The Seriousness of Play: Johan Huizinga and Carl Schmitt on Play and the Political

Huizinga in the Shadow of Tomorrow

In early 1933, Johan Huizinga, then rector of the University of Leiden, took his first overt political action in what has come to be known as the “von Leers Incident.” Johann von Leers, a committed Nazi scholar, had been visiting Leiden as a delegate to the International Student Service Congress, when the university became aware of an anti-Semitic pamphlet that had recently appeared under his name. At a meeting with Huizinga and the deans of the University of Leiden, von Leers admitted to his authorship of the tract and was immediately denied further access to the campus (Otterspeer, 1997, pp. 390–402). The congress itself, the directors of the university declared, was also to end several days early. von Leers then had a short interchange with Huizinga, which anticipates the Dutch historian’s coming work in cultural criticism:

The rector [Huizinga] had observed that an abyss had opened up between opinion in Western Europe and opinion in Central Europe, Dr von Leers had responded that he and the members of his delegation had tried to bridge that gap. Thereupon the rector had remarked that having won back among many people the sympathy it had lost during the war, Germany had now lost that sympathy again, and far more besides (as cited in Otterspeer, 1997, p. 397).

Over the course of the coming decade, Huizinga attempted to account for this abyss in opinion between Western and Central Europe. But his account, much like von Leer’s, proved inadequate.

Three years later, Huizinga published his first book to address the ongoing cultural crisis in Europe, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936). This book, whose German translation was swiftly banned by the Nazis, grew out of his earlier studies like The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) and America (1918–1926). In this prior work, Huizinga had pursued of a form of imaginative historiography that treats the past not as a register of events but as an image borne by creative freedom (cf. Daniel-Wariya, 2019; Geyl, 1963; Otterspeer, 1997). Huizinga had also taken an early interest in what he called “the intimate connection between culture and play” (Huizinga, 2002, p. 104) in ancient cultures. But, by the mid-1930s, a change had transpired in his thinking. The Dutch historian had turned away from the past and toward the present in order to diagnose the pathology of his own time, in which many harbored uncertainties about the longevity of civilization. “Everywhere there are doubts as to the solidity of our social structure, vague fears of the immanent future, a feeling that our civilization is on the way to ruin” (Huizinga, 1936, p. 15). Citing the detrimental influence of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–1922), Huizinga opposed apocalyptic cultural pessimism, ultimately accusing the pessimists of an indifference to truth and knowledge. Knowledge, he argued, should not be eclipsed by any form of vitalistic subjectivism or relativism.

As a major culprit of this decline, Huizinga (1936) named the “worship of life” among certain contemporaries who “sneer at all that is knowledge and truth” (p. 105). He criticized these philosophers of life for having turned the concept of “the political” into an “absolute category” by placing the sovereign state on a higher plane than truth or justice. The result: cosmopolitanism was losing ground to nationalistic “blood metaphor.” Huizinga named here Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1932) as exemplary of this way of thinking. In it, Schmitt divorces “the political” from ethics by assigning political calculations autonomy from other all considerations. The Dutch historian accused Schmitt of begging the question, for taking as his conclusion the postulate that the political can be reduced to the distinction between friend and enemy, rather than that between truth and untruth or justice and injustice. This faulty logic, Huizinga suggested, leads only to chaos. “In the shadow of the recognition of the absolute independence of the political as such stands the recognition of anarchism” (p. 123). Assessing the political-theological core of Schmitt’s work, which takes the concept of the enemy to be a genealogical inheritance from theology, Huizinga classified Schmittian political theory as nothing other than a “Satanism which sets up evil as a beacon and guiding star for a misguided humanity” (p. 127).

