Ludwig Wittgenstein once told his students that “philosophy begins when language goes on holiday.” Whether or not you agree, it’s certainly true that holidays—those precious periods away from work pressures in unfamiliar surroundings—may be just the time to pick up a philosophy book. But which one? You could do worse than take to the deck chair with Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. This self-help treatise by the great Roman stoic explains why so many people make so little of their lives. It’s not that time is short, but rather that most of us squander it, chasing after money, sex or facts. As Seneca puts it, a sailor who sets off in a ship and is carried this way and that by stormy winds hasn’t been on a voyage. He’s just been tossed about a lot. Far better to stop chasing lucre, and invest in golden moments and the life of the mind—or whatever it is that you really want to do—before it’s too late. If that all seems a touch earnest, why not get hold of Bernard Suits’s scarcely-known classic The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, first published in 1978. This brilliant little book plays with ideas about game-playing in fine style. As in Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper, unlike the hard-working ant, has spent the summer playing games. He should have been collecting food and is now dying of starvation. In a witty parody of the last days of Socrates, however, this articulate arthropod persuades his disciples that he is doing the right thing. Games are part of the good life. Wittgenstein famously declared that a “game” can never be strictly defined: there is no single feature that all examples have in common beyond a pattern of overlapping similarities between them—a family resemblance. But Bernard Suits will have none of this. He defines a game as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” A little like taking a holiday, it’s a way of passing time that brings delight precisely because it is surplus to requirements. In Utopia, Suits argues, we’d play a lot of games since all our other needs would be met. And, one might add, we’d probably read a lot of philosophy too.
