The complexity of play

Abstract

In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetic Letters), Friedrich Schiller asserts the importance of play for human beings. He claims, “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” (Schiller, 2005, 131). Play is so pivotal that it qualifies as the activity resonating the state of human fullness. So, naturally, one might ask, what does play consist in for Schiller? While a Kantian approach might see play as the relation that manifests when a disinterested subject beholds something beautiful, Schiller uses more artistic and embodied examples of play throughout the Aesthetic Letters. In offering an alternative reading to Paul Guyer’s analysis of Schillerian play as serious (forgoing creativity and imagination), intellectual (objective and grounded in the intellect, rather than feeling) and negative (reliant on constraints) I draw out two important elements of Schillerian play: play force (the harmonious relation of two types of drives found in nature) and the forms of play (actual instances of aesthetic play.)