Episode 106 - Fun

Transcript

Ellie: 0:13

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:15

The podcast where two philosophers have fun with big ideas.

Ellie: 0:20

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:21

And I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzman. Fun is exceptionally hard to define. There are all these concepts that are closely related to it, such as play, leisure, humor, and pleasure. But there is not a lot out there about fun specifically.

Ellie: 0:38

Yeah, we decided to do this episode topic before we looked into the literature. And then once we looked into the literature, we were like, Oh, wow. Okay. There actually isn't very much of it. And that is for reasons that we will unpack over the course of the episode. We also did find some fun research, some fun research. So stay tuned for that. But I found myself in looking into this topic, doing what Socrates says is the wrong way to define something, which is instead of giving a definition, just pointing to all the things that are fun, right? Going to an amusement park is fun.

David: 1:13

I mean, is it though? All those lines and expensive bad food. I don't know that I think it's super fun.

Ellie: 1:21

Going to an amusement park on a random Wednesday when all the kids are in school, how about that? Then the overpriced bad food doesn't seem so bad anymore because there's no lines.

David: 1:29

Brr! Amusement parks are a big no for David.

Ellie: 1:33

Okay, so what do you find fun then?

David: 1:36

So I will let you know that something that I have coming up this weekend is going to be extremely fun, which is that I have signed up for my first tennis competitive tournament in over a decade. And so for me, sports are the epitome of fun, and I'm going to be doing that for three days in a row.

Ellie: 1:53

Oh my gosh, bless you, David. I know this and I love this about you, but there is nothing I find less fun than either participating in or spectating in a sporting event.

David: 2:03

No, Ellie, come to the dark side. Come on. I'm already like feeling the jitters, the pre tournament jitters. And I like, already I'm experiencing that as fun. I'm like, Oh, this is going to be so fun.

Ellie: 2:15

Oh my god. Well, I love that for you. I had the most fun last weekend, and I feel like this is now so typical of me. My friend Mariana, who is an Overthink listener, hey Mariana, co wrote a Mamma Mia musical, but a rewriting of it. It was called Mamma Mia! But Different and it was organized around this really obscure song from the Super Trooper album called The Piper. And it's all these comedians who are doing like a Mamma Mia spoof musical. I was so excited all week leading up to this event. The actual event was like maximum fun for me. I was beaming the entire time. To me, a spoof Mamma Mia musical is like as fun as it gets.

David: 3:00

Yeah. So you like spectatorship of art, right? Specifically in musicals. I assume you would also add cinema. I think you're a movie buff. Probably.

Ellie: 3:09

Oh my god, no, David, you're way more of a movie buff than I am. You're always recommending David Cronenberg movies, and I'm like, oh, I just watched The Bachelor. But I do, so let's say spectatorship, reality TV spectatorship is fun.

David: 3:21

I just watched Planet of the Apes. I have to say that was not actually fun.

Ellie: 3:25

Okay, yeah, I wouldn't count that movie as particularly fun. Challengers, which we saw together, extremely fun.

David: 3:31

That was a lot of fun.

Ellie: 3:32

Okay, I have to admit though, it's interesting that you say this thing about spectatorship for me because my confession at the beginning of this episode is that it's actually really hard for me to know how to create fun. Sometimes even knowing how to find fun. Watching a silly movie can be very fun to me, but that's just like a passive experience. I feel like one thing that really stresses me out is not knowing how to create fun for myself or for other people. I find it really hard to know what people are going to think is fun. I think this is part of something I've talked about on the podcast before, which is my anxiety about hosting parties. In part because I'm like afraid people aren't going to show up, but I think also part of it is I'm afraid it's not going to be fun because I don't feel confident in my own ability to create fun. I know how to have fun on my own. I'm going to pull up some YouTube karaoke songs and get going. But when it comes to creating it for other people, that's very stressful to me. Actually, maybe sometimes creating it for myself too. I feel like I'm not making a lot of sense, but hey, that's what happens when you're doing the Fun episode, this inchoate phenomenon.

David: 4:40

That we cannot even agree upon a definition. But it's funny because I am a little bit the opposite. Often I go into group settings or parties with this default assumption that I am the life of the party. Not, that sounds really presumptuous and pompous.

Ellie: 4:56

That says so much about you!

David: 4:58

It really does, sadly, I have to admit it. But I go into it with the idea that my clownish personality will be fun for me and for other people, and that I can entertain on the spot without preparation. And so I don't have that same stress. as you do, which is not to say that I actually succeed at being fun. It's just that I am under the delusion that it's very easy for me to have fun without a lot leading up to it.

Ellie: 5:24

Yeah. Well, and I do think of you as quite a fun person. Do you think of me as a fun person?

David: 5:29

I think of you as a person. Yes.

Ellie: 5:32

Given how much we No we laugh on the podcast, I would beg to differ. But no, I actually am kind of curious. I will not take the answer personally.

David: 5:43

No, no, I do think you are fun. I think you have to know when the fun moments are and then you throw yourself into them.

Ellie: 5:51

Yeah.

David: 5:52

Yeah, I think you compartmentalize fun versus serious moments a little bit more than I do. So that's my honest answer.

