In a very superficial analysis, one could say that leisure equals free time, and be done with it. Certainly, in some languages, like Dutch and German, the very word used to denote ‘leisure’ actually translates as ‘free time’ (vrije tijd and Freizeit, respectively). However, while ‘leisure’ and ‘free time’ are related concepts, they are not the exact same thing. The very idea behind the philosophy of leisure (e.g. as explored in this book) is that there is considerable conceptual depth to be found in ‘leisure’ that is sold short by using ‘free time’ as a description.
There are several ways to make the point that ‘leisure’ does not equal ‘free time’. One of them is to focus on the ‘time’ aspect of ‘free time’, claiming that leisure denotes much more than merely an activity category that one can distinguish from ‘work’. From a socio-economic perspective, free time can indeed be seen as a part of our day, with its associated activities and economical infrastructure, but one of the core claims in this book is that leisure is also a deeper concept containing quite a bit more – the phenomenological inside of free-time behaviour, and the potential positive effects that leisure practice can have. This claim is tangentially related to the distinction made by DeGrazia (in Rademakers (2003)), who introduces a normative distinction by associating ‘free time’ with entertainmen-trelated activities, and associating ‘leisure’ with the psychologically salient ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 2007) category of activities. No parallel hierarchical value judgements will be made, but our general point will be that ‘leisure’ as a concept denotes something that is more layered phenomenologically than a socio-economic categorisation. More will be said about the deeper uses and associated meanings of leisure in later chapters, particularly when the end-game in Part III of this book comes into view.
Another way of negating the naive equation ‘leisure = free time’ is to note that the freedom in free time is philosophically problematic, hence that the equation of the two concepts falls apart – or, at the very least, requires additional attention. This will be the purpose of this chapter: focusing on the idea of ‘freedom’ in ‘free time’.
Understanding the concept ‘freedom’ has been a major project throughout the history of philosophy, and continues to dominate many current discussions. The core question in many of these discussions is under which conditions and to what extent freedom is possible – this possibility being something that is somehow perceived to be the case or desired in a particular ideological context, but should then be understood in light of constraints which would appear to make the existence of this freedom difficult or impossible. For instance, how is it possible that humans make their decisions freely if theories of causality (due to the deterministic nature of the world, or the omnipotence of God) suggest that everything is predetermined?
The idea of free will (which underlies the question above) is especially relevant to the understanding of leisure. In the conception of leisure as time that is (relatively) free from constraints, the idea is that leisure defines a space for people to choose freely (to some extent) the activities that they desire to engage in, rather than being forced to conform to the structured obligations of, for instance, work or care tasks. Obviously, many leisure activities are constrained (e.g. essentially by rules of sports, practically by geographical or financial limitations, and so on) and many people can experience freedom in their work, so it is important to note immediately that one cannot build this analysis in absolute terms. Freedom in leisure is defined on a continuum, which overlaps with other activity domains like work and care tasks, and where on that continuum specific leisure activities are located is probably personal and contextually defined.
The classical philosophical discussion about freedom suggests that the universe – either due to the iron-clad perfection of God’s plan, or because the mechanical properties of matter as explored in the natural sciences mean that any current state of an object is fully determined by earlier states – is deterministic: things are the way they are and develop the way they do out of necessity. Determinism is very popular among people enamoured by the general Enlightenment view of science and the natural world (i.e. as a massive machine that works according to fixed rules). However, to many people, the lack of freedom it implies for humans is counter-intuitive. That is, many people feel that they have at least some freedom, some personal control over the things that they want, the decisions that they make and the things that they do. This conflict between a deterministic universe on the one hand and the idea of free will on the other is customarily approached in one of three different ways.
The first option is to concede that the universe, including human beings in it, is determined, and free will is simply impossible. A historically important supporter of this option is Spinoza, who claimed that everything happens in accordance with the will of God, and the sensation of free will that people experience is merely an illusion, caused by our inability to see the true causes of all our actions.
The most popular position in more recent times is to support the idea of free will, and that is generally done in one of two ways: libertarianism and compatibilism (denoting options two and three of our enumeration started above).
Libertarianism states that human decisions are not determined by the constraints that other (mechanical) processes are subject to. One way of making this claim is by saying that the human mind or soul is not held to the deterministic laws that govern physical substances – a position famously defended by René Descartes, and one that is also in alignment with religious doctrine that supports dualism of (mortal) body and (immortal) soul. Substance dualism, however, is a rather problematic position for the majority of modern (analytical) philosophers, who tend to be secular naturalists.