Toward the end of In the Shadow of Tomorrow, the Dutch historian diagnoses the “evil of [his] time” with a pathological playfulness. As he understood it, the politicization of all spheres of life taking place in Nazi Germany amounted to nothing other than the ludification of all things. Huizinga saw this form of play as ingenuine. “Nowadays, play in many cases never ends and hence is not true play,” he wrote. “A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place. The two spheres are getting mixed” (p. 177). As a result of this mixing, a “permanent adolescence” had taken hold of Huizinga’s contemporaries, ruining the sense of decorum that had ruled over Western civilization since the time of medieval chivalric codes. Consequently, the political sphere had become a matter of playful “puerilism,” in which sloganeering has taken the place of serious debate. Huizinga’s concern was to defend seriousness against the encroachment of play. Yet, rather than seeking to demarcate the realm of the serious, the Dutch cultural historian set his sights on defining and delimiting the magic circle of play. His next work, the seminal Homo Ludens, reads not only as a manual about what play is. It points to the very limits of play in seriousness. Through this sharp distinction, Huizinga’s argument accrues polemical value. But, in doing so, it forsakes complication and, even, rigor.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga defines play not as a certain type of activity but as an “element” fundamental to human culture. His work follows in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, who, in the late 18th century, redefined “esthetics” as a matter of phenomenological experience, rather than of ontological beauty. Schiller’s idea of the esthetic “play drive” (Spieltrieb), the fundamental human impulse to imagine, create, and judge freely, lies at the origin of Huizinga’s study. For Schiller, whose later work is itself an expressly political response to the French Reign of Terror, the development of the instinct for play serves as an essential component in the moral education of the autonomous individual. Huizinga extrapolated from Schiller’s argument, arguing that the “play element” is fundamental not just to the life of the mature individual but to all of human society. Out of ancient myth and ritual were born music, poetry, law, and even knowledge. For the Dutch cultural historian, our entire human history must itself be understood sub specie ludi, that is, as representative of the creative freedom and enlightened autonomy of “pure play.” But Huizinga’s understanding of the autonomous play element curiously hinges on his conception of seriousness. Through this contrast, the conceptual and, even, political limits of Huizinga’s argument become apparent.

The concept of seriousness factors into Homo Ludens less to delimit the notion of play than to describe differing attitudes of play. Huizinga (2002) initially rejects the simple definition of play as “non-seriousness” or even “not serious” (p. 5). Although play unfolds in an imagined world, he understood, it nonetheless can be pursued with a great deal of seriousness, as in a religious rite, a court proceeding, or even a game of chess. He acknowledged that “the contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play” (p. 8). Crucially, what distinguishes Huizinga’s concepts from one another is not whether they bear on heteronomous concerns. Indeed, play for Huizinga should be purposeless, functioning at most as a necessary supplement to serious matters. Huizinga preoccupied himself with the domains appropriate to play, a psychological concern which becomes all the clearer in his critique of Carl Schmitt in the final chapter of Homo Ludens.

The last chapter, “The Play Element in Contemporary Civilization,” reads as a revision of Huizinga’s argument in In the Shadow of Tomorrow. Rather than decrying the pathological overabundance of play-like puerilism, as he had done previously, it criticizes the increasing seriousness among contemporaries. It most clearly has in its sights Schmitt’s concept of the Ernstfall, the serious threat of violence in accordance to which the political sphere of friends and enemies establishes itself. Huizinga (2002) attacks Schmitt for reducing politics to violence:

A cant phrase in current German political literature speaks of the change from peace to war as “das Eintreten des Ernstfalles”—roughly, “the serious development of an emergency.” In strictly military parlance, of course, the term is correct. Compared with the sham fighting of maneuvres and drilling and training, real war is undoubtedly what seriousness is to play. But German political theorists mean something more. The term “Ernstfall” avows quite openly that foreign policy has not attained its full degree of seriousness, has not achieved its object or proved its efficiency, until the stage of actual hostilities is reached (p. 209).

For Huizinga, this reductio ad violentiam is not problematic because it renders politics overly serious. In fact, as argued below, Huizinga, like Schmitt, viewed the political sphere to lie within the realm of the serious. Rather, his issue lay with Schmitt’s understanding of warfare as the origin of all seriousness.

