The Serious Philosophy of Not Taking Yourself Too Seriously

I want to make a confession.

Sometimes, in the middle of a very important philosophical discussion - the kind where people are using words like ontological and epistemological and intersubjective with great seriousness and furrowed brows - I have to suppress the urge to laugh.

Not because the ideas aren't important. They are. But because there is something inherently comic about human beings, these improbable creatures who showed up on a smallish rock orbiting a star made of plasma, deciding with enormous gravity that they need to work out the precise nature of consciousness before Tuesday.

I say this as someone who genuinely loves philosophy. As Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, I have enormous respect for rigorous inquiry. And as a Cambridge researcher, I have spent years taking ideas very seriously indeed.

But I've also spent years in shamanic practice. And one of the things the spirits will not tolerate - not even slightly - is self-importance.

So today I want to make a philosophical case for play. For joy. For laughter. And for the radical, underrated, spiritually sophisticated act of not taking yourself too seriously.

Lighten up!

Philosophy Has Always Known This. It Just Forgot for a While.

Here's something they don't always teach you in the seminar room: some of the greatest philosophers in history were genuinely, wickedly funny.

Socrates spent his life wandering Athens asking powerful, important people questions they couldn't answer, and watching them tie themselves in knots trying. He claimed not to know anything. He insisted he was just asking. The most powerful mind in the ancient world operated through the medium of cheerful, relentless mischief. They eventually killed him for it, which does rather prove the point about what happens when power meets genuine playfulness.

Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher, made a career out of gleeful philosophical provocation. When Plato defined the human being as a 'featherless biped', Diogenes turned up to the Academy with a plucked chicken and announced, "Behold - Plato's human." When Alexander the Great came to visit him and asked if there was anything he could do for the great philosopher, Diogenes, who was lying in the sun at the time, said, "Yes. Stand out of my light."

Alexander later said that if he couldn't be Alexander, he'd want to be Diogenes.

Even Kierkegaard, not exactly known for his lightness of touch, understood irony as a fundamental philosophical stance. Nietzsche laughed at the whole tradition. Wittgenstein said that a serious philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Play is not the opposite of philosophical seriousness. It is, in the right hands, one of its highest expressions.

What Play Actually Is

The Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, wrote a remarkable book called Homo Ludens: Man the Player in which he argued that play is not something we do after the serious stuff is done. Play is constitutive of human culture itself. Language, ritual, law, art, philosophy - all emerged from the spirit of play. The capacity to enter a voluntary, bounded space where different rules apply, where imagination is sovereign, where the normal constraints are temporarily suspended is not a luxury. It is the engine of human creativity and meaning-making.

The philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, went further. He argued that play has a subject, and the subject is not the player. When you are genuinely playing, genuinely absorbed, genuinely free, you are not controlling the play. The play is playing you. You surrender to it. And in that surrender, something opens up that deliberate, effortful, self-conscious activity cannot access.

This is something shamanic practice knows very well.

When I journey and enter non-ordinary reality and meet with the spirits, the helping guides, the ancestors, there is a quality of play to the encounter that I can't quite describe to people who haven't experienced it. It's not frivolous. The healing is real. The information is real. But there is a lightness to it, a willingness to be surprised, a sense that the encounter is happening to me as much as I am making it happen.

Jaguar doesn't show up and deliver a solemn lecture. The ancestors don't hand over a formal report. There is colour, there is movement, there is sometimes something that can only be described as cosmic humour. As if the universe is in on a joke that it's very gently helping me to understand.

Why Seriousness Becomes a Trap

Let me say something mischievous.

I think a great deal of what passes for serious philosophical or spiritual discourse is, at its root, a defence mechanism.

If I am very serious, very weighty, very concerned, and if I use sufficiently complex vocabulary and maintain a sufficiently grave expression, then nobody can accuse me of not caring enough. My seriousness proves my depth. My solemnity proves my sincerity.

But does it?

Because here's what I've noticed, in philosophy and in spiritual practice alike: the people who are most rigidly, defensively serious are often the ones who are most afraid. Afraid that if they laugh, it will somehow undermine the importance of what they believe. Afraid that joy is incompatible with genuine understanding. Afraid that if they stop performing gravely, the whole thing will fall apart.