Ellie: 6:00

Yeah, well, and I think that goes with my sense that it's hard for me to know how to create fun, especially for other people. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to carry a conversation, to like, make somebody laugh, to have a sort of jovial vibe. But this idea of a situation that's gonna catalyze fun, I'm just like, I have no idea how to, it feels like a burden for me to have to figure out how other people are going to have fun. And so I have so much respect for like my friends that are hosting the parties because they're giving me and us such a gift.

David: 6:34

Today we're talking about fun.

Ellie: 6:37

What is fun and how does it differ, if at all, from amusement, play, and leisure?

David: 6:43

Is fun an essential component of the good life or is it how capitalism keeps us on a tight leash?

Ellie: 6:50

What are the various social uses and functions of fun? Our assistant Emilio helped us with the research for this episode, and he discovered that it's actually unclear where the word fun derives from. The Oxford English Dictionary simply says it's of unknown origin. And I was like, what, what does this mean? What do you mean it's of unknown origin? But it does seem to be a relatively recent word. It doesn't have a majorly long history, which I think is perhaps part of the reason that there's not that much philosophical work about it. But the words for the same concept in some other languages are really, for lack of a better word, fun. So thanks to Emilio's research, I want to spend a bit of time unpacking them before we get to theories of fun. David, I want you to tell me your responses to each of these word origins.

David: 7:42

Okay, let's go for it.

Ellie: 7:45

The French word for fun is amusant, which originates in, I didn't know this before, to gape or stare at something. So for something to be amusant is for it to be something you gape at.

David: 7:57

Okay, so I guess the idea here is that you are absorbed in what you are doing. You are transfixed or fascinated by the object of your activity.

Ellie: 8:07

Yeah, and of course we have the cognate for that in English in the word amusing. It's a little bit different in Spanish. Actually, why don't you tell me what the Spanish word for fun is since that is your native language?

David: 8:17

Algo es divertido. Si, diversión.

Ellie: 8:22

Yeah, that's the noun word.

David: 8:24

Yeah, so that's it, right? Which is interesting because in Spanish, being a Romance language, that has the Latin root for distraction. So it has to do with something being fun because it diverts you or distracts you, maybe from the humdrum of everyday life. I don't know. So it, pushes you to the side, like off the beaten path.

Ellie: 8:45

Yeah, and in that sense it's almost the opposite connotation of the French word, because the French is all about absorption in something, whereas the Spanish is about avoiding something else. It has this kind of reactive element to it.

David: 8:58

Hmm. And it's interesting that they're not the same word as usually Spanish and French, you know, they, they're very similar. So here, that difference might be indicative to the fact that different languages just have entirely different conceptualizations of this thing that we in English call fun.

Ellie: 9:15

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if we're justified in that kind of speculation, but you are right that it is surprising that they have two different origins. And apropos of that, I have another surprise for you, which is the German word for fun actually comes from Italian.

David: 9:31

okay.

Ellie: 9:32

So Italian uses divertimento, similarly to Spanish, but it also has the word spaso for fun. Um, And the Germans adopted a version of this Italian word spasso to get their word for fun, which is Spaß. And the word Spaß refers to expansion, an expansion of time. And Emilio noted, quote, I think this is adorable. Time doesn't fly when you're having Spaß.

David: 10:00

But I mean, but time does fly, doesn't it? I mean, that's the whole notion of absorption in the French amusant. The fact that you are so enthralled in a particular activity that you don't actually notice the time ticking away. And I think your day, for instance, at the amusement park is an example of that, right? It would be over in a flash before you realize it.

Ellie: 10:22

Yeah, I think though that there's something about the fact that the clock doesn't feel like it's ticking for you while you're having fun, though, that speaks to this. Because time expands out when you're having fun, so you feel sort of suspended, in a sense. We'll come back to this when we talk about communal practices of fun later in the episode. There's a way that fun things take us out of the ticking of clock time.

David: 10:46

And let me add just one point here on the etymology, since you said that the English word fun is of unknown origin, because I did find one text that says that it likely came from the old English term befun, hm? B E F O N, which means to make a fool out of somebody. So it has to do with diversion or amusement, but also with the figure, arguably, of the fool.

Ellie: 11:13

We do see this notion of making a fool of someone in the idea of making fun of someone.

David: 11:19

Making befun?

Ellie: 11:20

yeah.

David: 11:21

Out of somebody.

Ellie: 11:24

Well, but why do you think we find making fun of people fun?

David: 11:27

Schadenfreude, speaking about German terms, often making fun of people is a hierarchical move. It's a putting down of somebody who is the butt of the joke. And so there is certainly a politics to humor that I think would explain why we find gratifying turning somebody into an object of mockery and ridicule. But I mean, on a lighter note, also practical jokes are fun, you know, in a kind of harmless way sometimes.

Ellie: 11:54

You said that making fun of people often involves a hierarchy, like a power play, but having fun presumably doesn't, right? Because it doesn't necessarily have a direct relation to your treatment of another person.

David: 12:09

No, I think that's right. Having fun is about the self. It's about entertainment. It's about leisure. It's about filling your time with activities that are joyful. Whereas making fun of somebody else, it's always relational. And it does presuppose that power asymmetry. So having fun is about entertainment. incorporating either that absorption or that expansion of time or that shrinking of time, however we're conceptualizing the temporality of fun into your life for a period of time. So that, you know, you, you feel like your life is worth it, right? Like, that's the effect of fun that you feel like you're actually living life to the fullest.