Huizinga, who had spent much of his earlier career studying medieval chivalric codes, knew that warfare had, for millennia, been ruled-based and thus had traditionally existed within the realm of play. He detected, however, a transformation in this paradigm with the rise of total mobilization. In order for war to retain its playful character, the combatants must “regard each other as equals or antagonists with equal rights” (p. 89). Traditional war remains beholden to the dictates of what Huizinga calls “culture,” that is, of ethical mores and international law. In it, the enemy retains the status of a player among equals. Total war, by contrast, “is waged outside the sphere of equals, against groups not recognized as human beings and thus deprived of human rights—barbarians, devils, heathens, heretics, and ‘lesser breeds without the law’” (pp. 89–90). In transforming the enemy concept into an existential other, modern war effectively “extinguish[es] the last vestige of the play element” (p. 90).

This opposition to total war underlies Huizinga’s critique of Schmittian political theory. According to the Dutch historian, Schmitt’s political theory turns war into too serious a matter. War, he believed, should reside within the magic circle:

I know of no sadder or deeper fall from human reason than Schmitt’s barbarous and pathetic delusion about the friend–foe principle. His inhuman cerebrations do not even hold water as a piece of formal logic. For it is not war that is serious, but peace. War and everything to do with it remains fast in the demonic and magical bonds of play. Only by transcending that pitiable friend–foe relationship will mankind enter into the dignity of man’s estate. Schmitt’s brand of “seriousness” merely takes us back to the savage level (p. 209).

Schmitt’s understanding of war, Huizinga argued, forsakes playful antagonism in favor of life-or-death seriousness. In doing so, it degrades the cultural sphere that Huizinga viewed to be so vital and originary to human civilization.

In the final pages of Homo Ludens, Huizinga at last betrays his own conception of seriousness. For the neo-Kantian, seriousness refers first and foremost to the “moral content of an action” as determined by “objective [...] ethical standards” (p. 210). In the last paragraph, he makes the case that, in spite of its importance to human culture, play should ultimately defer to serious deontological considerations. “What is play? What is seriousness?” he asks. “Play, we began by saying, lies outside of morals. In itself, it is neither good nor bad. But if we have to decide whether an action to which our will impels us is a serious duty or is licit as play, our moral conscience will at once provide the touchstone” (p. 213). For Huizinga, the true contrast by which play comes into its own is thus not precisely the distinction between play and seriousness. Instead, it is morality that should be set apart from play and guarded by seriousness.

But, in constructing a moat around his concept of play, Huizinga undermined his own argument. Although Huizinga readily admitted that play and seriousness can at times concur, he ultimately concluded that seriousness precedes and lies outside of play. Play, at best, remains relegated to the realm of the imaginary, secondary to the serious concerns of ethics and politics. Motte (2009) has described Huizinga’s play–seriousness binary as “hierarchical and top-heavy, insofar as the ‘earnest’ is invested with meaning, importance, and value, while the ‘playful’ is relegated to the domain of the trivial, the otiose, and the supplementary” (p. 25). In ultimately assigning play a secondary status, Homo Ludens draws into doubt its thesis that play has been and will remain elemental to civilization. Its final statement contra total mobilization ultimately contradicts its earlier claims. As Galli (2012) has pointed out, rather than establishing the particularity of play, Huizinga's book “ends up problematizing the relationship between play and seriousness” (p. 76).

Huizinga’s life here provides another useful clue to his thinking. As discussed above, Huizinga felt compelled in 1933 to dismiss von Leers from the University of Leiden because the German scholar had published an anti-Semitic pamphlet. His problem was, however, not the content of von Leers’ political views. Rather, Huizinga took offense with von Leers’s use of his title and position in academe to promote patently false “stories about ritual murders of Christian children by Jews” as the truth (Otterspeer, 1997, p. 424). In doing so, the Dutch historian wanted to defend the university as a free and imaginative play space for the discovery of truth, in which intellectual adversaries number as equals. von Leers, in other words, was what Huizinga would later call a “spoilsport,” a player with no respect for the game of knowledge. The Dutch historian felt it necessary to expel von Leers from Leiden for his refusal to abide by the rules of open academic discourse in a democratic society.

