Play, Seriousness, and Violence: the Advantage of Understanding Reality in Terms of Play

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Master Thesis Philosophy Leiden University

Play, Seriousness, and Violence:

The Advantage of Understanding Reality as Play

Name: Nick van Rijn

Student number: s1416367 Supervisor: Dr. Frank Chouraqui Master: Philosophy

Datum: 04-06-2020 Wordcount: 21215

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2 The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy – that is every man’s tragedy.

- Philip Roth, American Pastoral

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3

Introduction

This essay takes its cue from the insight of Johan Huizinga’s well-known book Homo Ludens in which he argues that the conceptual break between play and seriousness, which he sees as characteristic of his time, leads to fanaticism, extremism, and ultimately violence. He argues, while referring to Carl Schmitt, that “through an ethos that transcends the friend-foe relationship and [that] recognizes a higher goal than the gratification of the self, the group or the nation will a political society pass beyond the ‘play’ of war to true seriousness.”1_{For Huizinga, seriousness means the belief in the existence of absolute}

meaning. Such seriousness forgets the playful element of war and, enraptured by the attainment of a higher goal, sees the other not as an adversary to be overcome in order to win the game, but as an obstacle to destroy. “The spectacle of a society [Germany] rapidly goose-stepping into helotry is, for some, the dawn of the millennium. We believe them to be in error.”2_{With his study on play, Huizinga warned us, a year before Nazi-Germany’s}

invasion of Poland, of the devastating violence that was to come.

As such, Huizinga asks us to regain the element of play within society in order to reduce the possibility of the kind of destructive violence that has scarred the first half of the twentieth century. However, within this line of thought there are two main points that need clarification. First, abstract ontological beliefs (i.e. seriousness) have a bearing on violence. In other words, there is a causal relation between thought and reality that interacts through meaning which can result in violence. Second, Huizinga does not claim that understanding reality as play presents a solution to the question of violence. This is obvious in his discussion on the play element within war. This suggests that violence is irreducible and a fundamental part of reality. To say it more mildly, reality is conflictual and wherever there is conflict the chances for violence exist too. Given these apparent conflicting claims the question can be asked whether understanding reality as play can provide a solution to the problem of violence at all.

Off course, this question carries the presupposition that violence is an anomaly. However, once violence is conceived as an irreducible part of reality then no ideological thought can overcome that anomaly for that would mean overcoming reality itself. Even worse, as Huizinga points out, falling into seriousness often has the opposite effect to what it tries to achieve: eradicating violence by perpetuating of violence. This does not mean

1_{Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. p.211} 2_{Huizinga. p.207}

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5 that the question of violence should be forgotten altogether, but that it should be approached in a different way that tries to embrace reality with all of its cumbersome aspects without collapsing into justifying the practice of violence on the grounds that this is reality. It is here that the concept of play becomes important. Within play, interaction between the opponents is paramount. There would be no play without an opponent. In addition, however gruesome, vile, and cruel play can be, it is never the goal to dispense with any opposition altogether. Even better, insofar as we play, we appear to be happy.

The objective of this paper is, then, to engage with the opposition between play and seriousness and the advantages of overcoming that opposition. The main question that will guide this inquiry is how and in what sense understanding reality as play and, thus, to live as players, is more advantageous over and above understanding reality in terms of seriousness. At first blush, this question is a question of hope inspired by the same aversion for violence that characterizes much of idealist seriousness. However, the question is fundamentally tragic, for it acknowledges that violence cannot be overcome. Therefore, the question is posed in terms of relative advantage, because the claim is not that the question of violence is resolved by play.

Concerning the path taken here, insofar as living life as players entails embracing the conflictual nature of reality, this paper will not enter into an exposition of different kinds of violence in order to deduce which kinds of violence are allowed – if at all – and not allowed within play. This is, indeed, a great gap in this paper which does need attention. Here, I will stick to play as a concept and a way of living that allows for the possibility of change. On the basis of this quality, it is worthwhile asking this question. If we focus on the European continent, then we perceive an increase of conflicts sparked by economic, environmental, social, political and military crises3_{that demand attention and}

engagement. Confronting these crises might require hard decisions and rethinking of structures and traditions of a society that is already changing. If we choose the path of seriousness, then the challenges these crises pose to society will not only be much harder to confront, but also significantly increase the tensions inherent in these crises.

The argument is divided into two parts that is undergirded by an explanation of the interaction between thought and reality in the first chapter. This explanation shows that meaning originates in the relation between subject and object. In the first part, play

3_{We might rather say that after the cooling down of tensions in the post-soviet era and, from a European}

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6 will be developed as an ontological concept. In the second chapter, seriousness will be explained by way of an analogy between play and meaning that hinges on a moment of delusion. The moment of delusion is required in order to take the attributed meaning of objects to lie within the objects in order to engage with them. That momentary forgetting is the institution of seriousness. However, the significance of ignorance in the face of the contingency of meaning will require an account of the conceptual break between play and seriousness. The third chapter will argue that the conceptual break between play and seriousness is the result of fear of and actual meaningless suffering which is a possibility within conflictual reality. The second part will then ask the question of violence. The fourth chapter will argue that seriousness increases the practice of violence. Seriousness turns difference into opposition. Opposition comes to count as a negation of the ideal. In an attempt to actualize the ideal, the negative opposition must be eliminated. In reality this means, in the words of Hegel, “the fanaticism of destruction.”4_{The fifth chapter will}

argue that overcoming the conceptual break between play and seriousness reduces the practices of ideologically-motivated violence not by solving the question of violence, but by tacitly abandoning the idea of a solution; practicing liberty and moderate politics that is sustained by the quality of health as the result of a playful life. The main thesis, then, is that to understand reality as play allows for a healthy engagement with the conflictual nature of reality that, consequentially, reduces the practice of violence motivated by ideological seriousness as the result of the attempt to overcome any conflict. The ability of play to reduce unnecessary practices of violence that results from seriousness makes understanding reality in terms of play more advantageous than in terms of seriousness.