Ellie: 12:49

Mm hmm. I think you're right about this feeling of living life to the fullest. I want to, deepen the analysis of that. I also want to say though that I'm not sure I agree with you that having fun is about the self. I think that having fun, whether or not it's something that exclusively can be had with other people, which like I think probably the answer to that is no, having fun involves a sort of falling away of the self. So what happens to me a lot of times is that I realize I'm having fun. I'm, I'm like in the middle of having fun and I'm with other people and I have this moment with myself where I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm having so much fun. Or I don't even have that moment during the party, say, I have it when I get home, when I'm thinking about what just happened.

David: 13:34

Yeah, but even in that case, I think what you're seeing is the falling away of the self in the sense of a reflective self, thinking about myself as somebody separate from other people and separate from the flow of life, but I think the mere fact that we can have fun here. Yeah. alone suggests that it is something that is tied at least possibly to selfhood, right? I have a lot of fun by myself. I crack up at my own jokes when I am entirely alone in my living room, but I don't think I can make fun of other people in solitude, right? The joke just doesn't land.

Ellie: 14:12

It doesn't land with yourself. You don't make fun of people to yourself that you see like on social media doing cringe things or something.

David: 14:18

No, because then I feel the need to share that with other people in order for the joke to be real. I need a witness. And so I think this is a difference between making fun of somebody versus having fun, that the latter can happen in solitude, whereas the former cannot.

Ellie: 14:35

Is this true though? Because I feel like for me, I love being alone. And my most meaningful experiences are almost always alone. This is actually something that I hurt the feelings of a former partner when I confessed. I was like, yeah, no, my most meaningful experiences are always alone. And he was like, that is the saddest thing I've ever heard as somebody who loves you.

David: 14:57

I don't think that's sad at all.

Ellie: 14:58

I was like, it doesn't mean that I don't have tons of meaningful experiences with other people. It's just that I really like being alone. But I'm not sure that I'm actually having fun when I'm alone. So I talked about enjoying, say, like a TV show. I might be having fun when I'm watching a TV show alone. But I guess maybe there, there's the presence of the people who are on the TV screen who are accompanying me. Like, as we know from our reading episode a while ago, one of both of our favorite activities is reading. Is it fair to say that I'm having fun while I'm reading or just that I'm enjoying reading? Like I find things enjoyable that I wouldn't necessarily say are fun. I feel like I'm inclined to use the word fun when it comes to things I'm doing socially.

David: 15:42

Yeah, so I think we don't see things the same way because what you're referring to has to do with the choice of activity in your moments of solitude, right? Like you're choosing serious activities like reflection and reading and things that expand the mind. What I have in mind when I talk about having fun by myself is that I play the fool in my living room. I dance, I vogue, I do death drops, I have full on comedic dialogues with myself. Admittedly, sometimes there is an imaginary audience or an imagined audience. You know, but it's not a real one. And so this goes to what I said earlier, that I think you compartmentalize serious versus fun moments. And maybe you put the time that you have to yourself more on the serious activity side, potentially, you know, I don't want to speak for you about this. Like, this is what you're doing, Ellie, when you're in solitude.

Ellie: 16:34

It's all good. You know, by co hosting a podcast together for years as close friends, we are giving ourselves over to analyzing one another.

David: 16:42

Yeah, and so I think I mean playing the fool to yourself. That's what I mean by having fun alone. And it does mean being silly.

Ellie: 16:49

Yeah. So maybe I don't do that. Although I will say that I think something that people don't really know about me if they don't know me super well, is that I'm actually like a absurdly silly person. Like, not in a way that I'm like, oh my god, I'm so silly. My sense of humor is totally babyish. I find, like, the most crass, simple things...

David: 17:10

You make a lot of gestures, facial gestures, like pouty faces and like ridiculous, exaggerated smiles.

Ellie: 17:18

yeah. Or, like, I'll do weird little dances or, like, do little voices and, yeah, find just, like, very childish humor funny. But I actually think that the internal audience that you mentioned is really interesting because it helps me articulate the fact that I think part of the reason I have fun when I'm with other people, but may or may not have fun when I'm well and truly alone, is that when I'm alone, that internal audience actually comes to the fore. When I'm having fun with other people at a party, I'm not preoccupied with a sense of how I might be looking from the outside. I'm immersed in the group. When I'm alone, it's actually a lot easier because there's the time and space for thinking, and I'm somebody who has a very strong inner monologue or inner dialogue. There's a lot more time and space for me to be thinking about like, oh, how would this appear from the outside? Like, why would I do a weird little dance on my own? I'm doing it in groups with other people, where their response is what's salient to me, not my own activity.

David: 18:20

Yeah. But it depends on how you project psychically that audience, right? Because if you imagined a critical audience, then of course you're going to be hyper aware of how you might be read by that imagined audience, whereas the audience that I imagine Ellie, when I am literally dancing to a Shakira song in my PJs at eight in the morning making breakfast, this is an audience that loves me. They are fans. They are giving me stand up ovations. So I imagine a very friendly audience without an iota of a critical edge to them. An iota of an edge? I'm mixing here my, my metaphors.

Ellie: 18:58

all good. I didn't even catch it because I am just wondering what it could possibly be like to have an inner dialogue that's not critical. Okay. This is a pivot, but I want to ask, why do you think being scared is fun? Obviously not all forms of being scared are fun, but there is this category of fun scary or fun scared that people say I experience when they're watching horror movies. Not me so much because I have like a very low threshold for scary scared. So like my fun scared, there's a very select few number of things that are fun scary to me, but I still experience it, but some people can get like really scared and still be having a great time.

