The Paper World of Bernard Suits

Abstract

Here I consider the utopian claim of Bernard Suits, that the ideal life consists in playing games. I argue that his claim has no meaning. Just as it makes no sense to maintain that everything is an illusion, since we would have no sense then of the correlative ‘reality’, so too it makes no sense to speak of a world consisting entire of playing. Also I examine Suits’ definition of play, which he takes to describe the forms of play that we actually have. I show how it fails to describe them. I end by showing how the Utopia of the Grasshopper self-destructs into postmodern babble—which is perhaps what Suits [should have] intended all along. Once upon a time Oets, a fellow from Nebraska, wrote about Descartes’ problem of universal skepticism in Meditation 1. Could the Evil Genius deceive us about everything? Could she deceive us into believing that the entire world was as we believe it to be, while in reality it was made out of paper? Following his roshi (master) Wittgenstein, Oets argued that it turns out that the Evil Genius herself was being deceived. Despite her best efforts, she had created a less flimsy world of three-dimensional objects and creatures. Instead, in creating, she was giving herself the delusion that she had created a two-dimensional paper world and was fooling all those creatures. (3: pp. 95–7) I submit that Bernard Suits has gotten himself, or his insect, into a similar position in his utopia, The Grasshopper. Suits does ask for himself to be considered an evil genius. He has his arthropod puppeteer say: