Playing at Life
Human maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children
Friedrich Nietzsche., Beyond Good and Evil, §94
Playfulness is an interesting personal characteristic. I also think it has a philosophical significance - what does it take, as a fully grown human adult, to be playful with life?
Nietzsche writes about playfulness is several ways. He connects it to childhood and ideas about innocence and naivety and to caprice, the random hand of fate and the malice of the gods. He also relates playfulness to philosophical and psychological questions - how can we be playful about something as serious-sounding as ‘truth’? What is the game that our internal drives playing?
I think these are all connected. There is a sense in which, until you can be playful with something, you aren’t really serious about. You haven’t mastered it.
One of the reasons for this is unpredictability, and how you respond to it. In a game - cards, ch…
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