David: 19:43

Yeah, I think I can have a lot of fun with scary things like movies. And of course, there might be a physiological component to the explanation having to do with the adrenaline rush, with the unpredictability, your senses get heightened and all of that. But I also think when we're having scary fun, it's never really scary in the real sense of the term because it happens in a broader context where we know we are safe, right? Like at the movie theater or at the amusement park. And so I think there's a significant difference between fear and the kind of fun that we have when we simulate fear, but it reminds me, when I wrote my book about dreaming, I ran into research that sometimes people who are lucid dreamers, when they're having nightmares, they really enjoy continuing the nightmare in their lucid state because it's kind of like a horror movie and they just want to see how far they can take it. So it's a bit of a pushing of the boundaries and testing the limits of how much you can

Ellie: 20:48

withstand. Okay, that's so interesting. And it also makes me think about a potential connection between being fun scared and Kant's notion of the sublime. Because in the third critique, Kant, following Edmund Burke, talks about the experience of the sublime as being different from the experience of the beautiful. characterizes a sublime is that it's something terrifying in nature, but it's at a distance from you. It's like looking out at a storm when you're safely in a cozy room with a fireplace. And it seems to me that that's kind of what's going on when we watch scary movies, is that there's that remove that you talked about. And something about undergoing that experience, but from a distance can feel not sublime to us, but fun to us.

David: 21:53

Although we have complained about how little research there is out there on the concept of fun, there is one book that turned out to be extremely helpful for thinking about the topic, and that is Alan McKee's book, Fun! What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life. Uh, nothing like an exclamation point that captures the spirit of the book in the title. And it's one of the only books out there that is fully devoted to articulating a theory of fun, a philosophy of fun. And McKee opens his book by arguing that over the course of the 19th century, we witnessed a cultural split that is essential for understanding the meaning of the English word. And that is the split between high art and low art. Before the 19th century, art wasn't really stratified in that way. We wouldn't differentiate between arts for the elites and art for the masses. If anything, you would find, for instance, Shakespearean plays being performed, in the same venue and at the same time as like a show involving circus monkeys and maybe somebody dancing and doing comedy. All of it was together without a differentiation between high and low. But later over the course of the 19th century, these two domains of art start becoming alienated from one another, and we end up with the state of affairs that defines the present, which is that Shakespeare is high art, but circuses become low art, i. e. entertainment.

Ellie: 23:33

Yeah, and this is something we actually talked about in our dating during COVID episode from back in 2021. We had this short series of episodes on different relationships during COVID. It was like friendship, dating, I think one other one, but I forget what it was.

David: 23:48

Cohabitation!

Ellie: 23:50

Yes, thank you! Yeah, these episodes are some of our least listened to because I think people see the title and they're like, that's not relevant to me anymore, we're not living in a time of quarantine. But I have to say, they're real bangers, and I think they're worth checking out, even though we're not still in quarantine anymore.

David: 24:06

And we might be again.

Ellie: 24:09

David, I'm not ready to go there. Um, anyway, but because of, you're not saying that for any particular reason, right? You're just saying, like, hypothetically.

David: 24:17

No, I don't have insider knowledge about the next pandemic.

Ellie: 24:20

just just to clarify for our listeners, but you talked about this idea there, following this book, Highbrow/Lowbrow by Lawrence Levine. And he talks there about how some art forms were sacralized in the 19th century and others were seen as vulgar. And this bifurcation became one of the ways in which the upper classes in America could separate themselves from working class people. That is, by developing an artistic culture that they considered to be refined, classy, etc. And that only they could access and control.

David: 24:54

Yeah, and that's when you see the rise of fancy theaters, opera houses, museums with certain cultural norms, so on and so forth, that were meant to keep out the working class. But McKee, in this book, fun, exclamation point, cites Levine quite a bit. And so there is a clear connection between how the two thinkers are interpreting the history of fun. And McKee notes that there were a lot of factors that contributed to this bifurcation of all art and entertainment. Of course, the rich people wanted to be gatekeepers of culture and taste, so on and so forth. But there was also the rising commercialization of culture under capitalism in the 19th century. The fact that now culture itself was a product that could be sold and could be used to make a profit. And also the rising urbanization of previously peasant populations. So peasants were now moving to the city, and suddenly, because they had their nights off and they didn't have to attend to the farm, they had free time and they demanded something cultural to consume as entertainment, but they weren't necessarily able to. Asking for the same things that we now would classify as high art. And so you have the commercialization of culture, the urbanization of the peasantry. Either way, once the split happens, there is this whole new domain of social productivity that is the entertainment industry, which differs from high art in several ways, according to McKee. Entertainment is vulgar. It is easily replicable. It is easy to understand. Stories always have a happy ending. And McKee says, above all, what differentiates entertainment from high art is that entertainment has to be fun, which art does not. And he draws this philosophical distinction where he says that while high art is judged by the concept of beauty, here, you know, you mentioned Kant a minute ago.. Entertainment is judged by the standard of fun, not beauty. So fun is the aesthetics of entertainment. And the whole book is basically a defense of fun as the aesthetics of entertainment. And he arrives at this conclusion, which I found really intriguing, which is that a life lived without fun is an incomplete life.

