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 drama’s altar isn’t on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it’s roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)