The Grasshopper

"My first choice is a book about the nature and value of sport. I wanted to look at this via Suits because his is probably the best-known full-length work in this area. It’s a wonderfully engaging, eccentric, ingenious book, which has a terrific idea in it, but I think it’s completely wrongheaded about the nature and value of sport. So I’ll start by explaining the good idea, and then explain why I think it’s not as helpful for understanding sport as many of its enthusiasts suggest. The book is a quasi-Socratic dialogue with the grasshopper as the main character, and the grasshopper’s idea is that the highest virtue is playing, that he is going to spend all his time playing, doesn’t care if he dies, and the overall argument of the book is that in utopia, where humans have all their material needs satisfied at the push of a button, what we would do would be play games, and therefore playing games is the ideal of human activity. Freed from all the necessities of having to do things we don’t want to do in order to get the material means of life, we’d do nothing but play games. That’s the main thesis. Suits does two things. He defines ‘games’ and, following on from that, he argues that the playing of games is the highest form of human activity. But the first part of the book, as you say, is a head-on attempt to meet Wittgenstein’s challenge. Wittgenstein said the concept of a ‘game’ was indefinable: you can’t give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that pick out all and only games, because games have nothing in common. Rather, they have a set of overlapping similarities, like the resembling faces within someone’s family. Suits comes up with this very neat definition of ‘game’ to refute this. I won’t give you the long version: in the shorter version, he explains that a game is any voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles . So, his idea is that in a game there’s some aimed at end point, or target. With Snakes and Ladders it’s getting your counter onto the final ‘100’ square; in golf, it’s getting this little white ball into a hole; in a 100-metre sprint, it’s breasting the tape ahead of the others. So there’s some target of the activity, and then, Suits says, what picks these activities out as games is that we put arbitrary restrictions on how to achieve that target: you have to do it by rolling a dice and going up the ladders and down the snakes; or you have to do it using golf clubs of a certain specification, and you can’t pick the ball up; and you have to get across the tape first by running, and not by shooting the others, or by getting on a motorbike or anything like that. So there are arbitrary restrictions on how you’re allowed to achieve the end, and Suits says whenever you’ve got a game, you’ve got that setup, and anything that fits that setup counts as a game. With a kind of awkwardness that I’ll come back to in a bit, he then spends the rest of the book with all kinds of strange fables and odd characters, defending the thesis that he’s produced a very neat set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a game, and I think he’s pretty close to achieving that. He does a very good job of showing that not just standard games, but games like hide-and-seek, and role-playing games, and so on, all fit his definition, and that part is pretty convincing. I have two big doubts about what then comes in Suits. One is whether his definition of a ‘game’ is much help at giving us a definition of sport; and the other is whether his definition of a game gives us any idea about what we find valuable in games. Focusing on the second of these doubts first: Suits’s idea seems to be that once we’re freed from the necessities of life, we’ll set ourselves challenges and then find value in the overcoming of these challenges, and if we put to one side the practical needs of life, the only challenges that will be worthwhile will be the ones we set ourselves in the way that we set ourselves challenges in games. I think that’s a completely hopeless idea. Suits’s idea seems to be this: take something which is completely pointless, make it difficult, and then it’s important to overcome the difficulties. I’m inclined to think that if something isn’t worth doing, it’s not worth doing even when you make it difficult, and I just don’t see any plausibility in Suits’s account of the value of games. A hopping race is an interesting case. Let me say what I think is of value in sport, and that will then put Suits’s idea of games in context. I don’t know anything about Suits personally, but reading the book, you certainly get an impression of somebody who’s never hit a sweet cover drive, or hit a backhand crosscourt, or driven a golf ball 250 yards. There’s no sense in the book anywhere of the pride, pleasure, enjoyment, and value, that people get out of the exercise of physical skills. My view is that what’s valuable about sports is nothing to do with games, and nothing to do with overcoming arbitrary obstacles: it’s the enjoyment and value that people get out of the exercise of physical skills. You can get a pretty good definition of ‘sport’ by saying it’s any activity, the primary purpose of which is to allow the exercise of physical skills. The nature of sport is the exercise of physical skills, and the value of sport is just the value that human beings find in that. I think this goes very deep in human nature – developing, exercising, extending physical skills, and