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7

Prelude

1. Thought and Reality

Through Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Marxism we can begin to understand the relational character of life and in what sense the interaction between thought and reality can be conceived. This is crucial for both understanding the concept of play and the argument in the third chapter that will engage with the relation between ideology and violence. For instance, when we play games, rules and objects are made up and consecutively acted upon when the game starts. It would be impossible to play a game without the possibility for a causal relation between thought and reality. As such, play requires a causal relation between thought and reality. Likewise, regarding ideology and violence, to make the claim that ideology does have a bearing on violence a causal relation between thought and reality is required. If there is no such relation, ideology cannot act upon reality and therefore cannot result in violence.

However, already here I will begin to show that ideology has a bearing on violence, but it will remain underdeveloped and make the case against materialist mechanistic interpretations of Marxism. Within material mechanistic interpretations of Marxism, the class struggle, and by extension the revolution and violence, arises out of objective material conditions which excludes ideology as a factor. However, Marx was eager to show precisely the correspondence between thought and a certain kind of practice that grounded his belief in the possibility for social change and the coming of the classless society. I will be using Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Marxism, since I believe that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation is true to that presupposition.

In Marxism and Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty argues that any philosophy that tries to understand Marxism in terms of either idealism or materialism will miss the point of what Marxism is about. “Marx is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand, he is opposed to all forms of mechanistic thought; on the other, he is waging war with idealism.”5_{If we}

want to be true to Marxism we have to understand Marxism as phenomenology, since only phenomenology gives an account of how thought interacts with reality.6_{The argument to}

refute either material mechanistic or idealist interpretations of Marxism implies that the phenomenological interpretation of Marxism changes the meaning of idealism and

5_{Merleau-Ponty, “Marxism and Philosophy.” p.128}

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8 materialism in such a way that these are always in relation with one another. Merleau-Ponty argues that

Marx’s materialism is the idea that all the ideological formations of a given society are synonymous with or complementary to a certain type of praxis, i.e., the way this society has set up its basic relationship with nature. It is the idea that economy and ideology have interior ties within the totality of history, like matter and form in a work of art or a perceptual thing […] The frequently celebrated relationship between ideology and economy remains mystical, prelogical, and unthinkable insofar as ideology remains ‘subjective’, economy is conceived as an objective process, and the two are not made to communicate the total historical existence and in the human objects that which express it.7

If we, like Descartes, search for the ultimate certainty in a pregiven, irrefutable subject, two problems emerge. First, we fall into the obvious and well-known problem of incommensurability between the body and mind. Second, due to incommensurability, Marx’s specific attempts to show how ideology does and can communicate with materiality is therefore impossible. The “cogito is false only in that it removes itself and shatters our inherence in the world.”8_{Through such an idealism the relation between}

ideology and the economy becomes indeed “unthinkable”. What is sought for is a causal interaction between thought and reality.

If we start from a materialist mechanistic perspective to interpret Marxism, then we have not reached communication either. Again, we are faced with two consecutive problems. Thought, or ideology, becomes a mere equation with materialism in which materialism, governed by eternal laws, has priority over thought. Thought originates in objective materiality. In addition, apart from the fact that this interpretation fails to understand communication, it contradicts the fundamental presupposition of change within Marxist thought. “A Marxist conception of human society and of economic society in particular cannot subordinate it to permanent laws like those of classical physics, because it sees society heading toward a new arrangement in which the laws of classical economics will no longer apply.”9_{Laws cannot be objective and permanent, for in such}

case it would not be possible to arrive at any other arrangement than the arrangement at

7_{Merleau-Ponty, “Marxism and Philosophy.” p.130-132} 8_{Merleau-Ponty. p.133}

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9 hand. As such, the material mechanistic interpretation undermines the emancipatory project that Marx espouses.

Both positions, as has been argued, contain a misunderstood relation between thought and reality. In the case of idealism, the relation becomes unthinkable, whilst there is a clear and obvious interaction. Thought is being expressed in terms of objects in the very words written down here. In the case of materialism, thought becomes a mere bystander, reducing all and everyone to mere objectivity. On this interpretation the class struggle in Marxist philosophy is not a conflict originating in ideas, but the result of objective material conditions that spurs the conflict between those who have the means of production and those who do not. The common idea is that this struggle will gradually develop into the revolution through the inner contradiction within capitalist society. However, such materialist mechanistic interpretations neglect the idea that Marx’s materialism, in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, is the relation between thought and praxis. Any new structure, or arrangement of society arises out of thought accompanied with a certain kind of practice. Therefore, to the extent that the class struggle is a struggle between different kinds of praxes, it is an ideological struggle.

However, the way in which thought interacts with reality needs the be examined more thoroughly. Right from the start of his Phenomenology of Perception¸ Merleau-Ponty engages with the question of what it means to ask the question “what is real?”. Both idealists and realists uphold the same fundamental presupposition. Reality must be independent from our experience. Merleau-Ponty calls this a naïve realism.10_The

standards that idealists and realists pose on reality are so high that what we find in experience can never live up to that standard. Therefore, we fall into false categorizations of the thing-in-itself. However, the only way for us to know what is real is through experience. What we experience is the world: “the world is there before any possible analysis of mine, and it would be artificial to make it the outcome of a series of syntheses which link, in the first place sensations, then aspects of the object corresponding to different perspectives, when both are nothing but products of analysis, with no sort of prior reality.”11_{Reality, as we experience it, is real; it is not a reconstruction through a}

synthetic operation in a pregiven unity of the subject. Even if we dispense with our belief in the world, if we let it be a dream, if we “break with our familiar acceptance of it,” then

10_{Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. p. ix-x} 11_{Merleau-Ponty. p. x}

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10 this break does not teach us the existence of a transcendental subject but only “the unmotivated upsurge of the world.”12

The alternative to explain the interaction between thought and reality is to see ideology and materiality not as grounding, but as the result of their relational inherence in the world. Any act of perception, any experience happens within the world and because there is a world to which the human is tied from the outset. This bond with the world does not entail that any perception is of ‘true’ things in the world regardless of perception. The bond merely grants the possibility for anything to appear at all. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that before any subject or object is given, the world shows up to me and it shows itself as something to someone. Neither the subject, nor the object are pregiven, they are a relation resulting from the unmotivated upsurge of the world. That relation is characterized as communication. What I think about the world, shapes the objects that I experience. It grants them a meaning that allows for my engagement with them. As such, the objects that are perceived do not contain an independent meaning. Something appears and consecutively obtains its meaning through description by the act of perception that is the result of the appearance. For example, the famous duck-rabbit drawing only becomes a duck or a rabbit once we have made up our minds about whether the drawing is a duck or a rabbit. Before that it is not even a drawing – for that already entails an act of description – but an appearance before our eyes. The object and the subject arise out of this appearance in the relational moment between the perceiver and the thing. The subject names and singles out the appearance in the world as a distinct object, naming it a drawing and consecutively a drawing of either a rabbit or a duck. It is the move from the intangible towards the tangible through interpretation and meaning. This process is entirely relational.

