Homo Ludens Quotes

The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.

All play means something.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.

To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.

Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.

One more comment from the heart: I’m old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don’t wish to diminish the significance of these distractions-without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and possibly dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words he’ll keep for a life time. And finally, he’s free-and no other hobby can promise this-to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic.

Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various play-forms, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change, alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in full richness.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.

Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest”. Thus

The word "school" has a curious history behind it. Meaning originally "leisure" it has now acquired precisely the opposite sense of systematic work and training, as civilization restricted the free disposal of the young man's time more and more and herded larger and larger classes of the young to a daily life of severe application from childhood onwards.

For many years the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.

I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.

Play is battle and battle is play.

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generatly it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.

There is no more striking symptom of the decline of the play-factor than the disappearance of everything imaginative, fanciful, fantastic from men’s dress after the French Revolution. Long

real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted.

In play there is something “at play” which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active principle that makes up the essence of play, “instinct”, we explain nothing; if we call it “mind” or “will” we say too much. However we may regard it, the very fact that play has a meaning implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself.

The whole functioning of the mediaeval University was profoundly agonistic and ludic. The everlasting disputations which took the place of our learned discussions in periodicals, etc., the solemn ceremonial which is still such a marked feature of University life, the grouping of scholars into nationes, the divisions and subdivisions, the schisms, the unbridgeable gulfs—all these are phenomena belonging to the sphere of competition and play-rules. Erasmus

Our species is obsessed with play: we are either participating ourselves or watching others play for us.

The Japanese samurai held the view that what was serious for the common man was but a game for the valiant. Noble

This levelling down and democratization of men’s fashions is far from unimportant. The whole transformation of mind and society since the French Revolution is expressed in it.

El club corresponde al juego como el sombrero a la cabeza

Los juegos de azar hay que considerarlos como estériles para la cultura. Ninguna riqueza aportan ni al espíritu ni a la vida. Pero otra cosa ocurre cuando la porfía exige destreza, habilidad, conocimientos, valor y fuerza.

For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generally it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.

The supersession of the round dance, choral and figure dances by dancing à deux, whether this take the form of gyrating as in the waltz or polka or the slitherings and slidings and even acrobatics of contemporary dancing, is probably to be regarded as a symptom of declining culture. There

Here the bewildering antithesis of play and seriousness presents itself once more. We have gradually become convinced that civilization is rooted in noble play and that, if it is to unfold in full dignity and style, it cannot afford to neglect the play-element. The observance of play-rules is nowhere more imperative than in the relations between countries and States. Once they are broken, society falls into barbarism and chaos. On the other hand we cannot deny that modern warfare has lapsed into the old agonistic attitude of playing at war for the sake of prestige and glory. Now this is our difficulty: modern warfare has, on the face of it, lost all contact with play.

The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs--hunting, for instance--tend, in archaic society, to take on the play form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world.

Si se considera que lo serio es aquello que se expresa de manera consecuente en las palabras de la vida alerta, entonces la poesía nunca será algo serio. Se halla más allá de lo serio, en aquel recinto, más antiguo, donde habitan el niño, el animal, el salvaje y el vidente, en el campo del sueño, del encanto, de la embriaguez y de la risa. Para comprender la poesía hay que ser capaz de aniñarse el alma, de investirse el alma del niño como una camisa mágica y de preferir su sabiduría a la del adulto.

But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.

In few human activities is competition more ingrained than in music, and has been so ever since the battle between Marsyas and Apollo. Wagner has immortalized these vocal battles in his Meistersinger. As instances from periods following that of the Meistersinger themselves we may cite the contest between Handel and Scarlatti got up by Cardinal Ottoboni in the year 1709, the chosen weapons being harpsichord and organ. In 1717 Augustus the Strong, King of Saxony and Poland, wanted to organize a contest between J. S. Bach and a certain Marchand, but the latter failed to appear. In 1726 all London society was in an uproar because of the competition between the two Italian singers Faustina and Cuzzoni: there were fisticuffs and catcalls. Factions and cliques develop with astonishing ease in musical life. The 18th century is full of these musical coteries—Bononcini versus Handel, Gluck versus Piccini, the Parisian “Bouffons” versus the Opera. The musical squabble sometimes took on the character of a lasting and embittered feud, such as that between the Wagnerians and the Brahmsians.

Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber’s suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

We have lived for too long in the dreary region of homo economicus, our lives shadowed by principles of self-interest, utilitarian 'necessities,' instrumental moralities. But we are permitted to hope; to revive those great and optimistic words of Breton: 'Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights.' We must welcome, as did the Surrealists, the re-entry into modern life of homo ludens, the imaginative man at play, the intuitive visionary.

En lugar de fingir que «la Humanidad siempre ha hecho deporte» o que «siempre ha practicado juegos», diremos que los predicados tales como Ludens o Habilis son ya aplicables a ciertos animales pre-Sapiens (gusanos, insectos, vertebrados), mientras que otros predicados, vinculados a instituciones como las tantas veces citadas del discóbolo o del doríforo, sólo son aplicables, en diversas líneas, al Homo Sapiens.

Play gives meaning to life, wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga back in 1938. He christened us Homo ludens–‘playing man’. Everything we call ‘culture,’ said Huizinga, originates in play.

I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history,' intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, 'and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut.

Dutch historian J. Huizinga argues in 'Homo Ludens' that a competition, in order to be interesting to the public, has to be perceived as fair. There is a widespread perception, however, that the judging of FS is biased and that the results of competitions are often fixed. [...] But the perception of bias and favoritism in the judging of skating persists; and it persists because, well, there is bias and favoritism in judging

To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write. Leyden, June 1938.

De populaire spreekwijze drukt dit duidelijk uit in de woorden: het gaat niet om de knikkers, maar om het spel, in andere woorden: het finale element der handeling is in eerste instantie gelegen in den afloop als zoodanig, zonder directe betrekking op wat daarna volgt.

Niet een vorschende wetenschap maar de scheppende taal heeft woord en begrip samen gebaard.

Wie betrapt er zich niet herhaaldelijk op, dat hij een levenloos voorwerp, bij voorbeeld een weerbarsig boordknoopje, luide en doodelijk enstig toespreekt in zuiver menselijke qualificaties, waarmee hij het een weerspannigen wit toekennen, het verwijten doet, het wegens zijn laakbaar verzet beleedigt?

Human beings differ from other animals because they are sufficiently intelligent to wish that they could stop working and reasoning – and free enough to toil harder than other creatures to pursue both these aims in order to eventually enjoy free time. It follows that Homo faber and Homo sapiens are only contingent consequences of the truly essential Homo ludens. The fact that philosophers do not typically endorse this view only clarifies why they rarely qualify as champions of common sense…

Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens: “At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty.