The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits #
The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits. What a wonderful but unusual book. I first heard about this book from C Thi Nguyen’s piece “The Aesthetics of Rock Climbing” nearly a decade ago.This book has since featured heavily in Nguyen’s later work, including his book Games: Agency as Art. When it made a recent and unexpected appearance in a book I was listening to—The Explorer’s Gene—I knew it was time to pull the trigger and pick up the book.
Let me divide my brief review into a bit on content and a bit on form. While the latter is what makes the book so unique, it will help to understand a bit of the former first.
At its core, the book presents a definition and philosophical defense of a definition of what it is to play a game.Part of the interest in so doing comes from the use of games by Wittgenstein as an example of the kind of concept that cannot be given an adequate exhaustive definition. The “portable version”: playing a game is the voluntary overcoming of unnecessary obstacles. This includes everything from run-of-the-mill board and card games, to competitive sports, to more individual pursuits like, yes, rock climbing. The longer version includes a detailed description of the necessity of a goal to achieve, the imposition of inefficient means, and the adoption of rules that thereby constitute the activity. Suits illustrates all of these components through very colorful and illustrative examples. For instance, a golfer does not care independently about getting balls in holes in the ground, and so does not adopt more efficient means (e.g. a guided rocket) for so doing. In my own world, many debates about both ethics but especially style in climbing are really about what rules a certain community adopts. In other words: what game are we playing?
Coming to form, the book does not merely tell, but in fact shows. It takes the form of a dialogue between the grasshopper and two ants; the former, having idled away the summer, is on his deathbed, while the latter two have toiled away and will survive the coming winter. The grasshopper, however, defends his existence by providing the detailed argument about playing a game, and then finally arguing that game-play would be what remains to do in a Utopia where all material needs are taken care of. In such a state, people “do things because they want to, and never because they must”. Along the way, the dialogue goes “meta” and the characters realize that they are characters in a philosophical treatise on game-play. Why would the author write such a treatise in such a style? Why, to play a game! To show, in addition to tell.
The book is a delight to read.Whence it accompanied me on a trip to the Adirondacks and backpacking near Mt. Baker.. Although some bits may be slightly awkward for someone not used to reading mid-20th-century philosophy, Suits has a penchant for extremely colorful and engaging counter-examples and anecdotes, along with a prose style that genuinely produces joy in the reader. There are only two reasons I can’t give the book an “A”: (i) the topic of sex as an example comes up in a few places in a way that feels forced, either reflecting the mid-20th-century vintage or something about the author. (ii) The dialogue format at times is forced/strained: chapter 3, for instance, is basically a verbatim reprint of an article from the journal Philosophy of Science.
These shortcomings, however, are minor. Now that I have seen and had explained this structure, I can’t help but see it all over the place. That’s the sign of a satisfying analysis.
Grade: A-