Hence, the world that we live through is a world of meaning that is not grounded in either a subject or an object, but in their communicative relation. Therefore, the world is inexhaustible. “The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.”13_{We can never possess the objects through knowing their essences for}

there are no such essences only relations. The duck-rabbit drawing is a duck-rabbit drawing because we interpret it as such. In other words, we give the drawing a meaning

12_{Merleau-Ponty. p. xv} 13_{Merleau-Ponty. p. xviii-xix}

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11 through interpretation. On that basis the drawing is as real as it can be for only in the relation can it become real. Therefore, meaning is not found congenitally in the object, rather meaning is created.

Now, then, we will continue with the remainder and core of this essay where, in part I, the interaction between thought and reality as outlined above will serve as the foundation upon which the phenomenon of play can be understood and, consequently in part II, the reduction of unnecessary violence through understanding reality as play. To sum up this first introductory chapter, 1) neither subjectivism nor objectivism can give a coherent account of the interaction between thought and reality. For subjectivism, the interaction becomes unthinkable through the problem of incommensurability. For objectivism, there simply is no causal link between thought and reality. 2) Neither subjectivism nor objectivism can be the starting point for understanding reality, but rather as the consequence of their relational inherence in the world. Hence, 3) meaning is created rather than found, since meaning assignment is the act of making tangible objects in the world.

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Part 1 Play as Ontology

2. Play, Reality, and Seriousness

If we think of reality in terms of relations that yield objects of experience through meaning attribution, then we have not yet really spelled out the manner of engagement we uphold in engaging with that meaning and its objects. We can name this and that, set up rules that regulate our behavior for how to treat such and such thing, but it only becomes real once we act upon meaning. In other words, meaning becomes real when we start to use the objects of experience according to the way we have interpreted them. This requires that we take the meaning of the object to be within the object, which we will understand as the institution of seriousness. To engage with meaning, therefore, requires a moment of delusion in which it is forgotten that the meaning of the object is assigned.

Here, the phenomenon of play, I will argue, allows us to understand both the process of meaning making and the moment of delusion that results in the institution of seriousness. The primacy of play to explain the process of meaning assignment relies on the idea that, in the common sense meaning of the word, play represents a real life example of the process of meaning institution: what we perceive in play is an act of meaning making in which rules are made up and objects are given meaning. Given that meaning is created rather than found, I will take that structure of play to be an ontological structure where play explains the production of meaningful objects and also provides the manner of engagement with those objects.

This chapter will unfold in four sections. Firstly, the argument will show that in order to understand play, play must be taken as more primary than either subject and object. In other words, play substantiates subject and object. Then, we will delve into Huizinga’s analysis of the notion of seriousness in opposition to play and within play. Afterwards, the interaction between play and seriousness that relies on a moment of delusion will be explicated through setting up an analogy between play and meaning. At last, the structure of play will be problematized by addressing ignorance with regards to the contingency of meaning.

2.1 The Phenomenon of Play

In the now seminal work on play Homo Ludens, Huizinga endeavors to investigate the play element ‘of’ culture. Counter to the English translation, the genitive used is important. If it was a study of the play element ‘in’ culture that would suggest that culture contains

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13 play as one of its elements, while Huizinga from the start emphasizes that “civilization emerges in and as play.”14_{Such confusion has the effect of making play an instantiation of}

culture, rather than the reverse and wrongly accusing Huizinga of ignoring the diversity of play from which point onwards we fall into a study of games and all its different classifications.15_{Therefore, Huizinga speaks of the play element of culture. The extent of}

Huizinga’s insights will lead me to conclude that play is ontological: play produces beings which requires the institution of subject and object in order to be able to engage with those beings.

To start with the characteristics of play, we find, at the beginning of Huizinga’s second chapter, a concise summary:

Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life16

Huizinga recognizes that we take play to be other than ordinary life. Play stands outside ordinary life and is conceived as fictive, imagined, with rules accepted by the players. How can play be more primary when play is ‘different’ from ordinary life? To begin answering this question, Huizinga underlines the insufficiency of biological and psychological explanation of what play is. “They all start form the assumption that play must serve something which is not play, that it must have some kind of biological purpose.”17_Such

functional explanations argue that play points to the need to release energy, prepares us for serious life, teaches us restraint, and more. However, those explanations do not explain the fun, the drunkenness, the passion, the absorption and intensity of play that has its aim only in itself.

The question remains: Why do we even play at all? “Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing of its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like nearly all abstractions:

14_{Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Foreword.}

15_{In his book Man, Play, and Games, the founder of Game theory, Caillois precisely criticizes Huizinga on these}

grounds and, in an attempt to rectify it, goes on to classify all sort of games, while that is exactly not Huizinga’s point.

16_{Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. p.28} 17_{Huizinga. p.2 Italics added.}

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14 justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.”18_The

sheer presence of play in life should make us understand play as not merely opposed to or in service of ordinary life, but pointing towards something that is fundamental to life. Play is an element, or as we would say it here, it is an ontological structure. Play itself is a necessity. This necessity is clarified in Winnicott’s book Playing and Reality. The insight underlying his psychological inquiries can be succinctly summarized to one rule: play constitutes the self as separate from external reality, i.e. the subject and the object.

