V. Play and War
“Until recently the ″law of nations″ was generally held to constitute such a system of limitation, recognizing as it did the ideal of a community with rights and claims for all, and expressly separating the state of war—by declaring it—from peace on the one hand and criminal violence on the other. It remained for the theory of ″total war″ to banish war's cultural function and extinguish the last vestige of the play-element.”
This chapter occupies a certain unique position not only in the book but more obviously in Huizinga's own life. The first Dutch version was published in 1938 (before the official outbreak of World War II). The Beacon Press book is based on the combination of Huizinga's English text and the German text, published in Switzerland 1944. Huizinga died in 1945 (the year the Second World War ended).
- One wages war to obtain a decision of holy validity.
- An armed conflict is as much a mode of justice as divination or a legal proceeding.
- War itself might be regarded as a form of divination.
The chapter contains some pleasantly surprising remarks:
- One might call society a game in the formal sense, if one bears in mind that such a game is the living principle of all civilization.
- In the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible.
Read more about this topic: Homo Ludens (book)
Famous quotes containing the words play and/or war:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)