But Huizinga’s insistence on the autonomy of play did not, paradoxically, lead him away from friend–enemy relations. As we have seen, his theory of “Man the Player” is grounded in a worldview strictly opposed to the cultural pessimism and reactionary politics of the interwar years. Its final chapter clearly establishes Schmitt as its opponent. Huizinga’s insistence on the autonomy of play was, in other words, political. In taking this stand, however, Huizinga contradicted his very thesis that play must be kept apart from heteronomous concerns. The knowledge that it offers, a domain which Huizinga categorized under play, was motivated by something other than pure play. Schmitt, for his part, was aware of this political intensity in Huizinga’s work. In a 1938 book review, the German jurist mentions the Dutch historian by name in his paranoid and imperialistic depiction of the politics inherent to the unpolitical conception of culture:

The spirit of neutrality employs the concepts culture, progress, education, unpolitical science, and other similar ideas [Vorstellungen] as weapons in the battle against a strong Reich at the center of Europe. It turns politics into the antithesis of everything spiritual and cultural and a weak center of Europe, predestined to be the battleground of future wars, into an ethical and esthetic ideal. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, but also inside of Germany, this spirit has countless champions and allies. Cities like Basel and Amsterdam are its residence. Names like Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Langbehn, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Siegmund [sic] Freud, Huizinga, and Karl Barth appear on this cultural front, whose ultimate goal is depoliticization, neutralization, decisionlessness, nihilism, and finally bolshevism (Schmitt, 1940, pp. 271–272; my translation).

As Schmitt’s remark highlights, to depoliticize the cultural sphere as the domain of “pure play” does not render culture neutral. Instead, it simply obscures the political decisions that have made culture a free sphere in the first place. To deny the necessary relation between culture and politics by insisting on the autonomy of play is, in effect, to take for granted or to neglect the inherent political implications of culture.

Ultimately at hand in this disagreement is a contestation over the legacy of existentialism in modernist thought. Huizinga had, from the very beginning of his career, exhibited an interest in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose creative historicism served as the Dutch historian’s guiding star. Huizinga’s work takes an imaginative, dream-like, and “extra-scientific [...] approach to history” (Geyl, 1963, p. 243). Like Nietzsche, Huizinga did not believe that historiography should concern itself with rendering a factual record of the past. Instead, the historian’s vocation is to create meaningful images for use in the present and, thereby, to create order and harmony (Otterspeer, 1997, pp. 388–389). But this is where Huizinga’s reception of Nietzsche comes to an end. He refused to inherit from Nietzsche either an acceptance of value-creating chaos or a genealogical understanding of morality as a symptom of master–slave relations. Huizinga, instead, held to the serious Kantian notion that morality refers to universal, categorically imperative laws.

But, in differentiating between free play and moral seriousness, Huizinga ignored much of play’s existential potentiality. For play is about more than the freedom of the imagination; it too is about the serious matters of ethics and political freedom. Even Huizinga appears to have known this himself. Toward the end of his life, the Dutch historian reported in a lecture that a colleague had once asked him whether Homo Ludens was a “noble game.” “The question shook me,” Huizinga explained. “I replied with a half-hearted ‘yes’, but inside me there was a shout of ‘no’” (as cited in Gombrich, 1973, p. 277). Even though he was reticent to admit it, Huizinga ultimately understood the serious stakes of his theory of pure play.

“The Hidden Dialogue”

Although scholars have been aware of Huizinga’s contestation with Schmitt since the 1930s, only in recent years has an attempt been made to address Schmitt’s response to Huizinga’s critique. As the Italian historian Galli (2012) has suggested, Schmitt’s concept of the Ernstfall contains “a polemical and direct reference to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens” (p. 76). Schmitt too concerned himself with the dynamic between seriousness and play. At first blush, little in fact appears to separate Schmitt’s position from Huizinga’s. Like the Dutch cultural historian, Schmitt took an interest in defending the realm of seriousness from any encroachment from the realm of play. But, while Huizinga theorized play to be elemental, capable of creating civilizing harmony and order, Schmitt understood play to be a mere supplement to seriousness. The Ernstfall, as Schmitt saw it, creates order; it precedes and even delimits the potentiality of the free play of the imagination. This difference in conceptions of seriousness accounts not only for Huizinga’s and Schmitt’s dueling notions of play but for their dueling notions of the political.