Play is immensely exciting. It is exciting not primarily because the instincts are involved be it understood! The thing about playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is found to be reliable.19

According to Winnicott, who uses his therapeutic experiences with children to flesh out his findings, the child obtains an idea of the self and the world in one playful movement which he calls “transitional phenomena”. Within this movement the child acquires a sense of something that is not himself through the acquisition of a “transitional object” like a teddy bear, or dummy, i.e. the play-toy. The child gets the faint awareness that there is a sense in which the teddy bear can be controlled. It becomes the property of the child. In the process the child gathers the trust and security for engaging with the world. Before that moment the child felt the world escaped him. The transitional object reassures that the world is not entirely elusive and that there are safe ways to accept the world and engage with it intimately and reliably. The child acquires a world that teaches him that he is both a thing in the world and able to interact with the world. We become both object and subject, to be able to act and to be acted upon. Our freedom is therefore restricted, because we are bound to the world. Nevertheless, playing takes us out of the initial undetermined stage without control. That realm of interaction the child experiences, is the realm of life.

18_{Huizinga. p.3}

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We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweaving of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals.20

Life is what happens in the realm of play, the area of transitional phenomena. Without play there would be no self and no objects to engage with. Therefore, play succeeds where subjectivism or objectivism fail. Neither objectivism nor subjectivism can explain play successfully without reference to any aim outside play (like biological release of energy, to become grown-ups in a just state); play is impossible in subjectivism or objectivism, while play explains the subject and the object and at the same time the aim remains within play. A word of caution is, however, needed. This does not mean that play is once again a function that serves something other than itself for this we had denied. On the contrary, the aim of play is not to instantiate the subject and object, but these are conditions needed to live life as play through playing. The additional result of playing is that play necessarily leads from the ontological into the ontic by producing beings that have meaning.

Thus, if we remember that subject and object, according to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, are a relation that arises out of their inherence in the world, then the phenomenon of play can be explained by making play the source of the relation. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception is not recognition of some objective external meaning or recognition of some subjective internal idea. Perception is interpretation that gives an object for a subject to be perceived. Within play, the world outside is controlled trough interpreting objects of perception for a subject to engage with. This we perceive in games very clearly. Three poles and a net become a football goal; a bloated piece of leather becomes a ball you kick in the net that, accompanied with rules and a certain time and place, is the game of football that we can play. Understanding play requires a notion of meaning attribution. However, since play is more primary in understanding reality than either subject or object, meaning attribution can also be explained by play. Thus, we reach an analogy between play and meaning. Yet, with play we also have a phenomenon that complements the depiction of perception and reality that is accounted for by the process of meaning attribution outlined in the first chapter. Play or playing is a mode of being that explains the manner of engagement we have with reality. This requires that the phenomenon of play explains seriousness. The analogy between play and meaning will

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16 allow for that explanation. But first, I will briefly turn to Huizinga’s discussion on play and seriousness.

2.2 Huizinga on Play and Seriousness

The discussion on the meaning of seriousness in Homo Ludens does not give a clear answer to the question where seriousness comes from. In addition, Huizinga operates with two notions of seriousness that are not clearly demarcated in his argument. One is the opposite of play and one is included by play.

The argument so far has been to suggest that if we take play to be ontological, it is everywhere in life, even in ordinary life. Reality plays, and we cannot help but play. However, these assertions might seem far-fetched, given that we commonly do not think of our everyday engagements with the world as play. We work, and to most of us, that experience is not play. But that is precisely the point. As Huizinga says: “To our way of thinking, play is the direct opposite of seriousness. […] this opposition seems as irreducible to other categories as the play-concept itself.”21_{But it only remains cheap}

when we are stuck in regarding play and ordinary life, including work, as mutually exclusive opposites; what is play is not serious and vice versa. After a long historic-linguistic analysis of the meaning of the words play and seriousness, Huizinga concludes:

We can say, perhaps, that in language the play-concept seems to be much more fundamental than its opposite. The need for a comprehensive term expressing “not-play” must have been rather feeble, and the various expressions for “seriousness” are but a secondary attempt on the part of language to invent the conceptual opposite of “play”. They are grouped around the ideas of “zeal”, “exertion”, “painstaking”, despite the fact that in themselves all these qualities may be found associated with play as well. […] The significance of “earnest” is defined by and exhausted in the negation of play – earnest is simply “not-playing” and nothing more. The significance of “play”, on the other hand is by no means defined or exhausted by calling it “not-earnest”, or “not serious”. Play is a thing by itself. The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.22

21_{Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. p. 5} 22_{Huizinga. p.44-45}

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17 Play can very well account for seriousness, while seriousness excludes play. In the long historical development Huizinga notices that play and seriousness have existed on a continuum so that, originally, we can form the word-pair play-seriousness rather than keeping them categorically distinct and mutually exclusive. However, if we take seriousness to be excluding play, then we run into the problem of the fact that play does, can, and requires seriousness. Without seriousness the rules that make up the game for instance to turn the field of football into a field with a certain set of rules necessary for the game to take place, the game could not take place. In addition, athletes do experience agony, hardship, and pain (which is regarded as the opposite of play), but still experience what they are doing as play.

The seriousness within play is, therefore, a seriousness needed for the possibility for the engagement with the assigned meaning to the objects and the rules that make up the game even if that requires sometimes negatively valued terms. The other kind of seriousness that tries to exclude play has to point to a reality that is more real, more fundamental in which an ultimate ground of importance is sought. That seriousness contains the belief in the existence of absolute objective meaning which has been negated in this paper on the basis of both its impossibility to explain play and the causal interaction between thought and reality.

However, this leaves the question how seriousness is instituted. Up till now, we have only revealed that seriousness is included by play. In addition, now we are confronted with two different notions of seriousness and we have to understand both of these notions of seriousness through play. If play, as Huizinga suggests, is primary to understanding reality, then play must explain both forms of seriousness even if the seriousness understood as the opposite of play is a mistake and a derivative of play-seriousness. Yet, to explain the break between play and seriousness out of play will require a chapter on its own. For now, I will focus on play and the notion of seriousness that it includes out of which the problem of and the need to explain the break between play and seriousness will be introduced.

2.3 Play and the Institution of Seriousness

So far, the analogy between play and meaning has been looming in the background. But the analogy will be taken up here fully. The purpose of this analogy is to gain a principle of the institution of seriousness embedded within play. The argument here will show that

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18 play contains such a principle. The principle explains the move into the ontic which relies on the idea of delusion. In other words, within play and by analogy meaning, we delude ourselves by believing that the meaning of the object is really hidden within the object. This is not a fallacy that can be overcome, but a necessity of play in order to be absorbed in the game and be able to play the game. Thus, play institutes seriousness through forgetting that the meaning was attributed.

