Because this is my second blog with "free play" in the title, I feel it necessary to briefly describe again why I am drawn to "free play" as a concept and as a title. I draw on both Kant and Matthew Arnold for the definition of "free play."
For Kant, cognitive powers were in "free play" when "no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition."
Matthew Arnold expanded this concept, connecting it with "disinterestedness":
It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of man's nature, just this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake,--it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality. It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without intrusion of any other considerations whatever.My intentions for this blog are to examine various literary and cultural artifacts using "free play" as described above. To this end, I will not employ any one political or theoretical framework to the examples I choose, but examine each using what I feel is best appropriate or at least what is most handy. To this end, my post may at times contradict one another and, if and when they do, these contradictions can become additional objects to be examined.
