A HERMENEUTIC OF FREEDOM IN PLAY (LEISURE, RECREATION, INTERPRETATION)

This investigation began with the observation that the body of play literature is chaotic and nonprogressive; play theorists frequently advance conflicting if not contradictory theories; they rarely build on the findings of their scholarly predecessors; and they favor a classification system based on chronological, not thematic similarities. The purpose of this study was to locate thematic continuities in the literature which might shed some light on the experience of play and unify the large and diverse collection of play theories. Using the interpretive method of hermeneutics, the researcher uncovered two themes which are either implicitly or explicitly expressed in virtually all the mainstream play theories: freedom and self-creation/realization. These themes specifically address the experience of play, an aspect often overlooked by theorists in favor of the source, functions, or anatomy of play. An examination of some philosophical freedom literature (the ideas of G. W. F. Hegel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frithjof Bergmann, and Paul Ricoeur) disclosed an important connection between freedom and self-creation/realization in the notion of existential commitment. Existential commitment, or the personalization of experience, was revealed to be what renders an act free and what creates and authenticates the self. This notion of commitment was then used to generate a new interpretation--a metatheory--of play which provides a unifying framework from which to understand the multitude of extant play theories. The researcher concluded that in play, existential commitment--or in more technical philosophical terms, the dialectic and unity of the voluntary (freedom) and the involuntary (nature)--is most decisively illustrated. The researcher also concluded that for the purposes of her study, it is most enlightening to conceive of play as a bipolar dimension of human experience present in countless fields of human endeavor, rather than a particular activity occurring within a limited context. This metatheory of play was found to have theoretical, scientific, philosophical, personal, and practical significance