Compatibilism as a position in the free will debate, by contrast, states that all human decisions are, indeed, causally determined, but that there is still room for a workable concept of free will within this schema. The compatibilist has some work to do to explain this counter-intuitive position, not in the least due to some equally counter-intuitive experimental results that have become famous in philosophical discussions on this theme. One of the most notorious issues is based on a series of EEG experiments by Benjamin Libet. He found that the brain is already active in preparing for action long before the test subject becomes conscious of the decision to execute that action (Libet et al. 1983).
In these experiments, test subjects were asked to initiate a particular action, e.g. pressing a button, at a self-chosen moment. The subject was also asked to note the position of a dot on an oscilloscope, in order to time the onset of the decision to act. The actual pressing of the button, as the time of the action itself, was also recorded relative to the position of the dot. A third datum was the measurement of brain activity, specifically neuronal activity in the cortex, where purportedly higher cognition, i.e. decisions to act, arise.
If humans are indeed free to make decisions to act, and these decisions are initiated by their conscious will, one would expect to see a sequence of steps emerging: first the conscious decision to act, synchronous with or perhaps somewhat prior to a rise in neural activity in the motor cortex, leading to the activation of muscles in the hand and finger, causing the button to be pressed. The confusing result, however, was that there was heightened brain activity (what is called the ‘readiness potential’) a good 500 milliseconds before the reported decision to act, and 700 milliseconds before the actual action taking place. The implication, according to Libet, was that our actions are not at all due to freely formed conscious decisions, but that unconscious brain processes have already ‘decided’ what is going to happen long before ‘we’ do.
One of the counterarguments is that such a conclusion is conceptually confused. In line with suggestions by Ryle (1949) and Bennett and Hacker (2003), Libet’s conclusion can be said to be an example of a ‘category mistake’, in which a term from one logico-linguistic category is incorrectly applied to something that would require using a term from a wholly different category. An example of an error of this kind would be a case in which a capacity or activity of the agent as a whole is somehow attributed to something ‘inside the head’, be it a brain region or a particular functional state. In the description of Libet’s conclusion above, it is presupposed that ‘unconscious brain processes’ and ‘we’ are causally distinct entities, and that an unconscious process is capable of making a decision – normally a faculty which is assigned to a person rather than a physical process, since a decision involves some sort of deliberation, and is embedded in the kinds of meaning networks people (and not brains or brain processes) operate in. While it does pay to be careful with concepts and definitions, this line of argumentation leaves the actual empirical results achieved by Libet untouched.
The actual experiment, then, is what Daniel Dennett targets (2003). Discussing his argument in depth would take us too far from the main topic (i.e. the relation of freedom/free will to leisure). Readers interested in the finer details of his line of argumentation are encouraged to seek out his eminently readable books. For the purposes of this chapter, we can suffice by stating that, according to Dennett, Libet’s experiment is methodologically flawed, and that it does not demonstrate what it is claimed to demonstrate. The main methodological flaw lies at the untrustworthiness of the data that is supposed to denote the time of onset of conscious decision. Dennett (2003) says that Libet’s experiment does not show that unconscious processes ‘make a decision’ comparatively long before conscious awareness kicks in, but that conscious decision-making takes time, and does indeed start a while before the actual decision is consciously made.
Noting that Libet’s claim regarding the impossibility of conscious free will rests on a methodologically flawed experiment puts the onus back on the compatibilist to produce a better story about what free will is, and under which conditions one can be said to possess it. This is where Dennett once more comes in, as he himself has a different suggestion to arrive at a useful conceptualisation of free will, which he develops in several publications (1984; 2003). He operates within the compatibilist paradigm, so he claims determinism is true, but there is a more subtle version of free will that he wishes to support.
An example Dennett likes to use to support his idea on free will is that of the Great Golden Digger Wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus) (1984). A female sphex digs a burrow for her eggs and then leaves to catch a cricket to serve as food for her young. She leaves the paralysed cricket at the burrow’s entrance to ensure herself of the safety of her eggs, and then goes back outside to drag the cricket in. If, during her time inside, the cricket is moved, she will pull back the cricket to its original location just outside the burrow, and then go inside once more to check on the eggs. The core idea here is that this appears to be quite clever behaviour – it appears that the wasp exhibits remarkably high-level problem-solving capacities that would require (free?) decisions on her part to do what she does – but in fact it is not: it is completely, and even genetically, determined behaviour, which is shown in the observation that the cycle ‘go inside to check the eggs, come out, pull back the moved cricket, go back inside again’ can be repeated dozens of times if an experimenter keeps moving the cricket. This means that sphex behaviour looks ‘clever’, but is merely a few steps above tropism (structured and rule-bound reactions of an organism in response to a stimulus).
