank holiday weekend, but we were both working. It had been a while since we had last caught up so we met for lunch in a trendy café in central London.

"But what's the point of humans if there is no work to do?"

"Well, we could climb mountains, make music, learn to play chess, write poetry, paint paintings, watch football... anything we wanted really."

"But what would it all be for?"

"I don't know... living a good life I guess? I think housecats live good lives, and they don't have to work?"

I'd been a fan of this example since I first heard it in a philosophy tutorial about play and aesthetic value. That day was the last day I used it.

"House- what?"

He hadn't heard me properly.

"House cats you know, pets? When cats are still kittens they learn to hunt by doing things like playing with balls of wool. As they get older, if they are well fed but still have excess energy they entertain themselves by playing at hunting. Humans are much smarter than their pet cats, but they also love them, so they keep them safe and warm and feed them. Housecats barely need to spend any energy in order to get fed, so they spend loads of time playing at hunting. That's what flourishing is for a housecat. Maybe flourishing for a human is playing at all the things humans normally need to do: thinking, exploring, building and -"

I was waxing lyrical at this point, words pouring out of my mouth. I hadn't noticed indignant tears of rage in his eyes. He sat up in his chair and interrupted me.

"Hey - I don't want to be a fucking housecat!".

"oh.."

I was making the case for a combination of two views:

• What's known as the Schiller-Spencer theory of play
• The view that play is an intrinsically valuable human activity

It's approximately the utopian vision described in Ian M. Banks' science fiction writing¹. In the world of his Culture novels, machine brains and advanced societal institutions have made all human labour obsolete. Alignment has been solved through careful implementation of a maxim that "an agent's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it". Humans pass the time by making their own meanings. These meanings mostly involve falling in love, going on adventures, taking part in sports, and playing games.

Some research I did when writing this post also led me to Bernard Suits' book: The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia which makes a case for a similar view of human flourishing.

I was pretty much convinced at the time that this kind of vision for the future was universally palatable. Who looks at a housecat playing and doesn't think it is having a good life? And the human equivalent would be so much more meaningful. There are so many parties we could be throwing, so many great works of art we could be making, and so many ways we could be telling our loved ones we care for them, if our lives only weren't so dependent on work. If only our lives weren't so precarious.

I still want a future like this, but now I'm more cautious about how it gets implemented, and more careful about how I describe it. Housecats’ lives are less precarious than the lives of strays, but they are also disempowered. When a housecat's owner moves house, the cat has no say in the matter, and more confusingly - we wouldn't even be able to consult it if we wanted to. It gets put in a box and hauled across town with no concept of what is happening to it or why, and it emerges to find that its whole world has been changed.

And its not like a housecat's life is not precarious - its just precarious in ways it does not fully understand. Its owner could fall ill and give it up to a shelter. It could be hit and injured by a car when it is crossing the street. The earth could someday become uninhabitable to all mammals, including cats, due to climate change.

My concept of human flourishing was lacking a core component, and that component was agency.