However, for this analogy to become more than an analogy, in the sense that understanding the attribution of meaning through play signifies a difference, play and meaning have to be taken to be analogies on the ontological level that naturally lead into the ontic. The suggestion here is that, if we strip play of its ontic determination as games that involve rules, players, space and time, and objects, what we are left with is a principle of institution. In the example in the previous section on the playing child, play accounted for a principle of self-institution, an interaction between freedom and determination. The acquisition of a world by the child through play was a movement into the ontic where meaning resides. If we do the same thing with meaning, then meaning ontically involves the alphabet, natural language, and history etc. If we remove all that it is hard to understand what meaning is. Thus, if we take meaning-making and play to be ontologically identical, then we can understand meaning making better through understanding play better. The great advantage of setting up this analogy is that we gain a mode of being, call it the play mode, that allows to describe the manner of engagement we have with meaning. Consequently, we can start to comprehend the origins and meaning of seriousness.

In play a random object, or set of objects, can gain a meaning that the object did not originally have and is subsequently used according to the new meaning. A way to make sense of this, I suggest, is to consider that to play contains a moment of delusion. This moment allows for the possibility to take the new meaning serious (i.e. that the meaning really lies within the object). The idea of delusion I take from the etymology of the word illusion which has its origin in the Roman word illudere. Illudere means to mock at, to make fun of, and to play with. The combination between these three verbs is important. But, at first, notice that, originally, illusion did not contain the idea of deceptive appearance. Deceptive appearance implies a notion of something more real than what appears. That specific denotation the word illusion acquired only later through the

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19 development of church Latin.23_{If we turn back to the three original denotations of}

illudere, then to play is at the same time to mock, to make fun of. Once we are playing, we are mocking, we are making fun of something in the sense that things, objects, get a meaning that does not exist independent of our experience and still we take those objects to have that meaning. Therefore, play is illusion, but not in the sense that play and the beings that it produces are not real. The first part of the argument in this essay has been to show that whatever counts as real can be construed as precisely determined through play.

This ambiguous relation with the external world can be understood if we include a moment of delusion that results in seriousness. Objects that are strictly speaking interpreted become recognized as what the objects are through the attribution of meaning. Meaning allows for engagement in the way that those objects are taken to be. The attribution of meaning has the effect of deluding us for the act of attribution. Hence, it is forgotten that the act happened. Playing games requires and, therefore, includes this moment from the outset. Playing institutes seriousness. Without seriousness there is no possibility to engage with the meaning attributed to things. I cannot use a rugby ball if I do not take a rugby ball to mean a rugby ball. The meaning of the object has to be taken to lie in the object in order to engage with the object according to the specific meaning that the object is given. At that moment, the difference between whether objects are serious in themselves or that objects are taken to be serious becomes obfuscated to the point of forgetting. Through the seriousness of the engagement the attribution of meaning becomes forgotten, likewise play becomes forgotten: play makes us practice being serious. Play is an interaction between the playful, the process of meaning institution, and the serious which relies on a moment of delusion.

2.4 Play and Ignorance

However, this account would suggest that, if seriousness is the result of a forgetful moment embedded within play, then the obvious and somewhat cheap solution to overcoming the opposition between play and seriousness would be to start entering into the process of remembrance by revealing the very process through which meaning is

23_{Etymology retrieved from the Online Etymology Dictionary on April 30, 2020.}

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20 created outlined within this paper. But, the actual application of such remembrance often meets profound resistance.

The Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas presents one such example. The discussion about the racism of Black Pete - which has become an annual tradition by itself - not only starts to become more violent, but also reveals, to a certain extent, the failure of engaging in the process of remembering the contingent nature of the narrative of the Sinterklaas festival throughout history. For all that, pointing out the contingency has resulted in a reluctance to transform the institution and increasingly stronger assertions of the ‘essence’ of the Sinterklaas festival that cannot exist without black-painted faces. Hence, forgetfulness does not seem to be a term that allows to fully grasp the move into seriousness for it cannot account for the willingness to remain ‘forgetful’. The point here is not to say that the forgetting-model is false. One could indeed say that the festivity was assigned absolute value, because we forgot that the festival is contingent. Rather, the point is that it is not sufficient to understand the reluctance to confront the contingent nature of, for example, the Sinterklaas festival to the extent that it is ignored.

Before we continue, ignoring can mean both not-knowing and not-acknowledging. The problem is that the boundary between ignoring as knowing and ignorance as not-acknowledging is not always that clear. But, for the sake of clarity, let us say there is. Three things can be said about introducing ignoring into the story here. First of all, supplementing the forgetfulness in play with ignorance shows that it works on the level of experience itself. In playing, the fact that the meaning of the object is assigned is forgotten and ignored. We do not know beforehand we are deluded by ourselves and, therefore, we can forget. This line of thought is exemplified in one of Nietzsche’s notes. Nietzsche argues that the move into the ontic starts at the moment of sense-perception.

The making-complete (e.g.: when we regard the movement of a bird as movement). The immediate invention begins at the level of sense-perception already. We always form complete

men on the basis of what we see and know about them. We cannot stand emptiness, that is the arrogance of our imagination: how little it is attached to truth and used to it! We do not at any

moment lie content with the known (or the knowable!). The playful [spielende] construction upon the given material is our permanent and fundamental [Grund-] activity, and so is our imagining.24

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21 The playful activity, here, is taken to be so fundamental that it works on a level where there is not even any awareness on the part of the humans of the fact that everything that is perceived must become complete. It is arrogance, for there is a reluctance to look at the truth. The truth being that the perception of an object is a playful construction and that the object is not in itself. Thus, ignorance as not-knowing helps us to better understand our relation with seriousness.

Secondly, if we think of play again as stepping out of ‘ordinary life’, then the level of absorption into a game relies heavily on purposely not-acknowledging the moment of delusion beforehand in order to forget and to be able to enjoy the game. We know that it is not ‘real’, but we suspend that knowledge. To keep the game going requires that we do not ask about the ‘truthfulness’ of the game. Thus, objectivity is not important in order to play. Off course, the extent to which this might happen also depends on the quality of the seduction of the game. The spoilsport is the precisely the one who cannot hold up that attitude any longer. Yet, there is a moment when the game stops and everyone goes back to ordinary life. However, the argument so far has been to show that there is no difference between ‘ordinary life’ and play.