displaying them. “Wittgenstein said the concept of a ‘game’ was indefinable.” Not all sports are games, and not all games are sports. Suits seems to think you can just characterise sports as that sub-class of games that involves physical activity. In fact, when you think of sport in the way I’ve just defined it, then it becomes clear that there are quite a lot of sports that really aren’t games at all. While I believe Suits gives a good analysis of games, in the book he tries to extend his analysis to cover sports like rowing, sprinting, boxing, and windsurfing, which just aren’t games at all. They’re sports in my sense, they’re activities that allow the exercise of physical skills. Suits should never have started trying to make them games. They don’t fit his definition very well. He should have recognised that some sports fall outside of his definition of games, but then he would have had to acknowledge that sports have a value that doesn’t consist in their being games. Some sports are games—tennis is a game, cricket is a game—and the skills that you exercise in the context of those games wouldn’t really exist outside the games: there wouldn’t be any crosscourt backhands if there wasn’t tennis. But what makes hitting a crosscourt backhand valuable is that it’s a physical skill that you can take pride in, and not that it’s part of a game, that’s incidental to what makes it valuable. If you look at the overall range of games, the thing I’ve just said about games and sports applies to other games as well: many games don’t involve physical skills, but involve intellectual skills—think of bridge, chess, and so on—and people enjoy and find value in those activities not because they involve overcoming arbitrary obstacles, but because they allow the exercise of intellectual skills, which are things to take pride in, things that are important. Then there are games that are valuable because they engender a certain kind of excitement, like gambling games. That’s what makes them valuable, again, not because they are the arbitrary overcoming of obstacles, but because they give rise to something which independently has value, namely the excitement, absorption, and so on. I want to say about games in general that the games that have value, if they have value, have value for some other reason than the one that Suits focuses on. Absolutely. I’ve been going on about how wrong Suits is, but The Grasshopper is still a terrific book. It’s very eccentric, it digresses with strange characters and fantasies involving the behaviour of his characters, going on for pages and pages. It’s all very engaging. Is the book itself a game? In the course of the book, he raises all kinds of questions, including that one, and gives them mostly very good answers. As I said, the book’s absolutely right about games, it seems to me that it knocks Wittgenstein’s negative view on the head. If somebody is interested in trying to understand games, this is exactly the place to start. It also focuses on the question of why games are valuable. I think Suits gives a wrong answer, but he’s crucial for raising the question, and making us focus on it."

"I hadn’t heard of it myself until GA Cohen recommended it to me a few years ago. And then, independently, Simon Blackburn recommended it. So I thought given these recommendations from eminent philosophers, there must be something to it. It’s a slim book, first published in 1978. It’s all about playing games. Not only is that an interesting subject for a book, but it’s also written in a light-hearted way. It actually exemplifies some of what it’s arguing for. One way of reading the book is as a critique of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance argument” about games. Wittgenstein says that there is no one thing in common that is shared by all games. Instead, there’s just a pattern of overlapping resemblances between the things we happen to call games. There’s no single, essential aspect of all games. Well, Bernard Suits thinks you can actually give a definition of games according to necessary and sufficient conditions. That makes it sound dry but it’s not a book about definition. It’s called The Grasshopper because the central character is, in fact, a grasshopper! It’s inspired by Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The industrious ant works all summer and survives the winter, whereas the grasshopper spends his time dancing and singing, so he has nothing to eat and starves to death. But at the same time, it’s a parody of a Socratic dialogue with the grasshopper in the role of Socrates, dying of starvation but choosing to die rather than give up his belief that the thing which has intrinsic value in life is play. He’d rather die of starvation than give that up. Oh no, it’s a book written for philosophers primarily. That’s what makes it so clever. It actually puts forward a whole theory about the nature of game playing. Suits argues that playing a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Basically there are three features to all games, and for something to be a game it has to meet all these features. Games must have the “pre-lusory goal”, constitutive rules and the “lusory attitude”. The pre-lusory goal is the purpose of a game. Take mountaineering. The pre-lusory goal is getting to the top of the mountain. Now you could get to the top of the mountain by parachuting in from a helicopter. But for something to be a game it needs to have rules, which might