Ellie: 27:24

I'm fascinated by this idea that fun is to entertainment what beauty is to art. Namely, the standard by which we should be judging entertainment. I think that's so interesting. I definitely don't think all entertainment has a happy ending, but maybe that's a minor point to draw and can allow me to continue agreeing with what at first blush strikes me as quite compelling, which is this idea that fun is the aesthetic standard of entertainment. I think it's a nice riposte as well to some of the philosophers who seem to vilify fun, because most philosophers don't talk about fun and that's fine. Perhaps because even though it's of unknown origin, it seems like a relatively recent word. Although, like, the French then have no excuse because amusant has presumably been around a lot longer and it's not like they're talking that much about amusement. But the philosophers that do talk about fun, yeah, usually vilify it. And The Frankfurt School, for instance, in Germany, so I guess this would be about space, considers entertainment to be mind numbing, part of the culture industry, and I think has this idea that entertainment is there to be what Marx called the opium of the masses, right? Marx talks about religion as the opium of the masses, and the Frankfurt School in the 20th century says basically the culture industry or the entertainment industry is the opiate of the masses. I said opium of the masses. I meant, opiate . it But in any case, this notion that the problem with fun is that it actually keeps us tied to the status quo. It takes up time that could otherwise be spent doubting, questioning the status quo, which they think art encourages us to do. But I think your take following McKee, David, would perhaps be that the Frankfurt School is overlooking the value of entertainment and fun. Or maybe they'd just be like, no, entertainment isn't something we should valorize. It's only associated with the lower classes because the lower classes are the proletariat who don't own the means of production. And so we should work towards a different future where none of us is having fun. We're all experiencing beauty and art and revolution all the time.

David: 29:40

Yeah, I think it's because the Frankfurt School, and I'm here thinking in particular about Adorno, but this also applies to Horkheimer, they see entertainment largely as hedonistic and as activating human desires that don't lead to the cultivation of our higher faculties, especially critical thinking and moral imagination. But McKee has a theory about why that is. And when I say about why that is, I don't mean why the Frankfurt School thinks of entertainment as hedonistic, but about why philosophers in general tend to vilify fun. And they equate it, again, with these low desires or with this, let's say, position of quietude relative to the status quo. And McKee says that that has a lot to do with the unacknowledged class consciousness of philosophy itself as a social form. Basically, he says, look, it's no wonder that philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer in this case would devalue fun because philosophy itself is an upper middle class activity that channels rather than critiques the values of the class that makes it possible. And so philosophers, it doesn't matter how radical they think they might be tend to be middle class. Individuals with a middle class set of values, which is why philosophers will always like art and they will judge it by the standard of beauty. And they will judge entertainment and therefore also vilify the criterion for good entertainment, which is fun. And so they scoff at entertainment precisely because it is a working class product. And they reject fun because they see it quite literally as a plebian. Value.

Ellie: 31:28

Well, I will say we had a hell of a lot of fun in grad school. It was a very much a time of fun. And when we were hanging out with philosophers all the time. But the claim that philosophers are mostly middle, upper middle, upper class is historically true. And it is still true to this day. There's a lot of research that's done on the lack of class diversity among philosophers and also showing that people from working class backgrounds often find philosophy hostile and suffer from high levels of attrition when they do come into the discipline.

David: 32:02

Yeah, I mean, this is something that I have published about in the past, the, what I call the class hemorrhage that happens in academic philosophy environments.

Ellie: 32:11

Where did you publish this?

David: 32:12

This was an article in the journal Hypatia. It is called the philosophical personality.

Ellie: 32:17

co-authored with Rebecca Spera?

David: 32:19

Correct. And so, yeah, the class hemorrhage is, real and it's very intense. And McKee draws a conclusion that I found also very compelling. He says, look, there are no philosophy articles or philosophy books about fun because of the class consciousness of philosophy. So the fact that you and I at least struggled to find research is not at all surprising. But here is the thing, the fact that there are no academic publications about fun doesn't mean that there isn't, according to McGee, a philosophy of fun. In fact, there is, it's just that it's the philosophy that is embodied and lived by the working class. And the working class obviously doesn't write academic journals. Typically, they don't write academic books. They just live their philosophy. And so if you want to understand the philosophy of fun, you need to go out and see it in action in the life of the working class. And in connection to this, he cites a bunch of sociological studies showing that the idea of enjoying yourself and having a good time are at the top of the list when you ask people from low socioeconomic classes to answer the question, what makes life worth living?

Ellie: 33:44

It's giving a little bit of Nostalgia for a pre theoretical model, to my mind, and maybe I'm being unfair about McKee's position here, but this idea that those of us who are writing scholarly books should just go out and be in these communities where people live a philosophy of fun but don't think about it, strikes me as actually itself a pretty snobbish elitist position. For one, because it presumes that philosophers are not already in those spaces. And granted, I mean, as we've just talked about, given the sociological research, it's likely that philosophers are less often in those spaces than non philosophers, given that a lot of philosophers are not coming from working class backgrounds. But I still think it's a bit of an oversimplification to just be like. So let's go into those spaces. And I actually find it really strange to think that you couldn't find, like, a explicit theory of fun among those people. Because it sounds like what he's saying, it's not just there's a lack of access that these people have, or a lack of interest in writing academic papers on fun. Okay, sure, that's not a problem. But more, there's not an explicit theory of fun there at all. It's more implicit and lived in the body. And I think I just, anytime I hear that I'm reminded of Ray Chow's argument against Roland Barthes woodcutter where she talks about how the figure of the woodcutter as this manual laborer functions in Barthes work as a paradigm, like a desirable exemplar of what it's like to be outside of the trappings of corrupting theoretical society. I might be getting some of the details of her argument there wrong, but I think like the Barthes woodcutter here is the working class person who's, you know, going out and having fun, like drinking a beer at the local bar on the weekend.

