Deep Play. Rationality in the Life World with Special Reference to Sailing.

In an essay on the rationality of play, the author characterizes rationality by the three distinct demands it makes on the individual-demands for autonomy, soli- darity, and integrity. He develops each of these as they apply to the sport of sailing, using the example of two deep-ocean expeditions to arrive at a concept of deep play he sees as one solution to the existential problem of living rationally. In the course of doing so, he suggests why so many disparate activities fall under this concept of deep play and concludes with a reflection on how deep play transcends sports. Key words: autonomy; Bernard Moitessier; integrity; deep play; rationality of play; sailing; solidarityA towering figure in the history of ocean sailing, Bernard Moitessier began sailing traditional junks in Vietnam where he was born. At twenty-one, he ran a business shipping cargo between Rach Gia and Kampot, Cambodia. He made his first long ocean voyage with his friend Pierre Deshumeurs in a boat so leaky they had to pump water constantly to keep it afloat. He sailed alone from Vietnam in 1952 headed for France, but he ran aground on reefs near Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and spent three years in Mauritius building a new craft with his own hands. He lost this second boat in the Caribbean and finished his trip to France by airplane. A 1966 voyage with his wife Francoise took him to Tahiti and back via Cape Horn and set a record as the longest ever nonstop voyage by a yacht.Moitessier's most famous exploit began as a race on August 22, 1968, an unusual race, the first of its kind-a single-handed and nonstop race around the world, called the Golden Globe. After the competitors agreed to the rules and a newspaper put up prize money, what began as a theoretical discussion among friends took on a life of its own and became a sporting event. Six months later, sailing hard in the southern Atlantic aboard Joshua, his forty-two-foot steel ketch, Moitessier appeared the race leader. He had crossed his outward track and was expected to turn toward Plymouth, England, and the finish line. But he then made a decision that changed everything. Instead of turning north, he set a course for the Cape of Good Hope and continued to sail on. On March 18, he used a slingshot to propel a film canister onto the deck of a tanker off Cape Town. The canister contained a message that read, in part, "I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul." 1Abandoning the race, he set out on a voyage to which the simple words "sport" or "game" or "play" seem to apply only suggestively. Something deeper was going on-a more complicated form of play, let me call it deep play-that I believe has not been adequately conceptualized.What Moitessier called saving his soul proved a quest to define and then to defend his integrity as a human being. In this essay, I unpack the notion of rationality to reveal a form of personal integrity in which a demand for personal autonomy and a demand for solidarity with other people and the larger world become integral in a way that fully affirms both without recourse to watertight compartments to keep them apart. Moreover, I show how the deep play of sail- ing constitutes a way of life in which personal integrity becomes possible. Seen this way, Moitessier's withdrawal from the Golden Globe becomes something more significant than the idiosyncratic expression of personality. It is a model of rational action in the sphere of life.Philosopher Steven Horrobin would call Moitessier "a sailor of the third kind."2 Such sailors, says Horrobin, "sail toward the horizon they will never reach." For them, sailing is not a means of reaching a destination, winning a prize, setting a record, or achieving some other end external to the activity of sailing: "For the sailor of the third kind, the boat itself and its function, the life with it and within it, its relationship to the wind, the land, the ocean and its living beings, the sun, moon, stars and horizon-that process, focused through the sailor's self, is an end in itself. …