Sport philosophers reference Bernard Suits, author of The Grasshopper, like classicists reference Homer. Sport philosophy is a small but growing aggregation of scholars who reside in the chasm between Kinesiology and Philosophy Departments, promoting the study of play, games, and sport as academic content.
1 This gem is as fundamental to the academic sub-discipline of sport philosophy as any other text. Hidden away in an obscure corner of academia is a charming little book called The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Brian Bolt is Dean of the Education Department and Head Men’s Golf Coach at Calvin University. Chad Carlson is an Associate Professor of Kinesiology and the Director of General Education at Hope College.
We suggest, with help from a few key theologians and philosophers, that a reduced focus on game results and a reconceived focus on striving in games present a vision of game playing that just might allow Suits’s assertion to be compatible with the eschaton. In this article, we consider Suits’s body of work on the philosophy of games and then we “play” with the possibility of game playing being the ideal of existence. While many philosophers have weighed in on this question, none have done so with a Christian lens. Can game playing possibly be the ideal of existence? Philosopher Bernard Suits argues that it is, using a twist on the moral logic of Aesop’s fabled grasshopper.
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