Now, the factual accuracy of the claim that sphex behaviour is truly unchangeable and untrainable has come under attack in recent years (Keijzer 2013), but the metaphorical power of this anecdote still has some pull. Dennett’s claim is that humans are more complex than the sphex, but that this is a quantitative and not a qualitative or essential difference. This suggestion undermines the idea that human beings, with their powerful consciousness and supposedly free will, need to be special and set apart from the rest of nature, to be unsusceptible to the limitations of determinism. In Dennett’s story, however, humans can be just as determined by the laws of nature as the sphex, but people’s behavioural routines are so much more complex and versatile that one can have the feeling or impression (or perhaps some would say ‘illusion’) that one can still have workable concepts of consciousness and free will. That is, insight into options and consequences, hence the capacity to see one option as the best one and feel comfortable with that option (as such, feeling happy to have ‘chosen’ that option) makes us ‘free’ in the ways that truly count, i.e. that are phenomenologically important.
This, in effect, is a redefinition of what ‘free’ means to be compatible with determinism. A similar redefinition can be found in the work of Harry Frankfurt (1971). He claims that having free will means having the will you want to have. He says that we should distinguish a first-order desire (e.g. ‘I want to eat healthy food, not junk food’) and a second-order desire (e.g. ‘I want to have the will to eat healthy food, not junk food’). The first-order desires that are effective in actually realising behaviour constitute a person’s will. A second-order volition, then, is the desire for a first-order desire to be effective.
Frankfurt (1971) now states that it is having second-order volitions, rather than second-order desires generally, that is necessary for being a person (with free will in an appropriate sense). Of this he says that:
[his] conception of the freedom of the will appears to be neutral with regard to the problem of determinism. It seems conceivable that it should be causally determined that a person is free to want what he wants to want. If this is conceivable, then it might be causally determined that a person enjoys a free will.
(Frankfurt 1971: 20)
There are two major insights here. The first concerns the redefinition of what ‘free’ means, similar to how Dennett reconceptualises freedom to be compatible with his naturalistic views, where the reflective capacity of persons plays an important role in establishing a variety of freedom that is compatibilist, but still worth having. As will be shown below, this view of freedom, although perhaps insufficiently strict to satisfy conceptual purists about freedom, nonetheless aligns closely enough with the sense of freedom relevant in leisure. This claim has already been made in Bouwer and Van Leeuwen (2013), and is compatible with ideas by Neulinger (1974). The sections below contain a more explicit characterisation of the nature of freedom in leisure based on the ideas developed by Frankfurt and Dennett.
The second insight to take away from Frankfurt’s suggestions has already been briefly touched upon above: this conception of freedom is dependent on the reflective capacity of persons. A person can be said to be free if her insight into available behavioural options and the possible consequences of decisions is sufficiently developed, resulting in a capacity to understand and choose the best option and to feel comfortable with having made such choices. Being able to do that makes us ‘free’ in the ways that count. Like the issue of freedom and free will, the conditions under which an organism is an actual person, an individual, is also the subject of extensive philosophical deliberation. Some aspects of this discussion, and issues connected to it, will be addressed in Chapter 4. For now, however, the focus will be on the concept of freedom in leisure.
One of the classical conceptions of leisure, the ancient Greek idea of skholē, already contains that not-so-subtle balancing act between freedom and constraint, the more or less explicit normativity that is built into any situation where there is, or claimed to be, a freedom of choice. Skholē, after all, implies a state in which one is free from pedestrian obligations, but instead feels (or is made to feel) compelled to achieve happiness by working in a different way, namely occupying oneself with activities that stimulate the imagination, that hone skills, that help achieve a virtuous collaboration of body and mind. The very existence of this pressure, whether it is self-imposed or not, to use non-work time to develop oneself, i.e. to prevent leisure time from devolving into idleness, already means accepting unfreedom into one’s life.
A similar idea has, of course, re-emerged in more modern writings (Stebbins 2007) on leisure and its uses, in the form of the concept serious leisure. Engaging in serious leisure often means engaging in highly regimented and structured activities, since the very idea of becoming skilled at something means putting in the required time and effort to practise (thus laying a claim on one’s available time), and performing the associated actions in the proper way (e.g. by playing an instrument in a way that actual music comes out). In both ways, engaging in serious leisure activities means submitting to a considerable amount of unfreedom.
In recent decades, the idea of freedom in leisure has been infused with considerable nuance. The old sociological distinction between work and non-work, where the latter category would include the freedom of self-chosen leisure activities, has proven insufficiently specific and too anaemic in a conceptual sense to properly define leisure. Blackshaw (2010) explores the conceptual evolution of ‘leisure’, highlighting, for instance, the work of Parker (1971, 1983) in which leisure and work are understood to be connected practices, with work being the dominant factor. Parker suggested that work is the activity that most powerfully defines who someone considers herself to be, and leisure behaviour is derivative of work behaviour, either in an opposition pattern (hard work necessitates escapist leisure), a neutrality pattern (where apathy towards one’s work is reflected in apathetic leisure choices), or an extension pattern (where a high commitment to one’s work means that social networks from the work context are the same networks that sustain leisure activities).