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt (2007) defines the Ernstfall as the “ever present possibility of combat” (p. 32). For Schmitt, combat is not to be understood along the same lines as Huizinga’s ludic conception of war. Not a game, combat is a matter of one’s existential being-unto-death. Warfare, Schmitt clarifies, “does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved.” Instead, “the friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing” (p. 33). This possibility of “existential negation,” Schmitt argues, makes warfare the kernel of all seriousness, out of which grows the enmity of the political. Militarism should be “neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics” (p. 34). As a persistent possibility, however, the Ernstfall of combat nonetheless informs human civilization by making state politics necessary.

It would, however, be mistaken to argue, like Huizinga, that Schmitt endorses the extermination of the enemy. For Schmitt (2007) believed that human life only acquires its dignity through the political sphere, which prevents the enemy concept from descending to the status of a morally reprehensible “monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed” (p. 36). Schmitt (2017) made clear that the annihilation of the enemy amounts to nothing other than “self-annihilation,” for destroying the enemy would abolish the existential political intensity that renders life meaningful in the first place. The Schmittian concept of the political has its basis in a moral view that is “pluralistic” insofar as it accepts the legitimacy of opposing universalities. Neo-Kantian deontologists like Huizinga, by contrast, deny the possibility of competing legitimacies under the banner of universal ethics. In doing so, they merely obscure the political decisions underlying their moral universalism.

As Leo Strauss (2007) pointed out, Schmitt’s political theory does not abolish morality; it, in fact, passes moral judgment on the liberal, humanitarian morality represented by Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Schmitt’s concern is for a moral seriousness of a different, more radical variety than Huizinga’s. He sees morality itself as a political field shot through with the “intensity” of friend–enemy relations. “[Schmitt] affirms the political,” Strauss wrote, “because he sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life. The affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral” (p. 117). Whereas Huizinga sought to defend the play element in culture from political and ethical seriousness, Schmitt wanted to guard political and ethical seriousness from play.

In previously tracing the Huizinga–Schmitt debate, De Vugt (2017) has appealed to Schmitt’s concept of the Ausnahmezustand (“state of emergency” or, literally, “state of exception”) to explain the Ernstfall. Following the lead of Giorgio Agamben, she has argued that the Ernstfall should be understood along the same lines as the exception in Schmitt’s thought. For Schmitt, of course, the exception is anything but extraordinary; it speaks to the conditions underlying the norm. The Ernstfall, she concludes, is in fact the rule in Schmitt’s thought, in which it informs his understanding of everything from the political to play. But, in conflating the Ernstfall and the state of exception, de Vugt overlooks the particular conceptual topography of each term. Whereas the exception, a concept which Schmitt borrowed directly from Søren Kierkegaard (2005), refers to the concrete limitations of universalities like the law, the Ernstfall describes an existentially determinative event or, at least, the eventuality of one. As Schmitt conceived it, the Ernstfall is no philosophical problem; it is a real one, which has dire implications for the political, economic, social, and cultural order.

Schmitt’s critique of the autonomy of imaginative play finds its clearest expression in his postwar Hamlet or Hecuba (1956). In it, the German jurist applies an historicist hermeneutics to Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare’s drama originated not in the Bard’s imagination but in the historical world. He points to the murder of James I’s father as the decisive political event, the Ernstfall, that gave rise to this telling of the Hamlet myth. Rather than finding its way into the drama directly, as an allusion or a reflection, the trauma of this event lingers repressed in its unconscious as “a core of historical actuality and historical presence” (Schmitt, 2009, p. 44). This “taboo,” Schmitt claimed, enters the playhouse from the outside—from the political sphere—as a disruptive “intrusion” (Einbruch). A term with clear criminological connotations, the intrusion of the political Ernstfall sets limits to the freedom of the author’s imagination and the playfulness of the resulting work of art. The presences of the Ernstfall of Henry Stuart’s murder within Shakespeare's play rendered it a politically serious work of tragedy. Tragedy and imaginative play are irreconcilable, as the “core of historical reality is not invented, cannot be invented, and must be respected as given” (p. 48). Because it yields to this serious center, Hamlet offers a “surplus value” that allows one to perceive the repressed political reality of Jacobean England.