Thus, thirdly, it severely complicates the problem. The problem is that the ignorance alluded to in the Sinterklaas example is subsequent and based on something else than opening the possibility to be absorbed. We can remember the contingency of the festival and overcome forgetfulness, but the ignorance is not overcome by that remembrance. Not only is the ignorance in the example an indicator of our unknowingness, but also of the conscious decision to disregard the ‘truth’ and to remain ignorant when confronted with the ‘truth’. Paradoxically, in order to keep the game going we stop playing. The result is that at that moment the break between play and seriousness is realized. Already here, then, I would like to state the systematic point that violence relies on the break between play and seriousness through forgetting and ignoring play. The increasing violence that we perceive at the annual festival of Sinterklaas is an indicator of that process; any resistance becomes a threat to the aim of keeping the game of Sinterklaas going.

This brings us back to the two notions of seriousness. As of yet we have described the institution of seriousness out of play that is needed to play. However, the problem that Huizinga saw as characteristic of his time was that play and seriousness had become

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22 separated. Play-seriousness and the seriousness as the opposite of play are rather two different things even though the latter is a derivative form of the former. The question that is raised here is what ignorance reveals, more precisely, about our relation to seriousness. Therefore, the problem of ignorance pushes towards the need to explain the break between play and seriousness.

To sum up our findings here within the framework of the interaction between thought and reality: 1) the phenomenon of play gives a principle of the institution of the subject and object, whilst both subjectivism and objectivism cannot. 2) Likewise, play can include a notion of seriousness, whilst seriousness cannot. This gave us two different notions of seriousness; play-seriousness and seriousness as the opposite of play. 3) Within play the institution of seriousness happens through a moment of delusion that is ignored, either unknowingly or knowingly, that leads to the forgetting of the attribution of meaning. But what are the reasons for ignoring the process of meaning making and remain within seriousness after we are confronted with the contingency of seriousness?

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23 3. The conceptual Break between Play and Seriousness

The interaction between play and seriousness accounted for by play cannot satisfactorily answer how the conceptual break between play and seriousness arises. If play is more primary, then where does the break come from? In other words, how can we truly forget that seriousness is instituted, and is thus not so serious after all? The answer to these questions must lie within understanding reality as play which will require a more thorough assessment of how the transgression into seriousness—in which play and seriousness are regarded as opposites — occurs.

Here, the explanation of the break between play and seriousness will be informed by what is known as the slave revolt in morality that Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals (GM). However, the academic literature is nowhere near a cohesive understanding of how the slave revolt happened, when it happened, and if it happened. Moreover, there is even disagreement about why and to what purpose the event happened within the body of Nietzsche’s philosophy. As one might guess, I do not wish to reconstruct the slave revolt myself. Rather, I will use the reconstruction of the slave revolt set up by Chouraqui in his article Hyperbole and Conflict in the Slave Revolt in Morality with a purpose: to understand how humans come to live under the separation of play and seriousness that will allow for an understanding of ignorance.

The first step is to briefly introduce the slave revolt and clarify the reasons for this unexpected move. Secondly, I will use the reconstruction of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality and argue that it was a means for the downtrodden to give sense to a life of suffering that was able to overpower the masters. This was achieved through, first, by distorting the system of valuation used by the masters, and then using a new weapon, namely: terrorist hyperbolic discourse, i.e. fear-mongering that saturated the master’s capacity to hold any critical distance to the contradictory nature of the ideals of the slave revolt. This will give us two extra pillars that are deeply embedded within human existence: suffering and fear. Thus, thirdly, the existence and possibility of meaningless suffering inspires fear, this can lead to ignoring the process through which seriousness is instituted. Nihilism, insofar as that means there is no inherent sense in reality, conjoined with our toilsome reality is a tough reality to face from which we often avert our eyes. If we do so, play and seriousness are separated.

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24 3.1 Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt in Morality

Huizinga’s suggestion to explain the conceptual break between what is play and seriousness remains rather vague. In the gradual development of civilization play comes to be seen as an independent phenomenon that stands outside ordinary life.25_{At the}

moment that civilization becomes aware of play, play is already separated from what is deemed real, i.e. serious. Play comes to be seen as recreation, as a stepping out of ordinary life. The awareness of play as an independent phenomenon suggests that civilization did not have the awareness of play even as it was evolving in the playful spirit. Yet, a conclusive answer to the conceptual break between play and seriousness that arises in and out of play is not given, but Huizinga does allude to a process of historical development. As such, the question is genealogical, the break must have its origin in history, and we have to provide a genealogical account that makes room for breaks. This genealogical account, I suggest, we can find in Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality.

Nietzsche is, however, rather unclear about the slave revolt. Nietzsche never really indicates that the slave revolt was an actual event. For one, he remains evasive about the question whether there ever really was a confrontation between the slaves and the masters, suggesting that it “took two thousand years to unfold.”26_{In addition, he even}

claims that the outcome of the struggle between the nobles and the slaves is on many places undecided.27_{As Chouraqui argues, “GM says very little about any form of contact}

between the two castes, although it says much about how each caste regards the other and itself. It seems that the notion of the slave revolt in morality therefore plays the role of a placeholder more than an explanatory concept: it names a mysterious event, one that must be presupposed to have taken place, but which remains unexplained.”28_However,

the reconstruction used here is a thought experiment that allows for an understanding of the separation between play and seriousness based on the resources of play itself. On this basis the reconstruction of the slave revolt has value, even though the slave revolt might not have taken place at all.

The potentiality and relevance of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality to allow for an understanding of the break relies on two reasons. First, the break from play into seriousness is, as I take it, the same break from immanence to transcendence that the

25_{Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. p. 111} 26_{GM I, 8}

27_{GM I, 11}

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25 slave revolt achieved. The slaves took an everyday sense of valuation and made that valuation into a transcendent and unconditional valuation. Likewise, everyday seriousness understood within play has been made into unconditional seriousness. Nietzsche in GM uses the term ascetic idealism to refer to this system of valuation. The ascetic ideal as the belief in a metaphysical grounding of all reality is seriousness as opposed to play. Therefore, when Nietzsche asks in GM III 11, “What is the meaning of all seriousness?”, I take him to be asking about and attempting to explain broadly the same conundrum that drives the first part of this essay: where does seriousness come from?