The aforementioned nuance resides in the realisation that work and leisure are not such neatly communicating categories of everyday life. Pensioners, the unemployed, housewives: they don’t have work in the orthodox sense of having paid jobs, but they do (or can) have a variety of activities associated with varying levels of obligation, and they do have, and need, leisure.
One of the suggested conceptual refinements, in line with Rojek (2010), is a thematic inversion: instead of the content and character of work determining who we are, hence constraining the leisure choices we tend to make, it is possible to claim that concepts associated with leisure activities, such as the search for satisfaction, self-realisation, stimulation and happiness, have come, in recent decades, to define who we are, and this in turn means that people today expect their jobs to facilitate that search for fulfilment.
Now this focus in characterising leisure on the idea that leisure allows people to have certain experiences, that it can help to satisfy needs and desires, is rather interesting in light of the discussion about leisure and freedom.
Bauman (1992) suggested that leisure has ‘retreated’ into the subjective, personal, desire-driven domain of the search for satisfaction through consumption. This means that paradoxically, as Blackshaw (2010) also notes, postmodern citizens appear fine with surrendering freedom in the consumerist power-relations that are very common in current society – as long as this allows them to consume and to satisfy their needs. These power-relations actually deregulate our lives: leisure-as-consumption means being subject to the imperative power of commercials, of fads and trends. In search of experiences, people surrender to the whims of who- or whatever can provide them with those experiences.
The matter of interest of this for the discussion about freedom is that this ‘experience focus’ determines the success criteria that people use to evaluate their leisure activities, and the choices that shape their leisure practices. In this normative framework, leisure is good when it is ‘fun’, or it makes someone feel good, or it improves one’s life in a non-trivial way. Here is a way to put this point in a way that connects it to the issue of freedom in leisure: leisure doesn’t have to be free in the strictest sense in order to be experienced as ‘good’ or ‘successful’ leisure, if what a (post) modern consumer is looking for in leisure is not to escape (implying freedom), but to experience (which does not necessarily require true freedom, but the mere sensation or illusion of being free). In this view, the main benchmark of success is not an academic criterion (leisure being truly free or not), but a phenomenological criterion (leisure having a specific, desired or otherwise valuable experiential effect).
The idea of subjective experience as a determining factor in defining leisure is not a new idea. Berger (1963) already noted the following:
no time is free of normative constraints, what is work for some, is leisure for others…. Any normative distinction between work and leisure as action should be a distinction between the kinds of norms which constrain them or a distinction regarding the extent to which norms have been internalized.
(Berger 1963: 29)
In addition to the intuitively correct disqualification of the idea of leisure as something that is completely free, there are two interesting aspects to what Berger says here. First, the very idea of norms is interesting because it stresses the context-dependence of leisure (which itself has two distinct dimensions, namely, first, the question of what counts as leisure at all – the norms of leisure definition – and second, within the domain of leisure, what kinds of norms people should employ to constrain, guide and interpret their behaviour – the norms of leisure ethics and leisure experience). The second aspect to be highlighted in Berger’s quote has to do with his reference to the internalisation of norms. This idea points the way to a discussion of the connection between leisure and personal identity, i.e. ‘the self’ (see Chapter 4).
An important way in which leisure is free is that leisure (in its multifaceted appearance including leisure as a mindset, as a subdivision of time and as a socio-economic sector) offers possibilities for immersion in different rule systems. More formally, one can say that leisure is characterised by a context-dependent malleability of experiential and social normative dynamics. That is, leisure facilitates the exploration of a variety of activities (e.g. different sports), sociocultural contexts (encountering different subcultures in visiting events or tourist destinations) and kinds of experience (creating access to natural narratives – the actual history and authentic atmosphere of a visited location – or artificially created narratives – theme parks, shopping malls and other themed locations in which specific aspects of the environment are designed in such a way to evoke particular kinds of experiences).
Above, it is noted that Berger claims that no time is free from constraints. We can turn this idea on its head by suggesting that it is the unfreedom, the set of constraints or rules that is applicable in a particular leisure context, that is actually more interesting. Leisure exists, and specific particularly effective leisure activities like sports actually thrive, in the implementation of rules, of prescriptions of what one must do and constraints that define what one cannot do. Throwing a ball into a group of people might lead to these people having a pretty good time, but it is not until one draws lines on the grass that one cannot step outside and forbids the use of hands (in addition to other, more specific rules) that something else emerges: the possibility to play a game of football.
