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Adolf Hitler, Ali Asani, autobiography, Constantin Stanislavski, David Haberman, film, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, LARP, Muharram, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Plato, Rūpa Gosvāmi, Seven Virtues
In the past few years I’ve become involved in live-action role-playing (usually known by the acronym LARP, or “LARPing”): a cross between long-form improv theatre and tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. This hobby is often maligned, partially because it looks very strange to those not involved (especially on video), and partially because of its association with the kind of intelligent but socially awkward “geeky” subcultures that develop around Star Trek, comic books, collectible card games, Japanese animation and the like. But as I’ve been a part of those subcultures all my life, this is hardly a barrier to my participation. (I hope you didn’t expect that someone who blogs about Sanskrit philosophical texts was one of the popular kids in high school.)
LARPing for me is genuinely a hobby. It’s not an avocation, a “neither career nor hobby” passion like I intend this blog to be; it’s just for fun. Still, lately I’ve been noticing its philosophical implications, largely because of a splendid game I play called Seven Virtues. The obvious inspiration (or at least analogy) for Seven Virtues is the Harry Potter series, as it’s set in a school, training heroes to fight beings of evil and destruction. But in this fantasy world, what makes the heroes powerful and able to fight their evil foes is their devotion to virtue, to becoming better people. Their goodness has direct effects on the supernatural physical world, and there are plausible reasons within the game’s cosmology why it does so (and one of the characters’ tasks is to find out how). To Plato or Augustine it seemed obvious that truth and goodness were the same thing; in a modern world that explains life by evolution and not divine design it is much harder to step into their worldview, but it’s much easier to do so in such a fantasy world. The game’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those like me who could be classified as virtue ethicists. And it’s made me think a bit more about the philosophical implications of LARPing more generally.
I did a little bit of theatre in high school, but LARPing is by far the closest I’ve come to method acting. For that reason, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about David Haberman’s Acting as a Way of Salvation, a study of the sixteenth-century Indian thinker Rūpa Gosvāmi. Rūpa Gosvāmi urges his followers to become closer to the god Krishna through dramatic play – acting out the life of Krishna in their own lives, sometimes taking a vow never to leave the area of Vraj (where Krishna was supposedly born). To help make sense of Rūpa Gosvāmi and his followers, Haberman’s book turns to the works of Russian philosopher-director Constantin Stanislavski, the father of method acting. For Stanislavski, the true actor fuses his identity with that of his characters, cheering “Live your part!”: “It may not last long but while it does last you will be incapable of distinguishing between yourself and the person you are portraying.” And according to Haberman, this is exactly what Rūpa and his followers aim to achieve: by acting like the characters in Krishna’s life, they hope in some sense to become the characters in Krishna’s life.
Now most LARPers, myself included, are not great actors or method actors; we don’t get the kind of change in identity that Stanislavski advocates. But that is in some sense the ideal that LARPs increasingly aim for, especially the “Accelerant” games I play in. As I understand it, the first LARPs simulated fighting with rock-paper-scissors (if you win at rock-paper-scissors you win the fight); whereas in the Accelerant games, people build foam weapons to simulate actually hitting each other. In older games, a staff member would explain to players the things that their characters saw, like a gamemaster in Dungeons & Dragons; in Accelerant games, staff produce low-budget costumes and special effects to simulate actually seeing it. (Games almost always take place at private camps in secluded rural areas so that curious strangers do not happen to wander in.) And because the game typically lasts a whole weekend, one effectively eats and sleeps in character. During that weekend one tries to become the character one plays, to fully live the part.
The question I wonder about is: is this a good and virtuous thing for our real-life selves, to live a part? For Rūpa Gosvāmi the answer would have been easy: by acting out Krishna’s life one is entering into his divine perfection, so of course it makes one better to do so. But LARPers, like Stanislavski’s method actors, are acting for entertainment and pleasure, whether their own or that of an audience. Perhaps more importantly, unlike the Gosvāmi devotees, the character that one plays is usually not an ideal, but a flawed human (or humanlike) being with imperfections and vices that one does not have oneself – perhaps even a true villain. Might the process of merging one’s identity with such a person not make oneself worse? Such a troubling problem is brought to mind by the Muharram passion plays, in which Shi’a Muslims reenact the lives of the martyrs Hasan and Husayn, as Rūpa’s devotees reenact Krishna’s. In a class session on the subject, Ali Asani noted that at Muharram the actors playing the bad guys, the ones who killed Hasan and Husayn, are paid very highly because they are in danger of being mobbed to death by others caught up in the emotions of the drama. One can see reasons why Plato might have banished the playwrights from his ideal state – they took people’s focus away from the things that are truly good.
In Seven Virtues, my character does act in ways that I might think wrong. He has a strict quasi-Kantian moral code that I do not share, and indeed find troubling. And yet by living inside his head I can see what is admirable about his worldview, remind myself why it appeals to many people: the unflinching honesty and moral courage that it allows. I can appreciate someone very different from myself, in a way more personal and immediate than watching such a person as a character onscreen or in a novel. The same might even be true of getting inside the head of a genuine villain, as troubling as it might be. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang (The Downfall) attracted controversy because it portrayed Adolf Hitler as genuinely human, in a way that could arouse some modest sympathy with him. (The film’s impact may have been lessened somewhat by the strange and often hilarious parody videos made of its final scene, but that’s not something the director could have imagined.) But it seems to me that this too is a good thing. Everyone has some potentially admirable qualities, even Hitler or Pol Pot; without such qualities, the wicked world leaders could not have attained the following they did. And it seems to me that an understanding of those admirable qualities, while potentially quite dangerous, is nevertheless a good thing.