But something greater than this latent reality is at issue in Schmitt’s Hamlet interpretation: an attempt to politicize the concept of play. In Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt is less concerned with redefining what playful imagination means—indeed, he accepts the Schillerian definition of play as “creative freedom”—than he is with combatting the idea that imaginative play realized as stage drama is politically neutral. He criticizes, in particular, Schiller’s theorization of play as a field of autonomous representation, set over and against all matters of seriousness. “In such a philosophy,” Schmitt writes of Schiller’s Kallias Letters, “play must become superior to seriousness. Life is serious, and art is jovial; indeed, but the serious reality of the man of action is then ultimately only ‘miserable reality,’ and seriousness is always on the verge of becoming animal brutality” (p. 47). For Shakespeare, however, the Schillerian play–seriousness binary was not self-evident. In the early 17th century, stage drama had not yet been relegated to the unserious sphere of play. It was still “elemental” and actively involved in the world around it. Shakespeare’s work, he concluded, cannot purely be play.

For Schmitt, Shakespeare’s genius lies not in his free creativity but in his ability to elevate the play element to the plane of political seriousness. Even the play-within-the-play, “The Murder of Gonzago,” preserves the intensity of the repressed Ernstfall of the murder of Henry Stuart. Schmitt exhorts the reader to weep for Hamlet, not because Shakespeare’s play is sad in and of itself, but because the play bears on real political violence. To do otherwise would simply “prove that the gods in the theater are different from those in the forum and the pulpit” (p. 43). Ultimately, Schmitt was interested in proving that the imaginative work of art does not exist autonomously. In spite of claims to the contrary, esthetic play remains bound to the political, even if unconsciously.

But Schmitt also acknowledged the political necessity of the Spieltrieb. Following his collaboration with the Nazi regime, he clarified that the enemy concept is not singularly determined by the omnipresence of deadly seriousness. Quoting a line from Theodor Däubler’s expressionist poetry, Schmitt (2017) wrote that the enemy too is a question of “figuration” (Gestalt), that is, of esthetic form and of imaginative play. Levi (2007) has argued that Schmitt’s Gestalt theory of the enemy “makes visible at the same time both the seriousness of the political—its life-and-death stakes—and its esthetic-formal component.” For Schmitt, “the political both draws on and is shadowed by elements that we might regard as irreducibly esthetic” (p. 43). And Pan (2008) has gone so far as to draw a connection between Schmittian political seriousness and Kantian reflective judgement, whereby “the decision contains a type of judgment that has an esthetic form” (p. 56). As Pan argues, Schmitt’s understanding of the relation between esthetics and political seriousness is dialectical:

Far from subordinating esthetics to politics, Schmitt develops a dialectical model in which, first, art’s lacunae are identified as the place of the political and, second, art plays a political role by influencing political thinking through its specifically esthetic mode of representation (Pan & Berman, 2008, pp. 3–4).

Within this dialectical model, esthetic play is by no means pure or free. It remains beholden to the political, which both intrudes upon the magic circle and is threatened by it. Doubtlessly thinking of Nazi anti-Semitism, Schmitt (2017) in fact cautioned of the political dangers of being carried away by the play drive: “Take care […] and do not speak lightly of the enemy. One categorizes oneself through one’s enemy” (p. 71). The German jurist was well aware of the destructive impact the arbitrary element of the imagination can have in the political sphere.

Ultimately, Schmitt remained cynical about the liberatory potential of pure play. He mused sardonically that seriousness might well come to delimit play: “perhaps someday a legislator, realizing the relation between freedom and play or freedom and leisure time, will establish the simple legal definition: play is everything that one undertakes in order to fill and structure legally sanctioned leisure time” (Schmitt, 2009, p. 40n). Play, in other words, is not genuinely free. The sanctity of the free imagination is determined by the externality of the political. To see play as pure, Schmitt suggested, obstructs one’s ability to participate in the true realm of human freedom, the political sphere. Here, the German jurist ultimately deferred to the writing of a former student of his, Rüdiger Altmann: “One can only know what play is after experiencing a critical situation [Ernstfall]” (as cited in Schmitt, 2009, p. 40). Play, that is, can only be understood through its relation to seriousness.