The presence of rules creates the possibility to play a game, and what you cannot do in a particular situation defines the ways in which you need to exert yourself to explore behavioural possibilities. Conceived in this way, leisure allows people to diversify behavioural and psychological ‘scripts’. In other words, leisure can exist in the practice of assuming different roles within various contexts (rule systems), which presents opportunities to explore different kinds of behaviour, and different kinds of consequences of the associated choices in these different contexts.
A brief aside, before this line of thought will be connected to the concept of freedom developed earlier: please note the use of words associated with texts, stories, storytelling, scripts, narratives. This is intentional, as the idea of storytelling, and the structural similarities of stories to leisure experiences, will play an important role in upcoming chapters, with an initial sensitisation of the concept taking place in Chapter 4, and the implementation in our analysis of the character and potential role of leisure in communal development in Chapters 8 and 9.
Returning to the main argument defended in this section: the intuitively contradictory fact here is, of course, that leisure-as-subjugation-to-rules appears to be the very antithesis of being free. Normally, rules constrain freedom, they do not promote it. The alternative suggestion is twofold. The first idea is that the implementation of carefully chosen rules actually creates possibilities, as stated above. The second idea is that freedom is quite definitely a factor in leisure, but in a way that might seem counter-intuitive. That is, in line with the discussion of the ideas by Dennett and Frankfurt presented above, and also of Bouwer and Van Leeuwen (2013), one could say that leisure is free to the extent that a player wants the subjugation to rules necessitated by a particular leisure activity.
In this case, the following is a pertinent question: what if playing a game (e.g. football), defined by its characteristic constraints (e.g. one cannot pick up the ball) and possibilities (e.g. the strategy and teamwork needed to win), allows a person to express who she wants to be? This makes the freedom (in a sense) in which leisure activities are chosen quite important to the constitution and development of personal identity. Freely chosen activities tend to align with one’s values, wishes and ideas about what is right, contextually appropriate behaviour – activities that, in short, are aligned with the kind of person that someone is. If one wishes to follow specific rules associated with a leisure activity, the very act of participation expresses a kind of ‘Frankfurtian’ freedom that is actually worth having, as it has the potential to elicit fun, happiness and (if consistent and frequent enough) well-being. In this practical sense, feeling free is ‘free enough’.
More experienced leisure scholars will recognise this as an idea that is also compatible with the insights of Neulinger (1974), who popularised the idea of perceived freedom as central to leisure. He defined perceived freedom as a state in which people engage in activities while feeling they want to do so. Whether the choice to do so was truly, metaphysically free or ‘merely’ phenomenologically free (and in that case possibly illusory) is not important. Once one recognises, as Neulinger’s claim implies here, that one of the defining aspects of a leisure practice is the associated experience, the meaning of the experience and what it feels like, the discussion about freedom in leisure comes down to the distinction between actually being free, and feeling free. Ostensibly, with leisure being a practice centred around activities that allow for the participant to have certain kinds of desired experiences, perhaps the notion of ‘feeling free’ is primary, and, in the vast majority of cases, this kind of freedom is ‘free enough’. Having the idea that an activity was chosen freely, or having the pleasurable sensation that the activity was selected for, should, in the vast majority of cases, be sufficient for the leisure activity to have the desired effect. The kind of freedom that matters for leisure need not be full-bore metaphysical, non-deterministic freedom. As has been indicated above, one would even suggest that at least for leisure, it does not need to be this pure kind of freedom. While engaging in leisure activities, perhaps one is not really free in a fundamental metaphysical sense, but those leisure activities can help to make one feel free – in that sense, one can then be phenomenologically free.
In child development, the stage of adolescence is particularly important in the exploration of freedom and unfreedom, and the associated shaping of one’s personality. So, in being a bit cheeky, in light of the above leisure could be described as a form of contextually and/or culturally sanctioned existential adolescence: the possibility or even drive to engage in activities that help establish boundaries and norms involving the appropriateness of behaviour. This is how children and adolescents learn, and in this analysis, leisure would allow the continuation of (parts of) that learning curve.