“To Plato or Augustine it seemed obvious that truth and goodness were the same thing; in a modern world that explains life by evolution and not divine design it is much harder to step into their worldview, but it’s much easier to do so in such a fantasy world.”
Each thing is what it is and not another! Truth is truth, goodness is goodness. We can’t possibly know that truth is goodness because that claim is absurd. Truth pertains to the status of statements about the world. (Moral) Goodness pertains to character and actions. So, it’s nonsense to identify truth and goodness.
On the other hand, if the claim is that what is true or factual is always good, then this is obviously totally false. It is true that the Wannsee Conference laid the basis for the “final solution” to Europe’s Jewry, but there is no goodness about, or in, this banal and horrific truth.
If it is logically impossible for distinct things to be identical, then not even unbridled fantasy can render nonsensical identity claims such as “Truth is Goodness” intelligible.
Amod: “The question I wonder about is: is this a good and virtuous thing for our real-life selves, to live a part?”
According to Erving Goffman’s dramuturgical sociological perspective, we are all “living a part” or playing a role in different contexts of everyday life.
Is this good or bad? Following Eryximachus’ line of thought in the Symposium, we could say that it all depends on these roles and whether individually or cumulatively they produce or enhance sickness or health in the psyche.
H.G.Wells tells the story that he once imagined for himself that he was a cruel tyrant and followed through in his mind all the vile deeds that would imply. His normally affectionate cat shrank from him and ran away. Here puss, puss, pshww, pshww.
Demonstrating, I think, that Wells was in at least some respects a good actor. One might still wonder if he got something valuable out of the exercise, however uncomfortable he might have made his cat.
I wonder whether the approach you propose (enacting a vilain, in order to understand him better, e.g.), may be similar to the one proposed by R. Rorty in the last essay of his Philosophy after Philosophy. He argues there that literature, against philosophy, has the advantage of giving voice to manifold points of view, hence to making us aware of their existence. Kant –from this perspective– would make one aware of the badness of the vilain. A novel about her could make one aware of her reasons or of her (though secondary) virtues.
Why can’t philosophy envisage and examine, based on real-life or hypothetical cases, a gamut of reasons for bad actions?
I agree there’s a value to learning from literature (or stories of any kind) which is not reducible to philosophy, but I don’t think it’s what Rorty says it is. Philosophy is perfectly capable of giving voice to multiple points of view; at a minimum, one merely has to read more than one work. Even in a single philosophical work, if done well, different voices are articulated. Knowing Rorty, what I think he’s objecting to is a strength rather than a weakness: that in a philosophical work one of these voices “wins,” one tries to show that one perspective is better or worse than another – because it is a better expression or reflection of the truth. Rorty, on the other hand, does away with truth entirely (treating knowledge as “justified belief” rather than “justified true belief”) so that philosophy becomes merely a bout of endless logorrhea, producing more and more piles of endless things to say.
Rather, what literature may be able to show better than philosophy is something else: the complexity of points of view when they are jumbled together in a real person who is not as consistent as philosophers wish, and the implications of a worldview for a lived life. (As I understand it, this is what Dostoevsky tried to do: he never refutes the arguments of the man who condemns God, he merely shows what kind of life such a man is required to live.)
it was not only Plato who had reservations about the theatre. All the way down to the alarm sounded about first-person shooter video games, worries about this sort of thing accompany our culture all along the way. Either it’s frivolous or it appeals to appetites or drives unworthy of us. I think Plato knew he was playing with fire when he tried to wrest the capacity to change the soul away from the poets. I think Walter Kaufmann asserts somewhere in Tragedy & Philosophy that “mimesis” is best translated by something along the lines of “making believe” or “pretending.” I spend a great deal of my time among school kids and the energy they put into such role-playing games (formal and informal) is astonishing. If I had to guess I would say this is the primary way human beings learn. No wonder Plato wanted to try to exercise a little quality control. But the nature of play is to rebel, not against rules per se (which actually facilitate play if they are fluid enough), but against agendas. If you tell a kid “it’s not chess unless the king cannot move through check,” they’ll decide either to play chess or play something else. But if you try to tell them that we’re playing chess in order to learn decision trees, they’ll roll their eyes (maybe behind your back), and the more honest will tell you go get your own game. As Keats says, we abhor poetry with designs upon us.
It’s a good point – and one very apparent to my wife, who designs educational games for a living. She insists that the best educational games teach by example, where the games appear as pure fun to the players but nevertheless take them through a new way of thinking. But the project funders often have a particular didactic goal in mind, and they want to be much more specific about concrete learning objectives, particular facts and ideas they want to instill in the players – with the game not as a way of learning in itself, but as a sort of bait to get them into learning the facts. This, even though every study of educational games warns that the players (child or adult) see through the bait immediately; for such “poetry with designs upon us,” the preferred term is “chocolate-covered broccoli.”