David: 35:46

Fair criticism, although I'll play devil's advocate or rather McKee's advocate. He's not the devil.

Ellie: 35:53

You know, I hate the phrase devil's advocate.

David: 35:55

I know you do. I know. So I'll play the advocate for McKee's position here.

Ellie: 35:59

It's just so philosophy bro coded. I'm like, just have a counterpoint. You don't need to say devil's advocate.

David: 36:04

You see, it's because I've been class absorbed into the middle class values of philosophy. That's why I say that. No, but so to be clear, I don't think McKee's position is that the values of the working class are pre theoretical. In fact, he says that there is a fully thought out worldview and an understanding of the place of the human in the larger universe and what the values are of that cosmic view simply happens to differ from, let's say, the highfalutin values of the upper classes. And so it's not pre theoretical, it's just differently theoretical and has a closer connection to what Pierre Hadot would call philosophy as a way of life. Something that you embody rather than something that you scholastically analyze and interpret.

Ellie: 36:51

Okay, so what is this philosophy of fun then?

David: 36:54

So the philosophy of fun is that fun is one of the highest human goods. And as I said earlier, that a life lived without fun as a central component to it would indeed be an incomplete human life.

Ellie: 37:07

But does he offer an account of what fun is?

David: 37:11

So fun is that which Pleases without purpose. So that's what we can contrast to that Kantian definition where it's non teleological, it's not functionalist, and it's something that opens us up not to the universalism of the Kantian aesthetics of beauty, but rather to a kind of pluralism where if fun is that which pleases me without fulfilling any other purpose, then we have to be open to the fact that what is fun for me will not be fun for other people. In the same way that you Ellie are not going to be joining me at the 2024 US Gay Tennis Open this weekend.

Ellie: 37:49

Well, yeah, and so that is really interesting because you're right that Kant also suggests that a beautiful work of art has to be purposive. It has an element of finality in it, which is something that Adorno kind of picks up in this Frankfurt School model of art, where he talks about artwork as independent. It's autonomous, even though it's still related to its society. I'll also just say that Kant's view of beauty requires that beautiful works of art be something that we are disinterested in. We have a kind of detachment, we're not like personally invested. It doesn't matter, like if I saw a painting of a tennis match versus a painting of Mamma Mia, I should be able to judge those things without any reference to the fact that I like Mamma Mia, but not tennis, right? But that's not the case for something that's fun. It is fundamentally interested as well.

David: 38:45

Yeah, it would be interested, but its interest does not lie outside of the activity itself. It is its own interest, right? So it is a ludic conception of fun where it's almost the same as the definition of fun. play. Play, again, is typically defined as without an external purpose, but tapping into something that we find very interesting, but that doesn't have a claim to universality. And those points are what make it, in many ways, the negative image of the Kantian concept of and therefore, the aesthetics of entertainment rather than art.

Ellie: 39:26

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David: 39:48

We talked in the last segment about fun as an aesthetic category, and I think the whole realm of aesthetics is often separated off from what we see as useful in everyday life. We know that fun is valuable, but I also want to ask now, is it useful? And if it is not useful, in what senses is its uselessness part of what makes it valuable?

Ellie: 40:12

Speaking as someone who wants more fun in my life and doesn't know always how to create it, I would say that fun is useful in the sense of bringing people together. Like it really cements social bonds.

David: 40:25

Yeah, for sure. And it's also often thought of as a way to let off steam, which is obviously a pleasurable and pleasant thing to do on its own, but it arguably can end up being that sort of opium of the masses that philosophers have worried about since Marx. And so I do share the fear that the Frankfurt school has articulated about fun becoming a pacifier. Especially when that fun becomes the end all be all of social life, and it becomes the only outlet that we have available to us for the pursuit of the good life. So I think fun can be a great component of the good life, but if your social order makes it such that only the consumption of culture through the culture industry and through the entertainment industry is your only avenue for enjoying your time off of work, then I think that's a problem.

Ellie: 41:21

Yeah, I'm inclined to say something really dark here.

David: 41:24

Do it.

Ellie: 41:25

The most fun people I know are almost to a one people who struggle with alcoholism.

David: 41:33

Oh my God.

Ellie: 41:34

I told you it was dark.

David: 41:35

No, I know I thought, but because it's a fun episode, I thought it was going to be like dark in like a fun way, but this was actually just really dark.

Ellie: 41:42

No, and I think there's a trope too in media that like the life of the party, I'm not referring to you here, David, you don't have this problem, but I like a lot of sympathy for folks who do struggle with addiction. A lot of my family members struggle with alcoholism. And yeah, I think there is that trope of the life of the party who then suddenly it's like, Oh shit.

David: 42:01

It's now masking something.