The boundaries that leisure activities can help a person explore relatively freely can be of the self (experimentation to find out what one truly enjoys), of others (what kinds of behaviour other people are prepared to tolerate, and under which conditions), and of environment (the play potential represented by physical objects, organised events and spectacle). These boundaries deviate from the stricter ones defined in the workplace, since the leisure-boundaries involve alternative experiential narratives with (generally) enjoyment or the quality of the experience as a primary success criterion (‘we lost the game, but we had a lot of fun!’), rather than the pragmatic or economically defined goals of work. In leisure, the possibility for personal development or growth is a correlated criterion (especially for serious leisure activities, but even ‘fun’ leisure can help shape someone’s character, e.g. if it stimulates cooperation or self-reflection). Dark leisure or edgework defines the outer edges of this adolescent practice, and the boundaries are likely to be removed furthest from the behaviour preferred by the moral majority in a particular sociocultural context. This darker side of leisure will be investigated more in depth in Chapter 8.
An interesting distinction that can be found in both the kind of free exploration facilitated by leisure, and the kind of exploration that is essential to the psychological and sensorimotor development of children and adolescents, has to do with the function of the associated activities. Consider sex: most people do it primarily because they enjoy it (i.e. as a form of leisure), but the proper, biological function of sex is reproduction and replenishment or expansion of the population; the broader population-biological or evolutionary function could even be claimed to be development of the species (macro-perspective) or survival of the genetic code (e.g. the micro-perspective suggested by Richard Dawkins (1976)). In this light, phenomenological priority for choosing an activity from the practitioner perspective lies in enjoyment, with development (in this case, e.g. expansion of the family, or possibly psychological growth due to becoming a parent) being of secondary importance. The ontogenetic (i.e. biosocial development from birth onwards) hierarchy is the exact inverse: unsurprisingly, the potential of an activity to drive adaptive change in a relevant sense (for sex, to create new offspring that sustains the species, and for a leisure activity, e.g. personal growth) is primary, and the enjoyment connected to the activity is a highly convenient by-product (because it makes it more desirable for organisms to seek out the activities that expedite reaching aforementioned development goals).
The point here is that any instrumental uses of a leisure activity, i.e. the power it has to stimulate personal development, are not negated by the focus on phenomenological primacy that we propose. Rather, these functions are interconnected. What we do suggest is that for decision-making processes involving leisure (i.e. selecting activities to engage in), the phenomenological dimension in the form of (a priori) expected enjoyability and (a posteriori) the evaluation of the quality of the leisure experience tend to be dominant.
If we hook this issue back to freedom and leisure, it is clear that any and all freedoms that we might enjoy are defined on a complex continuum. Of course there are certain constraints that are inescapable, because they are closely tied to what it means to be a product of a particular evolutionary process. A human being, having evolved into the organism she is, i.e. by dint of being part of her species, is generally unable to see infrared, fly under her own power, outrun a cheetah, etc. These general limitations are compounded by more individual-specific factors, which tend to be more interestingly influential in defining leisure choice behaviour: an individual has specific physical/developmental/genetic properties (e.g. bodily strength and size), but also particular intellectual and inherent skill-based properties that guide or limit developmental potential (e.g. musical talent).
Given these properties, there might be different kinds of freedom in play for a person. Freedom from extrinsic obligation (e.g. the demands of work, the need to care for one’s children), intrinsic obligation (e.g. the conviction that one needs or wants to work), rules, worries, practical/physical constraints (stimulating some to overcome such limitations by engaging in the practice called ‘life hacking’), social oppression and so on. All these varieties of freedom can be defined in intersubjectively understandable terms: if you need to work from 9a.m. to 5p.m., it means that within that time frame, your freedom is curtailed. However, it is the subjective dimension, phenomenological freedom, that drives the choices that people make because it is the ‘feeling of being free’ in a particular situation that helps define the satisfaction someone derives from an activity. If a highly regimented activity, e.g. a game of chess with all its rules, is experienced as enjoyable, the unfreedom constituted by those rules is clearly acceptable. The phenomenological aspect informs a personally motivated decision to accept extant unfreedom – in such a case, the player is not bothered by the necessary unfreedom, but is prepared to accept it because this unfreedom makes the game possible (or at least is not bothered enough to stop playing).
Having conveyed all this, it is important to provide a more extensive conceptualisation of that phenomenological aspect of leisure. What is it, and what can it do? So far, it has been suggested that the idea of phenomenological freedom being a central component of leisure means that the quality of the leisure experience is a deciding factor in the process of deciding what to do in a leisure-related choice process: how good a particular leisure activity feels, how much fun it is, what it means to people, to what extent it contributes to well-being, and whatever other quality-criteria one wishes to formulate. An interesting corollary of this subjective, phenomenological freedom is the freedom from manipulation suggested by Francis Bregha (2000) as being vital to the idea of freedom in leisure. He proposes this as a plea for self-knowledge, of understanding one’s own preferences and values, and making sure that those idiosyncratic features do not deter us from making the right kinds of decisions. Here, ‘right’ purportedly means using leisure in a constructive, positive and optimistic way. This conceptual tack will be explored further in Chapters 8 and 9, where the experiential character of leisure and leisure-related practices as a stimulating force in individual and communal well-being-directed processes will be explored. In the section below, however, some preparatory work will be done by exploring an essential concept to the discussion of freedom in leisure: play.
