For some years now I’ve believed, just on principle, mind you, that fun might be the reason for, well, everything. The driving force, don’t you know, behind evolution, at least, and probably the universe, even.

And then I discover that not only is Issue # 24 of The Baffler devoted to play, but also it contains David Graeber’s essay: What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun? I had so much fun reading this essay, and felt so, one might say, validated, that I found myself almost driven, or, as one might also say, conceptually chauffeured, to share the whole thing with you. But I restrain myself, as I must, and encourage you, with the following tease, to do so your fine self.

“Why do animals play?” asks Graeber. “Well,” he continues. “Why shouldn’t they?”

“The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?”

A little later, he quotes the Russian philosopher Kropotkin:

We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behavior of the young in mature life, there are others which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces — “the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species—in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world.

and comments:

To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company. From the Russian perspective, this does not need to be explained. It is simply what life is. We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.

concluding:

Let us imagine a principle. Call it a principle of freedom — or, since Latinate constructions tend to carry more weight in such matters, call it a principle of ludic freedom. Let us imagine it to hold that the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to become an end in itself. It would obviously not be the only principle active in nature. Others pull other ways. But if nothing else, it would help explain what we actually observe, such as why, despite the second law of thermodynamics, the universe seems to be getting more, rather than less, complex. Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain — as the title of one recent book has it – “why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun. This could… Our minds are just a part of nature. We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms—because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing.

And this, from the same issue, in the conclusion of Barbara Ehrenreich’s article A Thing or Two about a Thing or Two, a. k. a. Science, a post-script:

Is there a “play principle at the basis of all physical reality,” as Graeber so daringly suggests? I am drawn to this idea as a metaphysical speculation, so long as we remember that play has no moral valence. It can be elegant, it can be rough, it can be deadly — or all those things at once. But if we want a category of activity that embraces both subatomic particles and carnival goers, then we may as well call it play. And if we want to know what God is doing, should there be such an entity, and why he (or she or it) is doing all this, our best guess is that he is playing.

To which I add my two cents, and once again find myself unabashedly adding a quote of my own, this time from my article “The Fun Assumption“:

Suppose you supposed that the only reason birds sing was the sheer fun of singing, of having songs and the ability to give them voice. Or the fun of discovering themselves suddenly landing on a moving branch in a swaying tree in perfect balance. Or the fun of knowing that whenever the wind or whim took them, they could take off, and fly.

 

Retrieved from Psychology Today