Ellie: 42:05

And like they end up having to go to rehab or something like that. And I think it is a big struggle for people who are recovering from addiction to try and figure out how to have fun in their lives that doesn't have to do with going out and being with drinking buddies. And I think this is a particularly a problem in our culture when it comes to the increasing secularization and the idea that people don't really know how to spend their time nowadays, I'm not, I have no desire to go back to a society where religion is a much bigger role in our everyday lives in the way that we usually think about religion, but I do think what Scholars sometimes refer to as a no me or an absence of meaning is linked with the rise of addictive behaviors in our society. And I think that there can be a seeking out of these hedonistic pleasures of this basic fun when people don't know what else to do.

David: 43:00

yeah, and I think that is also connected to the lack of social spaces that perform that social cohesion function that you have alluded to, Ellie, that are not bars and clubs, right? So you work 8 to 5. And sometimes I find myself really struggling to even figure out what to do in my late afternoons, early evenings, other than going to bars, because that's our cultural default for socializing. You can go to the park, but it's already too dark and too cold. Or you can go to a restaurant and a bar, but there is very little in between or other than that. And the things that do exist, like going to the museum or going to the movies can be a little bit too pricey for also the average working class family.

Ellie: 43:46

Yeah. And there is a rise, although I feel like there's always comments about how there is a rise of what I'm about to say, but then it's unclear whether there actually is. There's a rise of non drinking related fun activities. And so I've been seeing there's like, chess or reading events that people are engaging with. I know games have been around for a long time. Oh, we do have our episode on games. I got to address that. It sounded just like such a ridiculous thing to say. But I think there's like constantly in our culture, and we do see this now as well, a desire to find outlets for fun that aren't related to drinking or drugs. I took to Twitter in thinking about research for this episode. And I was basically like, what do you guys want us to talk about with this fun episode? And almost all of the results that I got were actually about play rather than about fun. And because we want to potentially hold the door open for a future episode on play, we didn't end up pursuing most of these recommendations. But one thing I did consult in preparation for this episode is a work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called Homo Ludens, and it's all about the play element in culture. And I want to say a few things in a moment about what he thinks is important about the play element in culture. But for starters, he has a chapter where he talks about, where does the play element in culture live in our current society? And he says, it's increasingly become. tied to the workplace and less tied, strangely, to politics. Politics, he says, has always been a place where the play element has thrived, but we've seen that on the wane in recent years, and this book was written in 1938, and he says that, well, American politics still has play, it's still fun. And he finds that to be a quote, endearing element of American culture. And I was reading this and just being like, no, this is not at all an endearing element of American culture. Because I think part of what's happened is that in having fewer and fewer ritualized outlets for fun through these ludic, events. We have started to try and find fun in politics more and more. And he specifically talks about American elections as being, having a lot of elements of play. And I think that's true, especially in the present day. But looking at this election that we're currently heading into, I wish that people were having less fun because the kind of fun that people are having is also horrifying. I mean, we're all, I think a lot of people are watching on with horror, but also making fun of the other candidates, right? Trump is like a classic play jester figure, but one who has extremely damaging actual effects on the world. And so thinking about him just as a figure of fun and play is very horrifying to me.

David: 46:39

Yeah, and what worries me about the, let's say, comedification of politics is that it inoculates politicians against the responsibility that comes from wanting to be taken seriously by one's constituents, because it allows individuals a lot of leeway to hide in the wink in the comedic punch line or even in irony, something that a lot of people wrote about during Trump's presidency, that he could say things and then later simply disavow them by saying that other people are taking them too seriously. Meanwhile, they were clearly the basis for decision making at high levels of government. And so, it's not only that we see a comedification of politics, but just the expectation that our politicians interact with one another is much like the characters on television, and especially on reality television, right, where we often turn to politics, hoping to see a showdown, hoping to see somebody tear somebody else down, and it means that the central values I don't know, democratic theory and democratic engagement have gone out the window and they have been replaced by maybe the standard of entertainment in a domain that it's not appropriate

Ellie: 47:58

Yeah. In American society, there's nothing worse than taking yourself too seriously. That's a big difference between us and continental Europe. And Huizinga likes that about American culture, but I think I don't like it so much. Can I tell you a few things about his basic thesis around play? Because I'm curious what you might think about them.

David: 48:16

Yeah, I want to hear.

Ellie: 48:17

Huizinga's central thesis is that the play element is this huge part of culture that is often not recognized as such. Like a lot of times when we are talking about play, we reduce it to its usefulness, right? And so this goes back to the question that you were asking a few minutes ago, David, like, is play useful? Is it not useful? And he says that most of the accounts of play actually try and make a case for its usefulness. And in doing so, they miss the the significance of play in a stronger sense. For Huizinga, and I, like, hope I'm not butchering that Dutch pronunciation too much, I'm sure I am at least a little. The play element is actually older than culture, because he says that culture always presupposes human society, but we find play outside of culture or society, namely in non human animals. He says that one big thing that non human animals and humans share is that we love to play. And play isn't just a psychological reflex or a physiological phenomenon, but rather a significant function. He says all play means something. But this isn't just in a simply instrumental sense, right? The essence of play is actually the very absorption and intensity of the experience of playing. And on one of the few pages where he talks about fun specifically, he says that the fun of playing, not helpful for our episode, resists all analysis. All logical interpretation. So as a concept, fun can't be reduced to any other mental category. So the significance of that is that fun is irreducible, right? Like fun, we, I don't know if he would go so far as to say fun is intrinsically valuable, but it does mean that it's not open to logical interpretation, which is like sort of a womp womp moment, but also maybe an interesting moment, right? Because I think that coheres with our sense that fun is really hard to analyze.