A particularly intriguing concept that is implied in leisure practice, one that will be defended as being a dominant ingredient for many of the core leisure practices, is play. An important aspect of the freedom in leisure consists of possibilities to play: to play around with the rules, to be playful instead of serious, to escape the constraints and unfreedom of everyday life by ‘escaping’ into a game, etc. Playing is essential to the development of children, because this is how they come to understand the possibilities and limits of the world, and of themselves as active participants in whatever is going on in their environment. Playing is that activity that children are expected, due to social pressure and the practical needs that come with growing responsibility and maturity, to do less and less often as they approach adulthood. That is, except in leisure contexts, where playing is allowed, encouraged or sometimes even required. Playing cards, playing a game of football, playing instruments or playing a character on the theatre stage – there is a certain level of frivolity and sometimes regimented, rule-bound immaturity that is allowed in many leisure contexts.
Several leisure scholars have highlighted the prominence of ‘play’ in leisure practices. Blackshaw (2010: 25) refers to Peter Borsay, who recognises the principal components ‘symbolism’, ‘play’ and ‘other’ in leisure. To set the stage briefly, according to Borsay, ‘symbolism’ in leisure refers to the idea that leisure activities often represent something outside themselves. A sports game by the national team represents defending the nation’s honour. ‘Play’ in leisure highlights the unreality of leisure activities, the artificiality of the sports game in the stadium that is suspended when the game ends and the spectators go home, returning to their real, everyday lives. ‘Other’ refers to the abnormality, the fantasy that is created or pursued in leisure activities, the intentional exploration of places and situations that are out of the ordinary for the participants, e.g. as a tourist.
Blackshaw mentions play as catharsis (2010: 29), as real and unreal (2010: 31) and the carnivalesque (2010: 32–33) as relevant dimensions of this conceptual cluster. Sports and games, events, artistic expression, theme parks and attractions, even nature parks and recreation – they all contain a kind of playfulness, a levity (the carnivalesque), a directedness towards creating alternate interactions (real and unreal) and opening up new avenues of experience and exploration (catharsis).
In a sense, this is in line with the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that it is in the Spiel (the game) that people truly open up to the other and enter into dialogue and begin to create a shared understanding (Gadamer 2000). Playing is a co-creative activity for Gadamer, and in Vilhauer’s (2013) analysis of Gadamer’s treatment of the concept, playing has a definite ethical dimension. That is, playing involves a level of unpredictability and the need to relinquish control, all of this in a social context, hence there is a responsibility thrust upon the players to enter into this dynamic interaction in the appropriate way. Appropriate means playing in an open, appreciative way, actively engaging with the other and attempting to come to a fruitful shared outcome. The outcome of playing for Gadamer, interestingly, can be a specific shared articulation of truth about a particular issue.
Playing as a hermeneutical exercise might appear to be a surprising concept, especially when considering the intersection of playing and leisure (as will be argued below), but a quick look at developmental psychology can help in seeing the logic in this analysis: children learn by playing. By experimenting (trial and error routines to see what happens if, e.g. you throw a ball or push a button), exploring different social scenarios (e.g. as a toddler, testing the limits of what your parents consider to be acceptable behaviour) and assuming different identities (e.g. playing cops and robbers in the street with your friends, or being selective in the expression of personality traits in social media, i.e. in selecting which pictures of activities are and are not ‘personally flattering’ to share with the world – see Chapter 6), children acquire insight into how the world works, and how the environment tends to react to specific kinds of behaviour.
An interesting question then is whether this hermeneutical effect of playing persists in adulthood. Gadamer would appear to say ‘yes’, but the focus of his analysis in Truth and Method (2000) lies on a kind of playfulness or play-like quality that permeates dialogue – social, intellectual exchange. How much of this generative power remains when considering more colloquial forms of play – for instance, leisure activities that are often either games explicitly (like sports), or contain playfulness as a significant ingredient (like performers in a play playing a role on stage) or involve a playful attitude that is required for participation (like playfulness as a temporary suspension of seriousness required to have a pleasant experience at a dance party) – can be an important question for further leisure research.
It is, however, possible to make some suggestions. After all, an important thing to note is that ‘play’ is not a straightforward concept – but, as luck would have it, the main source of non-straightforwardness in this case is also a prime contributor to the power of play as a generative activity. We can see this if we consider the ideas of Sutton-Smith (1997), who underscores the ambiguous nature of play, both in terms of the concept ‘play’ being difficult to define, and (particularly relevantly for our purposes) in the sense of playing (as an activity) and playfulness (as an attitude) creating ambiguities.
