Humainologie creative dialogue a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility tomorrow Wednesday January 5

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us." - Helen Keller

"Well, now it is time to be off, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God" - Socrates

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” – James Carse

Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, once wrote: "Don't do anything that isn't play.” If you can play with boundaries, even death will hold no dominion over your playfulness.

I have appended herewith my synopsis of Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James Carse. Here are some questions to help you warm up for the game tomorrow, Wednesday January 5.

· What games have you enjoyed playing in the past?

· Have you ever made a game out of something to make it more interesting? Please tell us about your own experience with this strategy.

· Can you take a familiar difficulty in life and create a game structure to make it easier? For example, any of the following might be made into a game:

o Difficulty getting up the enthusiasm to start the day.

o Difficulty getting started with a task (such as income tax reporting) that must be done by a certain deadline each year.

o Difficulty interacting with someone who annoys you.

o Difficulty coping with setbacks or failure or disappointment.

· Write down at least three things you would love to be able to do but which seem beyond your limits. Pick one and design a game structure that might – if you started playing the game – bring that thing within reach.

· If there were just one thing you would like to explore in 2022 – something you could always look back upon with the delight of having done it – what would that one thing be? How would you structure a playful approach to it for the year ahead?

· What parts of the (herewith appended) synopsis of the bookFinite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility did you find most useful for your own games?

Shinobu has provided the Zoom link for our game tomorrow Wednesday, January 5. Here it is:

Topic: Humainologie Dialogue Session Time: Jan 5, 2022 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Feb 23, 2022, 8 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86365003921?pwd=RkRVQVkvaHhML3FoYkRybHpOak1UUT09 Meeting ID: 863 6500 3921 Passcode: 12345

Toot sweet,

Arthur

Book: (James P. Carse) Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility(1986)

“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Those are the opening words of this classic by James P. Carse, who had been Professor Emeritus of history and literature of religion at New York University prior to his death a little over a year ago (September 2020). Ernest Holmes once observed that “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” If you think of life as play and possibility, then life will become full of play and possibility for you. And that sounds like a good thing to me.

Finite games have a definite beginning and end, and clear winners and losers. There are countless examples: Chess, soccer; elections; World War I and World War II; on and on. “Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.” Finite games have a seriousness about them. “To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcomes of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.”

“Death is a defeat in finite play. It is inflicted when one’s boundaries give way and one falls to an opponent. The finite player dies under the terminal move of another. Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that ‘they die at the right time’ (Nietzsche). The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter. …We laugh not at what has surprisingly come to be impossible for others, but over what has surprisingly come to be possible with others.” “The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.” “No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. …Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character. …As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself. As we shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change itself is the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue; this is the principle by which infinite players live.”

“I am the genius of myself…. It is I, not the mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels.” In expressing my unique genius to others, and in expressing their own unique genius as they hear and understand what I am saying, we engage in infinite play. We open possibilities and play with boundaries.

“A finite game occurs within a world.” Boundaries are necessary in a finite game to make sense of it. “The rules of a finite game will indicate the temporal, spatial, and numerical nature of the game itself.” Early in the game, possibilities seem abundant; later in the game they seem sparse. The endgame of chess, for example, will have far fewer moves that can lead to a win than will the opening of the game. “We look on childhood and youth as those ’times of life’ rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome.” A finite game must come to an end, but the players are competing for a victory that will be remembered far longer than the duration of the game. “The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs meant never to be forgotten. …By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.”

“Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience [this] as its utter indifference to human culture.” Human history can be seen as a struggle to master this indifference. Nature has a “lawfulness” and because the structure of the mind is perfectly compatible with that lawfulness, we think we can gain a complete understanding of nature. We think we can bend nature to our will by understanding its laws. The gods have fallen silent. Or so we had thought. “There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature.” However, “…nature allows no master over itself.” Referring to the concept from Francis Bacon that “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” Carse writes: “If we must obey to command, then our commanding is only obeying and not commanding at all. …Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it.” Our observation is itself a part of nature, and our understanding is only a map of the infinitely rich territory we are interpreting. Carse calls attention to the difference between finite and infinite speech, and in doing so he emphasizes the importance of listening, of story (and, I think, of dialogue). “The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening.” We cannot really know the stories even of our own lives. Instead, if all goes well, we live our lives, aware that what seems like an ending, a closure, can be the opening of a new possibility.

We can think of nature as “a hostile Other,” and try to control it, in which case “the result…is the machine…” whereas if we discipline ourselves to be in harmony with nature, the result is the garden. “This is not a garden one lives beside but a garden one lives within. It is a place of growth, of maximized spontaneity. To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise in nature.” “Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature…. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.” And here comes the climate crisis: “The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it.” We destroy a rainforest, and a desert takes its place, and threatens to destroy us. There is also a danger from artificial intelligence (AI). We think machines will be our slaves, but we become slaves to our machines. “Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. …The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operations. …. Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.” Let’s make it obvious. “The inherent hostility of machine-mediated relatedness is nowhere more evident than in the use of the most theatrical machines of all: instruments of war. … Killers are not victors, they are unopposed competitors, players without a game, living contradictions.” The stupidity that was rudimentary in the club-wielding cave man, is more advanced in the nuclear weapon-wielding modern man. “Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century’s grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.” There is a garden in our culture. “Gardeners celebrate variety, unlikeness, spontaneity. …Growth promotes growth. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.” A garden enables growth in the gardener. Lastly, it is myth, not explanation or argument, that makes the rejuvenating mystery of the world accessible. “We can even say that if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.” Myth is essential to our humanity. “Whole civilizations rise from stories – and can rise from nothing else.”