David: 50:13

Yeah. And that it's hard to justify to somebody who asks you why do you want to have fun? If they don't get it, we draw the conclusion that there is actually something wrong, not just with the question, but with the question asker. And I'm happy that he brings in this question of the relationship between fun and culture, because a lot of elements of culture are institutionalized modes of having fun. We could say, actually in his book, Fun! I have to say it like that every single time. McGee does say that the, some of the places where he saw fun talked about in academic settings, which were not philosophical, were primarily in the context of workplace management, of managers trying to figure out how to make the workplace more fun. And so we are institutionalizing fun in the office. But he also says this is something that happens all the time in education, as Teachers try to figure out how to make sure their students are having fun while they learn. So, the workplace, the education system, are two environments where culture really thrives by trying to incorporate fun and giving it a socially acceptable form of expression.

Ellie: 51:29

And in talking about the institutionalization of fun, Huizinga asserts that all ritual has to do with play. Which I think is really funny when you think about, sorry to be sacrilegious here, but maybe not. The eating of the host at a Catholic mass, ooh, so ludic, it was like a play.

David: 51:52

It's your dinner party, Ellie.

Ellie: 51:54

The like, priest is cosplaying right now. His point is that, you know, play, it's meaningful, it's significant. It's not just like this lightweight, lighthearted thing. And Even if we're not having fun at a Catholic mass, there's still, he thinks, a play element. I wonder what you think about that. Would we say that all rituals are fun, even if we agree with Huizinga that all rituals have a play element.

David: 52:21

Yeah, I would say that all rituals are ludic in the sense that they are play like and they contain play elements. Just think about like ceremonial singing, ceremonial dances. It usually is the presentation of something that in a different setting would be fun, but here for solemn purposes. And this makes me think of a book that was written in the 1930s by the anthropologist Erna Ferguson called Dancing Gods, which is an account of the dancing ceremonies and traditions of the people of the pueblos of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. And Ferguson talks about how in a lot of these communities in New Mexico, indigenous communities, there are ceremonial rituals involving dance. There are dances that have characters in them known as fun makers. So there are specific characters that perform in the dance the function of having fun and introducing elements of play that make the dances, again, ludic. And so she talks about how, for example, in many of these dances, it's quite common for the fun makers, which differ from Pueblo to Pueblo, to, for example, make obscene jokes during their performance. To play with children, to sometimes make fun of white people, if there's a white person that happens to be witnessing it through mockery and pantomime and things like that.

Ellie: 53:51

will volunteer myself as the butt of your joke in sacrifice to the ludic dimension of culture.

David: 53:58

Yeah, and you know, so you, you see the elements of fun and play here, but they are canalized in the direction of a higher spiritual goal, which in the case of these stanzas ranges from making contact with ancestors, trying to establish some kind of dialogue with the elements to ask for more rain or for, you know, fructification or something like that. But they also play a bunch of other social functions. Like there are some dances that are specifically oriented toward the initiation of the young into puberty, as well as others that play the function of reminding the tribe of their totemic origins. Because the dancers, these fun makers will not just play the role of fun makers, but they will also play the role of. of totemic animals with whom humans share a mythic origin in the philosophies of these tribes. And so here you see that deep connection in an indigenous context between fun, play, and ritual.

Ellie: 55:01

And there's also a big connection to power here as well because I think a lot of rituals that play up the ludic element and also even just the jester figure in so many different cultures is also a figure of, immense power and has a deep connection to the sacred origins of the world. And so there's almost a sense in which I would say there's simultaneously assertions of power from these figures and also a kind of mitigating of that by the element of laughter or of play. The difference between. A sorcerer and a clown is sometimes just the fact that the clown is wielding their power in the context of something comical.

David: 55:51

Well, and I would add maybe putting on my Foucauldian hat for a second that there's also here a blurring of the line between reason and unreason because in The history of madness, Foucault talks about how the figure of the fool in particular in the 16th century during the Renaissance represented madness, but not madness as the absence of things that rather madness as an opening Up of a different order of truth than the truth of reason itself. And here we might connect that directly to the concept of fun, which again might come from the fun, which is to make a fool out of somebody to play the fool.

Ellie: 56:33

Yeah, and in speaking about Native American ceremonies, among the Lakota people, there's a figure of the sacred clown known as the Heyoka who conducts the sacred dance ceremonies. And the Heyokas have sacred power that they share with people, but they do it through their funny actions. So that's part of what I'm thinking about in talking about the sacred clown as a figure of power as well, right? There is like this sharing of power, and it has to do with thunder for them too, and there's a longer story we could tell about there. Since we're coming to the end of the episode, I won't be able to, but I'll just say that there, that sharing of power comes through the funny actions, and so it's sort of defanged in a sense.

David: 57:12

Yeah, and this would lead us to see the Heyoka as a lot of other marginal social figures are often presented as individuals who mediate a culture's relationship to nature and to the broader world in such a way that they become essential components for the health of that society. So not only do they heal, in many cases, inner tensions, but they also ensure that there is a healthy relationship between a community and its outside.

Music: 57:42

Wow.

Ellie: 57:44

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