Whereas the people I have found most genuinely wise in philosophy, in the shamanic traditions, and in science tend to have a lightness about them. A willingness to laugh at themselves. An ability to hold enormous questions with deep care and simultaneously a kind of cosmic amusement. The Dalai Lama laughs constantly. Desmond Tutu laughed constantly. The Andean teachers I've learned from carry joy like a second skin.

The Zen tradition has always understood this. The koan, the unanswerable question given to students in meditation, is not entirely unlike a very sophisticated joke. The point is not to solve it. The point is to be cracked open by it. And the experience of awakening in that tradition is often described not as solemn revelation, but as laughter. A sudden, helpless, liberating laughter at the cosmic joke of having taken yourself quite so seriously for quite so long.

The Spiritual Case for Lightness

In the Andean tradition, the concept of sami, light, refined energy, is understood as the natural state of the living cosmos. Heavy energy, hucha, accumulates through fear, resistance, self-importance, and the grinding effort of trying to control what cannot be controlled.

Laughter is sami. Joy is sami. The moment when you stop performing and simply delight in being alive, that is sami.

This is not to say that suffering isn't real, or that joy is always available, or that you should paste a smile over genuine pain. Spiritual bypassing is its own kind of trap, and a dishonest one. The shamanic path doesn't ask you to pretend. It asks you to be real.

But sami, that lightness and genuine joy, is not a reward for having solved all the problems. It is a practice. A capacity. Something that can be cultivated even in the midst of genuine difficulty, not as a denial of the difficulty but as a way of remaining open within it.

The Norse tradition, which is not exactly known for its relentless cheerfulness, nonetheless understood this. Loki, the trickster, the shapeshifter, is not simply a villain in the Norse cosmology, though he gets quite villainous later on. He is the necessary disruptor. The one who prevents the gods from becoming too settled, too certain, too rigid in their self-understanding. The trickster archetype appears in virtually every indigenous tradition in the world: Coyote in Native American cosmologies, Anansi in West African tradition, Hermes in the Greek. The trickster plays, provokes, subverts, and in doing so, keeps wisdom alive.

The trickster is philosophy's secret ally.

What Happens When You Actually Play

Here's the thing about play that the serious-faced approach to life tends to miss: it works.

Not as a performance. Not as a technique. But genuine, absorbed, uninhibited play - the kind where you forget to monitor yourself, where you're not thinking about how you look, where time does something strange and you surface surprised to find an hour has passed - that state is where some of the most important human experiences happen.

Insight. Connection. Creativity. Healing. The surprising arrival of something you weren't looking for and couldn't have manufactured.

I have had more genuine philosophical breakthroughs while laughing with friends around a fire than I have had in seminar rooms. I have received more useful spiritual guidance in moments of playful, open-hearted curiosity than in moments of effortful, earnest seeking. I have felt more alive and more genuinely present, more connected to the web of life, dancing in my kitchen to something ridiculous than in many a solemn ritual.

This is not an argument against solemn rituals. It's an argument for also dancing in the kitchen.

A Modest Proposal

So here is my serious philosophical case for not taking yourself too seriously.

Consider that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Consider that you are a briefly conscious arrangement of matter on a small planet, made of the same stuff as stars, who has somehow acquired opinions about things. Consider that the questions you are wrestling with, about meaning, about ethics, about what it all adds up to, have been wrestled with by every thoughtful human who ever lived, and not one of them definitively solved it before dying.

You are not going to solve it either. Not before lunch, and probably not before the end of the century.

And somehow - I find this not depressing but extraordinarily liberating - that's fine.

The philosopher, Alan Watts, who had a gift for making the profound sound almost easy, suggested that the universe is fundamentally a game that is playing itself, and that the human tendency to treat life as a grim duty to be discharged is one of our more endearing and most unnecessary mistakes.

The shamanic traditions would say: you are part of the living web, and the living web is not anxious. It is not defensive. It is not trying to be more important than it is. It is just magnificently, exuberantly, unreasonably alive.

You are allowed to be the same.

So go ahead. Laugh at the trolley problem. Let Diogenes bring his plucked chicken. Let the spirits be funnier than you expected. Let the cosmic joke land.

The most serious thing you might do today is refuse, just for a moment, to be quite so serious.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner who has decided that joy is a rigorous philosophical position. If this made you smile, or laugh, or feel just a little lighter, I'd love to hear from you at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

What makes you laugh in a way that also, somehow, makes you wiser? I'm genuinely asking, and I'd genuinely love to know.