exclude certain ways of achieving the pre-lusory goal. And then there is the third part, the lusory attitude – namely that you accept the rules not just because you have to. It’s all about participating in the spirit of the game. You’re following those rules because you want to. A few of the classic works of philosophy have been written as dialogues – Plato’s works of course, and also one of my favourite books, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion . But it’s amazing how few successful dialogues there are in philosophy, given those great exemplars. The Grasshopper is Suits’s serious attempt to do it in a lighthearted way. Without being po-faced, Suits has found a way to make serious philosophical points. He believes that game-playing is the highest good, because in a utopian world where all our other needs are met, he believes human beings would just play games. They’d set themselves obstacles and willingly try to achieve these pre-lusory goals. They wouldn’t need to worry about anything else. If heaven were real, that’s how we would survive in eternity. Suits thinks games are the highest intrinsic good. That might be going a bit far, but he’s found a light-hearted way of getting to that conclusion – by using arguments and considering counter-examples. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He builds in lots of jokes and he’s a skillful writer. Unlike the other writers on my list, he draws attention to his style. You can’t read this without noticing he’s playing with form. It’s a nice short book that deserves to be better known. It’s mysterious that it’s been so neglected, particularly given all the interest in Wittgenstein’s theories about games. _____________________________ 2021 update: There are certainly a couple. All the authors of the introductory books that I recommended when you last interviewed me were men. That’s probably quite representative of how dominated philosophy has been by men for all kinds of social reasons. But there are many women philosophers, academic philosophers around, some of whom have written some very interesting introductory books which are suitable for beginners, a few of which have been published since we did that interview. I’d like to recommend a Ladybird book, by Angie Hobbs (whom I interviewed about the pre-Socratic philosophers for Five Books). It’s a book about Plato’s Republic . Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s a Ladybird book, this is a new type of Ladybird book which is designed for, I guess, teenagers and adults, rather than for children. But it’s got the same format. It’s a short book of 50 pages, and around 24 of those are illustrations. Angie is a serious Classics scholar and yet she has a very light touch as a public philosopher. She explains ideas very, very clearly. And what she’s done in this book is pick out the key arguments that Plato —through the mouthpiece of Socrates —uses in the great philosophical work the Republic and summarizes them. Now, some philosophers, when asked about introductory books, say, ‘Well, of course, you don’t really need an introductory book, you can start with the great classics: you can read Plato’s dialogues, you can read Descartes’s Meditations , you can read Hobbes’s Leviathan – or at least parts of it. Why bother with an introduction?’ But I don’t think most people can actually get a huge amount out of those sorts of books by just picking them up. Somebody who’s a very competent reader could, but it might take them quite a long time. What a book like Angie’s does is point you to the arguments which philosophers have considered the most important in the history of reading this book. She gives you a map of what’s there, an overview, and a way of grasping something which you might lose in the detail on a slow, first reading of the Republic. I’m not recommending you read Angie’s book instead of the Republic . I think it’d be a great book to read alongside the Republic . The Republic isn’t a particularly difficult philosophical work, but some of the ideas about the theory of forms, which is at the heart of the book, can be quite easily misunderstood. And the importance of the simile of the cave, just what Plato was saying about how society should be structured, it’s very easy to slightly misread that. This book is a great way to teach yourself to read Plato’s Republic, as it were. If you’re going further, you’re going to read other commentaries on the Republic too . There are many excellent ones, but this is the shortest, clearest one I’ve seen and it’s written for an introductory reader. It’s also got pictures, which helps. I love books with pictures. I find they help me identify and remember particular arguments. And that’s also true of the second book that I’d like to recommend. The Philosopher Queens by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting, who have also been interviewed for Five Books . This is a brilliant book edited by two postgraduate students. It’s an anthology of introductions to key women philosophers, philosophers conceived in quite a broad sense—some of the people in the book aren’t conventionally within philosophy departments. It goes through the history of philosophy, it’s not just about contemporary, living philosophers. It’s women writing about women philosophers, with a bias towards the political end of philosophy, politics and ethics. These are great short essays, again, written for a general reader. They’re a wonderful way into