Learning and Pleasure
For my hammock-recharge readings recently, I picked up The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…, a collection of essays by the late David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and a prominent voice in left politics. There are many essays in the book that drew me in — like the essay on culture as creative refusal, as “active political projects, which often operate by the explicit rejection of other ones.” Also included is Graeber’s famous essay on “bullshit jobs,” required reading for anyone who wants to understand the work force.
But on the topic of learning and pleasure, I found myself drawn to the last essay in the book, “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” — which is what I have always wondered. Graeber argues that all animals have an impulse for play — and play that’s just for fun, not necessarily for some evolutionary purpose, the way that some people see puppies playing as practice for hunting or Alpha-male status. In fact, he makes a half-baked (by his own admission) argument that the random movement of electrons might be an expression of play at the subatomic-particle level.
I was more interested in the implications for education. Graeber, who was well known for involvement in anticapitalist movements, suggests that the framing of play as a means to acquire survival skills or some other evolutionary utility is just one way that evolutionary biology (and particularly neo-Darwinism, such as the work of Daniel Dennett) has fit itself into a capitalist framework that values competition and individual advantage. But Graeber finds this a problematic explanation for why we enjoy doing some of the things we do in life.
“Once you reduce all living beings to the equivalent of market actors, rational calculating machines trying to propagate their genetic code, you accept that not only the cells that make up our bodies, but whatever beings are our immediate ancestors, lacked anything even remotely like self-consciousness, freedom, or moral life — which makes it hard to understand how or why consciousness (a mind, a soul) could ever have evolved in the first place.”
Graeber acknowledges that his argument is ambitious and may not be fully supported in the essay. “I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently passed for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.”
As I read the essay, I couldn’t help but think of how learning, in many contexts, has been reduced to return on investment: What does this do for me? Or, in an economy that is unstable or unforgiving, how does this help me survive? Of course, those are important questions when the cost and risks of education are increasingly shouldered by families, but it’s a bleak starting point that downplays the joy of thinking and learning.
The fact is that people are learning all the time anyway — not just from schools and colleges, but also from the interactions in their families, from the way their government or society is structured, from TikTok. The questions for a learning society: What does society itself say about the pleasures of learning and what it’s for? Does it offer resources that allow people to set aside some of their worries about survival and to learn just for the heck of it?
The end of Graeber’s essay makes an allusion to the pleasures of learning — any academic who has engaged in banter with a colleague would understand it. He tells an old Taoist story of two philosophers, Zhuangzi and Huizi, who observe minnows darting in a pool of water. Zhuangzi said they are playing happily, while Huizi argued that no person can know what makes fish happy — or whether they could even be happy. The two debate the topic until Zhuangzi says enigmatically: “You asked me how I knew what makes fish happy. The very fact you asked shows that you knew I knew — as I did know, from my own feelings on this bridge.”
Graeber clarifies the point: Zhuangzi and Huizi were good friends who enjoyed arguing with each other like this. “Surely, that was what Zhuangzi was really getting at. We can each understand what the other is feeling because, arguing about the fish, we are doing exactly what the fish are doing: having fun, doing something we do well for the sheer pleasure of doing it. Engaging in a form of play … Since if even philosophers are motivated primarily by such pleasures, by the exercise of their highest powers simply for the sake of doing so, then surely this is a principle that exists on every level of nature — which is why I could spontaneously identify it, too, in fish.”