Conclusion: Differentiation and Deferral

As argued above, Huizinga was aware of the pre-modern interrelation between play and seriousness. Like Schmitt, he cited myth as the domain in which the two intermingle. “Living myth knows no distinction between play and seriousness” (Huizinga, 2002, p. 129). Only when myth becomes codified as mythology, he argued, does it become relegated to the sphere of pure play. In spite of what some have described as his apparent “postlapsarian” nostalgia for the pre-modern (Frissen et al., 2013), Huizinga affirmed the modern differentiation of play and seriousness. In doing so, however, he drew into doubt his own thesis that the play element is one of the absolute fundaments of human civilization. In the pure form theorized by Huizinga, play fails to live up to its promise of freedom and autonomy. Schmitt, by contrast, was aware of play’s limitations. He saw in the concept not a transcendental ideal but a political decision expressive of friend–enemy relations. By making the political contours of play apparent, his work seeks to return play to its relation to seriousness.

This dialogue, carried out in the critical decades preceding and following the Second World War, anticipates the insights of more recent debates concerning play. Over the past two decades, scholars have in fact sought to reassert the seriousness of play through the concept of gamification. Gamification strives to render play not just purposive but purposeful. In this very journal, scholars have in recent years proposed bringing “serious gamification” (Roth, 2015) to bear on domains as diverse as elder care (Musselwhite, Marston, & Freeman, 2016), moral decision-making (Stains, Formosa, & Ryan, 2019), and cognitive bias (Bush, 2017) in an attempt to make play useful. On the opposing front, others have attempted to defend the autonomy of play by insisting upon the value of unseriousness (Simon, 2017). But even the concept of the unserious is itself grounded in the serious motivation to offer an alternative to an all-too-serious worldview. Above all, these recent studies highlight anew the insights of the Huizinga–Schmitt debate, namely, that play cannot be understood as an entity unto itself. To know play, one must also know seriousness.

Both Huizinga and Schmitt were aware of this dialectic. Whereas Huizinga sought to resolve the tension by insisting on the transcendence of play, Schmitt set his sights on subjecting play to seriousness. These differing responses are indicative of an underlying political contestation: Huizinga’s attempt to depoliticize the concept of play and Schmitt’s re-politicizing rebuttal. But we need not resort to either of these extreme viewpoints to make the concept of play workable. We need not think of play as absolutely transcendent or as absolutely immanent. Here, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s critique of Schmitt’s Hamlet interpretation provides a useful counterpoint. Political history, Gadamer (2006) has agued, does not in fact intrude upon Shakespeare’s play. Rather, “the play draws time into its play” (p. 498), allowing possibilities to play themselves out. Neither is this temporality exhausted by the immediate political circumstances of Hamlet’s production, nor is it entirely separable from them. Instead, this play-time enables a “productive ambiguity,” which allows the experience of the artwork to become a “new event.” By insisting that Hamlet exists solely within the horizon on an old event, Schmitt neglected to see the promise of play to usher in the new, the unexpected, even the miraculous.

This failure of imagination on Schmitt’s part is certainly at issue in this debate with Huizinga. The German jurist focused on limitations and exceptions to the detriment of the principle of hope. His concept of the Ernstfall relieves play of every positive potentiality and turns it, at best, into a matter of caution. His political and juridical theory resorts to the same reductiveness. It subscribes to the program of political realism, while simultaneously downplaying the freedom and ethical awareness engendered by the playful imagination. The most troublesome aspect of this perspective manifested itself in Schmitt’s willingness to subject his own academic freedom to the demands of a dictatorial state by accepting a leading position in the Nazi juridical establishment and, in this official capacity, publishing a number of articles legitimizing Hitler’s rule. Schmitt’s case clearly reveals the dangers of ignoring the liberty of play. But we should also take from the Huizinga–Schmitt interchange the insight that play bears within itself a political index, a fact which even Huizinga recognized in the end. Play should not be isolated in its pure form. To conceive of the play element means also to conceive of the Ernstfall.