reading works by these thinkers and a counterbalance to the male-dominated histories of philosophy that you will typically be given as introductory texts. And the pictures are great. We discussed them in a Five Books interview with Helen de Cruz, about illustrated philosophy books . They’re like pop art caricatures, but they also have a dignity about them. It’s a very nice way to punctuate the book and for you to remember which thinker is which. I think their ideal reader is somebody like they were when they were about 15 or 16, trying to find out about philosophy, picking the book up in a bookshop and getting a sense that it is possible to be a woman philosopher and to make a significant contribution to the field despite the historical dominance of men. It also links with the previous book, because the idea of a philosopher king or a philosopher queen comes from Plato’s Republic and it’s something Angie Hobbs discusses. Even though he is quite authoritarian and conservative in lots of other ways, Plato would have allowed women to rule society as philosopher queens – the important point was that they be philosophers, not that they were men or women. The great virtue of The Philosopher Queens is that you can dip into it, it’s got these discrete essays, which you can sit down and read in fifteen or twenty minutes. You don’t need to have read the other chapters to make sense of them. It’s a book to have by your bedside, I think, and a good way to come in gently to philosophy, without committing to a patriarchal history of Western philosophy. Bizarrely, when I first started writing philosophy books, in the late 1980s, there were hardly any philosophy books targeted at the general reader, and hardly any introductory ones. I was teaching undergraduates and 16-18 year olds philosophy at the time and I had lots of notes. The first book I wrote was partly based on my teaching — it’s called Philosophy: The Basics . It’s a general, topic-driven introduction to philosophy. It’s the kind of book that I hoped I would find, when I was 15 or 16, to help me understand what philosophy is. The publishers liked the format and title so much that they created a whole series of ‘Basics’ books with well over 50 titles now (unfortunately they forgot to credit me for initiating that!). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Argument is central to the kind of philosophy that I’m interested in—making a case for a position without being dogmatic about what that position is. It’s a book that doesn’t presume any prior knowledge of philosophy, but I’ve also tried to write it as clearly as possible. The structure of it is that I present an argument that’s been important in the history of philosophy and give some criticisms of it in each case. There’s an engagement with the ideas, not just simply a summary of them, it’s meant to encourage the reader to decide how good they think the criticisms are, and to carry on with further reading if they want to. The second book that I wrote was called Thinking from A to Z . This is about critical thinking, the kinds of informal logic that are central to the philosophical method: reasoning tools, that complement the first book. The third one, Philosophy: The Classics , is slightly different. It’s approaching philosophy historically, looking at some key books in the history of philosophy, from the Republic to the present day. The book summarizes very briefly some of the key arguments from each book, and some possible criticisms of the approaches within the book. Again, it’s a book that’s meant to take you to the original books—not to be an excuse not to read them. Again, it’s written for a very general audience. I also edited an anthology of readings, called Philosophy: Basic Readings . That is meant to complement these three books. So that has short readings from a range of different places, on various topics and philosophers. More recently I wrote A Little History of Philosophy , which is in the Little Histories series that was spawned from a book that Ernst Gombrich wrote called A Little History of the World . So it’s in that format, written for a general readership. It covers some of the same areas as Philosophy: The Classics , and Philosophy: The Basics , but in a more story-driven way. I think it’s more accessible for a general reader. I’ve tried to bring in some aspects of the philosophers’ lives and context, briefly. The idea was that an intelligent 14 or 15 year old could get a lot out of the book and there’d be nothing threatening in terms of language or presupposed ideas. That’s a book that has surprised me greatly in the way it’s been taken up. It’s been translated into over 20 languages and has sales all around the world. I’m delighted to have been part of that movement to popularize philosophy through this dispersal of ideas. It’s very encouraging that so many people are interested in philosophy today. Lastly, I also wrote two slim books for people studying philosophy at university. One is called Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide , which is to help philosophy students understand how to approach being a student of philosophy (my original title for this was ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Philosophy Students’, but the publisher didn’t like that). The other one is more general and is called The Basics of Essay Writing. It’s again a short book and applies particularly to writing philosophy essays, but to other subjects as well."