{"id":445,"date":"2010-12-15T15:00:19","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T20:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=445"},"modified":"2010-12-14T15:57:48","modified_gmt":"2010-12-14T20:57:48","slug":"hofstadter-on-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=445","title":{"rendered":"Playing with Hofstadter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The great U.S. historian <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Richard_Hofstadter\">Richard Hofstadter<\/a> on play and the intellectual:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[The intellectual] may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for <em>one idea<\/em>, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. &#8230; Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness.\u00a0We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. &#8230; <strong>&#8220;Man is perfectly human,&#8221; said Schiller, &#8220;only when he plays.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And later in that chapter:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>One may well ask if there is not a certain fatal contradiction between these two qualities of the intellectual temperament, playfulness and piety.<\/strong> Certainly there is a tension between them, but it is anything but fatal. &#8230; Contemplate the intellectuals of the past or those in one&#8217;s neighborhood: some will come to mind in whom the note of playfulness is dominant; others who are conspicuously pious. But in most intellectuals each of these characteristics is qualified and held in check by the other. <strong>The tensile strength of the thinker may be gauged by his ability to keep an equipoise between these two sides of his mind.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8211;Richard Hofstadter, <em>Anti-Intellectualism in American Life<\/em>, 1963.<\/p>\n<p>Happy holidays, everybody! Keep an equipoise between the two sides of your tensile minds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The great U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter on play and the intellectual: [The intellectual] may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. &#8230; Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in<span class=\"more-link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=445\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[17,36],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-macdougall","post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-play","tag-quotations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":522,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=445"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}