The Reconstructive and Normative Aspects of Bernard Suits's Utopia

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2021

In this article, I consider Bernard Suits’ Utopia where the denizens supposedly fill their days playing Utopian sports, with regard to the relevance of the thought experiment for understanding the sports we currently play and have played. I argue that the thought experiment is irrelevant for understanding our current and past sports, i.e. human sports. I identify two views on games and sports in Utopia; the strong view of games and sports in Utopia is that game and sport playing would be inevitable in Utopia; the weak view of games and sports in Utopia is that game and sport playing in Utopia is possible. Whereas the strong view is obviously false, the weak view can be defended. However, this means that it is underdetermined whether there at all will be sports in Suits’ Utopia and this in itself throws seriously doubt upon the viability of the thought experiment vis-à-vis human sports. Furthermore, while human and potential Utopian sports will share the same internal purpose of winning sport competitions, they will have widely differing external functions or purposes since they are part of radically different circumstances. Human sports are born out of the non-Utopian circumstances of the human condition and fulfil our needs for competition and domination, whereas Suits’ Utopians would have no such needs, and the way in which they would potentially engage in their sports would be quite foreign to us. On closer inspection, when we think seriously through the circumstances in which Utopian sports would operate and how human sports function in the non-Utopian state of affairs we call our world, we find that the former do not to any relevant degree inform us about the latter. Suits’ Utopia provides no guide for thinking about human sports.

Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2007

In this paper, I engage the debate on Suits’ theory of games by providing a Kantian view of Utopia. I argue that although the Kantian aspects of Suits’ approach are often overlooked in comparison to its Socratic-Platonic aspects, Kant’s ideas play a fundamental role in Suits’ proposal. In particular, Kant’s concept of ‘regulative idea’ is the basis of Suits’ Utopia. I regard Utopia as Suits’ regulative idea on game playing. In doing so, I take Utopia to play a double role in Suits’ theory of games. First, it highlights the primary condition of possibility of game-playing, namely, the lusory attitude. Second, it provides a normative criterion that serves as a critical principle to evaluate instances of game playing and as a counterfactual assumption that makes game playing possible. I provide further support for my Kantian interpretation of Suits’ Utopia by bringing to light the anthropological assumptions upon which Utopia is built. In doing so, I argue that both Suits’ theory of games, in general, and his Utopia, in particular, lay out the conditions of possibility of game playing, not an analysis on the life most worth living.

Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2018

An essential and yet often neglected motivation of Bernard Suits' elevation of gameplay to the ideal of human existence is his account of capacities along perfectionist lines and the function of games in eliciting them. In his work Suits treats the expression of these capacities as implicitly good and the purest expression of the human telos. Although it is a possible interpretation to take Suits' utopian vision to mean that gameplay in his future utopia must consist of the logically inevitable replaying of activities we conduct in the present for instrumental reasons (playing games-by-default), because gameplay for Suits is identical with the expression of sets of capacities specifically elicited by game rules, it is much more likely that he intends utopian gameplay to be an endless series of carefully crafted opportunities for the elicitation of special capacities (playing games-by-design), and thus embody his ideal of existence. This article therefore provides a new lens for understanding both Suits' definitional work on gameplay, and its connection to his utopian vision in the last chapter of The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia.

Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2021

In his groundbreaking and fantastic new book, Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen asks us to see gameplay, and hence the ‘humorous, the playful, and the ridiculous’ (2020, 42), as an important sphe...

Play is a fundamental experience embedded within human culture. We all play in some perceptible manner that provides our lives with meaning we don’t ordinarily feel from other pursuits that are means-ended. Sport philosophers have depended upon the seminal theories of Huizinga and Caillois to shape their constraints on the play world. Huizinga’s and Caillois’ definition both use formal analysis to protect the play sphere however, their theories fail in providing justifiable reason to protect the play sphere and the meaning it has. I propose that understanding play from the perspective of existentialism provides a better way to understand its meaning and truly understand how it shapes the understanding of play, games, and sports with the field of the philosophy of sport.

The main theme of my article is the relationship between virtual worlds of video games and the concept of utopia. I aim to present a wide variety of different definitions and theories of utopia, which seem indispensable in order to further the relationship between video game and virtual reality research and the multitude of utopian studies discourses. The thesis starts with a short recollection of Alexander Galloway's thesis on video games and utopias from his article on World of Warcraft which I am trying to supplement with some of the most interesting contemporary utopian studies research. The core of the article focuses on sketching an alternative proposal which includes a variety of definitions of utopia and utopianism. My aim is to introduce precise and useful notions which could be further utilized in game analysis and game research.

2015

I aim to defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game. Specifically, it is a “Suitsian” game, a game meeting the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one raised by Thomas Hurka (2006) and another which Suits himself raises at the conclusion of The Grasshopper. In the process I offer a new interpretation of that enigmatic and challenging book.

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2013

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2019

In this article, we contextualize and introduce the papers that comprise the special issue, "Bernard Suits' Legacy: New Inspirations and Interpretations." The articles discuss the work of Suits to raise, formulate, and face challenges that it presents to open new philosophical debates on his philosophical analysis of play, game, and sport. The issue comprises 13 articles that explore the two central themes in The Grasshopper. One section focuses on the ontology of games, whereas the other centers on the normative aspects of game playing, that is, on Suits' notion of Utopia. The special issue closes with three brief reports concerning recent translations of The Grasshopper into foreign languages, a biographical note on Suits, and an interview with Cheryl Ballantyne, Suits' widow. We hope that the works contained in the special issue will help further the knowledge and stimulate the study of Suits' work not only within sport philosophy, but also in those fields where discussions on the nature of games and the good life are prevalent.