Sutton-Smith explains that playfulness destabilises social systems, introducing elements of unpredictability and imagination into the social dynamic. If that social system – either due to explicit rules that apply (e.g. in a game) or due to an inherent drive among the participants to co-create a specific kind of attunement experience (e.g. during an event, where we must assume the majority of people participate to have a similarly pleasant time together), or both – strives for a kind of creative stability, these playful disturbances will stimulate the participants to find new interpretations and expressions, and the social system as a whole (e.g. the audience present at an event) will tend towards dynamic adaptation, towards finding successful new strategies and interpretations that normalise the disturbance. Chapters 8 and 9 will look into some of these playful, leisure-based disturbances and systemic realignment processes.
Playfulness also has the power to shape and reshape value systems, to explore the outlines of moral acceptability of specific behavioural scenarios by creating ‘as-if’ scenarios. That is, play allows us to explore a variety of counterfactual conditionals (if A had happened, B would have been the case). By introducing different As in a controlled (a game with specific rules) or semi-controlled (an event where fantasy and imagination can be explored in a more free-form fashion than in rule-governed games, but once the event is over ‘normalcy’ returns) context, the causal mechanics leading to different kinds of Bs can be explored. By ‘playing around’, a lot of which one does in leisure situations (e.g. in sports; by immersing ourselves in fictional worlds via books, movies or video games; by suspending formal moral norms by acting out during a dance event, or ‘feeling like a kid again’ in a theme park) one learns about oneself, about how one reacts and what one likes or dislikes in situations that deviate from the norm set by everyday life, the life in which one has responsibilities and specific tasks. But during that sports game, or that concert, or during that hike through the wilderness, one can let go of those responsibilities momentarily, and worry less about decorum and external expectations and express something deeper, more primal and more honest about oneself.
Playfulness also supports explorations of the self (the strength of one’s convictions, the depth of one’s values, especially in situations of moral duress), of the other (predicting the other’s reactions and re-evaluating one’s understanding of the other’s character in light of the other’s actually realised responses) and of the social and physical contexts (exploring structural tolerances in a trial-and-error fashion).
Playfulness in children is expressed as an exploratory, growth-directed force: in their leisure engagements, the need to have fun draws children to play, and exploring play patterns means exploring solutions to problems in a variety of relatively safe social interaction scenarios, of tinkering with toy models (sometimes literally so) of physical mechanisms, engrained cultural practices and concepts.
The ‘as-if’ in play stimulates a kind of adaptive variability – Sutton-Smith (1997: 221) borrows this idea from evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s primary focus on variability as a driver of biological development, rather than evolutionary adaptation as such, which is a secondary effect of the primary process of exploring variation. Similarly, playfulness as a way to explore behavioural variation will support psychological evolution.
Adults also play, mostly in leisure contexts. In some cases, these leisurely forms of play are used explicitly for growth purposes: just as play for children has as an important effect on the shaping and sharpening of knowledge, insight and skills, for adults various forms of serious leisure are meant to implement and develop competencies that take the associated leisure activities beyond instances of ‘simply’ having fun.
Based on the ideas above, one could arguably state that playing is about exploring possibilities. Play is about exploiting the freedom to explore different behaviour, engage in different kinds of activities, explore different contexts and rule systems. Leisure provides children and adults alike with the freedom to play, and by doing so to explore desires, to change the rules, to try new things.
An especially powerful form of playing involves language: playing with words by using metaphors. Playing with meanings and interpretations can help reframe situations, and shift attitudes more explicitly. Leisure can, in that context, be understood as a source of practical metaphors – using situations and contexts that can stimulate new views, new interpretations, and open up new social and intellectual connections. These ideas will be explored more extensively in Chapter 9.
In the sections above, the way in which leisure and freedom are connected, specifically the experience-based, phenomenological aspect of leisure, was explored. It has also been suggested that an important manifestation of freedom in leisure is playfulness. These are the first steps in the construction of a larger conceptual framework for the understanding of leisure. In addition to the concept of freedom in leisure as discussed in this chapter, in upcoming chapters we will look at ethics, personal identity, experience and meaning in relation to leisure. In the end, we hope to use all these components to build an understanding of leisure as a psychologically salient context for issues involving the making of decisions, the exploration of freedom, the expression of personal identity, and personal and communal development. Leisure, then, is the totality of all activities we engage in of our own volition (with volition/free will as analysed above) to make our life better, more fun, more interesting or more beautiful, stimulating well-being through events, the arts, sports, volunteer work and so forth.
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