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VI. RECENT AND CURRENT VIEWS

A shallow reflection of Schiller's views is found in
Herbert Spencer, who vaguely remembers reading
about the play theory in some German author whose
name escaped him. While what he has to say has little
bearing on art, it is included in a simple version of
the “surplus energy” theory:

(Spencer
[1870-72]).

About the turn of this century there was a significant
revival of interest in the topic of play, with some
bearing on art. Karl Groos' two books chiefly rely on
the role of imitation, empathy, and education in the
learning and socialization process:

(1901, p. 8).

Lange, who follows Groos fairly closely, stresses the
structure of self-imposed rules which call for the exer-
cise of imagination. He opposes the passivity of the
spectator to the activity of the creator, and extends
his argument from play to art in pointing to the inven-
tion of a context developed in the course of creation
of a work of art.

Of the many commentaries on the surplus energy
and education theories a few examples may be cited.
Dessoir (pp. 318ff.) treats the Kant-Schiller approaches
favorably and with great penetration. Croce (p. 83),
followed by Collingwood, accepts the “freedom from
causality” argument of Schiller as “possible,” but finds
the surplus energy argument, especially as found in
Spencer “outrageous.” Guyau, on the other hand (p.
174), accepts the latter argument, but sees “art as too
involved with life to be mere play.” And Huizinga,
whose splendid book goes much beyond our scope here,
treats Schiller quite harshly (p. 168), having evidently
misunderstood his case.

A lengthy literature from the utopian socialists to
the 1960's expands the leisure theory to incorporate
art and play into the activities appropriate to an in-
creasingly affluent society. The education theories are
currently in the uncertain stewardship of the schools
of education and the learning psychologists; a stagger-
ing array of studies pursue the related problems of
value-free finger-painting and learning by playing in
a manner that has gone far to discredit the whole
argument.

The metaphysical and psychological theories remain
worthy of serious consideration. As to the first there
has been a significant tendency to extend creativity,
innovation, conventional (self-imposed) rule-making as
obvious features of play and art beyond these to scien-
tific and even to cosmological explanations. Charles S.
Peirce, who acknowledges his debt to Friedrich Schiller
(p. 401), develops (pp. 360f.) a notion of free aesthetic
contemplation—“Pure Play”—culminating in “Muse-
ment” concerning “some wonder in one of the Uni-
verses.” Koestler (1964, especially pp. 509ff.) displays
the interconnectedness of humor, art, and science with
a wealth of illustration. But the most succinct statement
in recent literature on the subject is found in Kroeber
(1948, p. 357):

Finally, there is another area, almost too vague to
document precisely, but pervasive enough in recent
decades, in which certain childlike qualities (including
playfulness) are assimilated to some desirable features
of art. While its origins may be traced back to Plato
at least, the combination is modern, especially in its
emphasis on the unconscious nature of creativity. If,
as Ellen Key argued in her famous book, this is The
Century of the Child (1909), much that is relevant to
our theme will be displayed in what George Boas has
called The Cult of Childhood (1966). Emphasis is laid
on the child's naiveté, spontaneity, and unconscious-
ness, and on the self-absorption of the child's activi-
ties—these are preferred to the calculation and pur-
posiveness of adult behavior. The child's vision is taken
to be innocent, fresh, unencumbered by conceptual
fixity or subordination to cognitive or moral criteria.
The artist (e.g., Rilke, Klee) is seen as liberated from
the exigencies either of representationalism in content
or of set formal patterns. It would be a mistake to insist
that all aspects of this shift in aesthetic objectives are
connected with nostalgia for childlike simplicity and
still less with play. In part it must be associated rather
will the metaphysical anarchy currently fashionable
and that dates from some of the post-Kantian develop-
ments we have traced. Among relevant contemporary
positions in aesthetics mention must be made at least
of Freudian psychology and proponents of “aesthetic
surface.”

An important paper of Freud's, “Creative Writers
and Day-Dreaming,” associates imagination, creativity,
and play, and draws on a parallelism between the child
and the writer, each of whom creates a world of his
own. This world is taken seriously, for the opposite
of play is not the serious but the real. (Freud makes
the further point that this play is not wholly uncon-
nected with the real, otherwise we have fantasy not
play.) From this it follows that features of the real
world are rearranged by the child in his play and by
the artist in his creation. The difference between these
and day-dreaming is that the latter entails a degree
of wish-fulfilment that moves in the direction of neuro-
sis or psychosis; but the differences appear to be of
degree not kind: “... a piece of creative writing, like
a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for,
what was once the play of childhood.” The elaboration
of these insights by the various psychoanalytic schools,
particularly by Jung and Rank, is immensely detailed.
And it is but a step from these to a great variety of
perspectives advanced by existentialist and phenome-
nological writers on aesthetics who make a great deal
of the “child's vision.”

This brings us close to the notion of “aesthetic sur-
face” (D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Analysis, New York,
1929) and “sheer appearance” (S. Langer, Philosophy
in a New Key..., Cambridge, Mass., 1942). Again,
the emphasis here is on the avoidance of conceptual
rigidity, allowing the object to speak to imagination,
a playing with the possible things the aesthetic object
might be, as in Dada for example. These illustrate the
tendency in art and play for forms and structures to
be explored and exploited more than the specific con-
tent of the artwork or game; much is made of the
paradoxical status of “commitment” in the sense that
play and aesthetic experience are contemplative, i.e.,
they do not require that what is encountered be trans-
lated into action, yet they furnish a rich stock of
paradigm situations in largely vicarious experience that
is in fact deployed where knowledge and action are
called for. The “high seriousness” of play and aesthetic
immersion is one of the ways in which many thinkers
have tried to give expression to this phenomenon; and
it derives from the dual capacity of art to be directly
an end-in-itself yet indirectly a means to irrelevant or
seemingly opposed ends.