Secondly, for Nietzsche this question means: what are the conditions that make it necessary for a form of life to live like that? Nietzsche never refrains from taking into account the psychological and physiological conditions through which change takes place. If we try to explain the break out of those conditions embedded within human life, then the account will not only be immanent but also genuine towards human existence. Hence, through the reconstruction of the slave revolt we can explain the break between play and seriousness and, in effect, comprehend the conundrum of ignorance.

3.2 The Struggle without Muscles

Now we will turn to the reconstruction of the slave revolt in morality by Chouraqui. According to Chouraqui, the reconstruction of Nietzsche’s slave revolt has to give a plausible account of the slave revolt that remains within the bounds of his immanent notion of the will to power as it is lived by the masters. Nonetheless the revolt should have the effect of creating a wedge in that immanent worldview by referring to a transcendent imaginative reality through which the slaves are capable of overpowering the masters.

This requires that, first, we understand what provoked the slave revolt. In simplistic terms, the dominance of the masters minimized the capacity of the slaves to discharge their drives externally. This leads to suffering. For Nietzsche, drives are manifestations of the ‘will to power’ which is the language he uses for his psychology. With the ‘will to power’ Nietzsche does not mean physical power, but, more importantly, also a principle of interpretation.29_{Now it may seem redundant to stress that the slaves were}

suffering. The slaves being dominated by the masters, whipped, beaten and controlled,

29_{The will to power does not signify mere physical power which is a common misunderstanding in the literature}

on Nietzsche. In the reconstructed work The Will to Power, Nietzsche says that “the will to power interprets. […] In fact, interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.” p.342

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26 are in effect incapable of exercising any kind of mastery over anything. The slaves are rivetted to themselves, passively being controlled, instead of controlling. Suffering signifies the incapacity to exercise any amount of control over a given situation.

The inability of the slaves to discharge their drives externally does not mean that the drives are not discharged at all. According to Nietzsche, the drives have to discharge (i.e. interpretations have to be made) in order to exercise control and to be capable of living without dying.30_{Nietzsche emphasizes that the ascetic ideal, seriousness, arises out}

of the needs of life. “The ascetic ideal is derived from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life, which seeks to preserve itself and fights for existence with any available means.”31_{As Chouraqui notes, this entails that the slave revolt is not an}

overcoming of the will to power as a principle for political relations, but “brought about by the slaves as a torsion in the expression of the will to power.”32_{Without the capacity}

for external discharge, the expression of the will to power was reversed and turned onto the self. Nietzsche calls this the internalization of the instincts.33_{The internalization,}

among other faculties, gave the slaves imagination and here the slaves sought to find their interpretation of the world. The slaves could imagine themselves living in a world in which there was no conflict, no pain, and no suffering. As an escape from the reality in which they found themselves, the slaves branded the imaginative world as the ‘real’ world. Consequently, the world in which they lived was regarded as a mere copy. The duality of a ‘real’ world and an ‘apparent’ world created the possibility for a new kind of valuation.

The kind of valuation used by the masters entails an equation of identity between a range of terms that are, as such, interchangeable. The idea of reality that the masters uphold is one of full presence; what is real = “good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed.”34_{As such, value is identical with what is real. Slave valuation, on the}

other hand, separates what is real in terms of presence from what is good. What is deemed good is not what is real by identity, but rather what can count as the good. Here, Chouraqui

30_{Remember here also the necessary move of play into the ontic. The move from the intangible to the tangible in}

order to control actual objects.

31_{GM III 13}

32_{Chouraqui, “Hyperbole and Conflict in the Slave Revolt in Morality.” p.238}

33_{GM II 16, “Every instinct which does not vent itself externally turns inwards – this is what I call the}

internalization of man: it is at this point that what is later called ‘soul’ first develops in man. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as between two membranes, has been extended and expanded, has acquired depth, breadth, and height in proportion as the external venting of human instincts has been inhibited.”

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27 points to the grammatical importance of this difference: “goodness becomes an adjective which allows for a ‘good’ (a real individual) to not be ‘good’ (morally or ethically).”35_This

grammatical difference also reveals that the undoing of the masters’ system of valuation relies on a distortion of that kind of valuation rather than an overcoming. Chouraqui supports this by claiming that otherwise it would not be able for the masters to grasp the new kind of valuation. Within the distorted valuation, what is good is still what is beautiful etc. by identity, however this does not entail that the good is real in terms of presence. Rather, the standard for the good is found in the imaginative reality that as a result competes with the real as presence. As such, the distortion makes the good a concept of judgement that operates on the separation between the apparent reality as presence and reality as truth.

The fact that the new kind of valuation is only a distortion of the old kind supports Chouraqui’s claim that the slave’s kind of valuation rests on a contradiction. He claims that, according to Nietzsche, “there is only one way that anything can have value, and it is by having reality [presence]. But the history traced by the genealogy shows how this has been forgotten, not how it has been changed. [Slave valuation] still appeals to a practice of valuation that is indistinguishable from the valuing of ‘this world,’ yet it does so in order to devalue this world.”36_{To summarize, then, the slaves come up with a new equation;}

what counts as real is good. This has the effect of making the present reality an apparent reality that is robbed from goodness. The good is then placed into a higher reality which is absent, but that always refers back to the apparent reality for valuation. This new kind of valuation, then, allows us to comprehend the genealogical origins of the forgetting of play and also that it is a forgetting rather than a break that created something else entirely. The reconstruction of the slave revolt here shows that it created a new kind of valuation that operated as a distortion of the old one. Likewise, we should understand the break between play and seriousness not as a change, but as the forgetting of play. Even if it is a distortion, it is still play. However, this does not yet answer the question of the significance of ignorance yet.

