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Reading group: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, starting with ‘Nature and Significance of Play’

Liu Mingqiao Fellow
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Play, sport & humourChineseModern EuropeanDaoismJohan HuizingaZhuangzi#homo-ludens#magic-circle#play-and-culture#reading-group
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Huizinga has sat unread on my shelf for too long, and I'd like company to finally read him.

Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is older than culture, since animals play without anyone teaching them, and that law, war, poetry, philosophy and art all grew up in forms that carry the marks of play. It is a historian's book rather than a philosopher's, full of examples, sometimes overreaching, always stimulating.

Plan (English translation, any edition; the chapters are short):

  • Week 1: Chapter 1, the nature and significance of play. Huizinga's characterisation of play: free, set apart from ordinary life, absorbing, bounded in time and place, ordered by rules, creating a community of players.
  • Week 2: Chapters 3 and 4, play and contest, and play and law.
  • Week 3: Chapters 5 and 9, play and war, and the play-forms in philosophy (the sophists, riddles, disputation).
  • Week 4: Chapter 12, the play-element in his own time. He is gloomy about modern sport.

My own interest: Zhuangzi's ‘free and easy wandering’ is a kind of play without rules, which Huizinga would not count as play at all. I want to see whether his definition is too European, too orderly, or simply different. Join whenever you like.

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5 replies

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Week 1. What struck me is how much work the idea of a bounded space does: the arena, the card table, the stage, the court of justice, the temple, all are ‘play-grounds’ set apart with their own rules. Teachers know this instinctively. A classroom with its bell and its rules is one. When it works, students enter a separate world for fifty minutes. When it fails, the magic circle breaks and it's just a room.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Hsieh Wei-ting

    Fellow

    Week 1, from a designer. The phrase ‘magic circle’ became a whole doctrine in game studies, mostly from a passing remark in this chapter. Reading it now, Huizinga is much less precious than the doctrine. He knows the circle is fragile: the spoilsport can shatter it, and play can tip into seriousness at any moment. The later theory made it a sealed wall.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Khalid Mahmood Awan

    Fellow

    Week 2, play and law. I sat thirty-one years in courtrooms and I expected to be offended. I was not. The argument is that a trial keeps the shape of a contest: two sides, rules of procedure, a bounded place, robes, a ritual ending. He describes old forms of dispute-settling that were openly contests, wagers or singing matches. My only reservation is that he underplays what the ritual protects. The formality of a court is not decoration. It is what lets a frightened defendant believe the outcome is not personal.

  4. Jorge Bonfim

    Fellow

    Week 3. Play and war is the uncomfortable chapter. Huizinga sees chivalry and the honour code as play-forms in warfare, and he clearly mourns their loss. Writing in 1938, I think he was already watching total war replace any idea of a contest with rules. As a capoeirista I understand the appeal of a fight with rules. I am less sure it was ever as noble as he thought.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Liu Mingqiao

    Fellow

    Week 4, and my answer to my own question. Huizinga insists on order and rules, so Zhuangzi's wandering doesn't fit. But in chapter 1 he also says play is free and ‘not serious’ while being utterly absorbing, and that describes the butcher Ding in Zhuangzi better than any rulebook. Perhaps Zhuangzi shows a play that has absorbed its rules so completely that it no longer notices them. Huizinga would have liked the cook, I think.

    Helpful · 2