I suggest, we can approach that problem by investigating how the slaves were capable of overpowering the masters by presenting a convincing interpretation. This is a problem, because the slaves, as the weaker kind, cannot rely on physical strength. Even

35_{Chouraqui, “Hyperbole and Conflict in the Slave Revolt in Morality.” p.241} 36_{Chouraqui. p. 242}

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28 further, how is it that the masters become adherents of that interpretation when that interpretation is based on the positing of an imaginative reality, that, in addition, runs counter to their own convictions. As Graham Parkes notes, the will to power as an interpretative force is a much more subtle exercise of power.

To offer a convincing interpretation of the world, by contrast [to crude physical power], to have others see things in a different way, is to exercise a much more subtle and enduring form of power. […] The ground for Nietzsche’s (albeit ambivalent) admiration for both Socrates and Jesus: lacking physical force they nevertheless exerted tremendous influence through their respective interpretations of existence.37

What counts as convincing does not mean that the interpretation is without flaws, but that the interpretation expresses enough convincing force that is not physical, but that can overpower the masters. In other words, what makes some absent imaginative notions of ‘God’, ‘heaven’, and ‘hell’, without the possibility for them to be actually perceived, come to count as real by its mere mention?

The insightful argument that Chouraqui develops is that the slave revolt in morality was achieved through the use of a newly discovered weapon, namely; terrorist hyperbolic discourse.

For Nietzsche, hyperbole abuses our ability to engage with representations as if they were reality. Indeed, when confronted to hyperbolic discourse, our critical abilities are numbed. […] in hyperbole: extreme language and vivid imagery are convincing by the mere fact that it is extreme. […] understanding hyperbole, therefore, means believing in the existence of the object mentioned

inasmuch as it is mentioned. The mere hyperbolic naming of the key hyperboles that structure slaves teaching, i.e. ‘God’, ‘heaven’, ‘hell,’ ‘eternal damnation’ makes it sufficient for them to be affirmed: God is made present by the word ‘God’.38

The language used by the slaves to overcome the masters consisted of positing an imaginative world in which the dominance of the masters was reversed. They taught the masters that it was not them but the masters who would be suffering in that other world. Hence, the slaves cast traumatizing images of immense and perpetual suffering over the masters to make the hyperboles ‘God’, ‘Heaven’, and ‘Hell’ come alive. The terrorist intent

37_{Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology. p.308} 38_{Chouraqui, “Hyperbole and Conflict in the Slave Revolt in Morality.” p. 244}

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29 in the hyperbolic language used by the slaves had the effect of exhausting the opposite reality of the masters to such an extent that the contradictions in the slaves’ interpretations were overlooked. The terrorist intent made it convincing: “hyperbole must be a saturation of the danger which leads one to take it seriously and to ignore all the evidence that the hyperbole is false.”39_{And this is what we perceive in the worldview}

expressed by the slaves. The unbelievers, the masters, they will suffer horribly and for eternity. But there is hope for them, as long as they start to live according to the teachings of the slaves. In other words, the slave revolt in morality works within the immanent reality conceived of by the masters as ‘interest’ and ‘threats’ whilst engaging with it from a transcendent point. Only in this language could their teachings make any sense to the masters.

The traumatizing images that the slaves cast over the imagination of the masters captures the masters’ abilities to enter into a critical assessment of slave morality to the point of numbness. Pascal’s wager is one of the examples in which terrorist hyperbolic discourse shows its effects. The logic of the worst: even if the “probability of God’s existence was infinitesimal, the penalty for not believing in God would be infinite, and therefore, that believing in God is a safe bet.”40_{Hence, we can also infer from this that fear}

is a self-reinforcing sentiment if it is used as a means to seduce. To seduce someone through fear makes oneself susceptible to fear. Thus, the inspiration of fear by the slaves makes them fearful too. The power of fear cannot be underestimated, for, as Metayer notes, “fear functions as a crucial point of entry into human subjectivity and represents an important tool by which individuals, and with them the entire history of thought, can be influenced.”41_.

To summarize our findings so far: 1) The slave revolt was provoked by the inability of the slaves to discharge their drives which means to interpret. As such, the slaves suffered meaninglessly. 2) Through the internalization of the drives, the slaves distorted the old valuation by defining the real as presence as the apparent reality and the absent reality as the truth allowing for the good as a concept of judgement. 3) This system of valuation found traction among the masters through the injection of fear described here as terrorist hyperbolic discourse. As such, the break between play and seriousness relies

39_{Chouraqui. p.249} 40_{Chouraqui. p.249}

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30 on a distortion of play that is the result of both meaningless suffering and fear. It is with these three pillars – suffering, fear, and distortion – that we can make sense of ignorance in relation to seriousness.

3.3 Fear, Ignorance, and Nihilism

Now that we can take the final step, let us quickly remember why the question of ignorance was asked in the first place. The problem of ignorance was brought forth when we tried to understand the fact that remembering or encountering the contingency of seriousness is not always sufficient to acknowledge that contingency. We can understand this when we take into account how the distorted sense of reality started to undermine itself. This process is understood by Nietzsche as the crisis of nihilism: the loss of all value. Ignorance is the outcome of our self-deceptive efforts to overcome, out of fear, that nihilism.

Quite contrary to what one might expect, Nietzsche does not shy away from understanding the value of the slave revolt, which he also calls the Christian morality hypothesis. He does so explicitly in the well-known Lenzer-Heide design from 1887. Nietzsche writes:

What advantages did the Christian morality hypothesis offer?

1) it conferred on man an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away

2) it served the advocates of God to the extent that, despite suffering and evil, it let the world have the character of perfection – including “freedom” – and evil appeared full of sense

3) it posited a knowledge [Wissen] of absolute values in man and thus gave him adequate knowledge [Erkenntniss] of precisely the most important thing

it prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking against life, from despairing of knowing [Erkennen]: it was a means of preservation – in sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism.42

The three theses point to morality, religion, philosophy, and science that organize themselves around three categories: purpose, unity, and truth.43_{All three are the result of}

the need to cure the ‘practical and theoretical nihilism’ as a means to self-preservation.

42_{Nachlass, 5[71], 1886. Translation by Duncan Large in: Ansell-Pearson and Large, The Nietzsche Reader.}

p.385

43_{Tongeren, Het Europese Nihilisme: Friedrich Nietzsche over Een Dreiging Die Niemand Iets Schijnt Te}

Play, Seriousness, and Violence: the Advantage of Understanding Reality in Terms of Play