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There are two fairly commonplace facts about games which seem relevant to a discussion of Alice in Wonderland. First, games are rule-governed, and so orderly; but playing a game involves a creative application of the rules, as Wittgenstein reminds us in Philosophical Investigations, and thus allows for freedom: rules are fixed, but moves are to some extent unpredictable. Seen in this way, a game might appear as a paradigmatic fusion of order and liberty—one, perhaps, of some relevance to society. Second, games involve a means/ends rationality, but aren’t in themselves functional: they are played as ends in themselves and in that sense transcend considerations of sheer utility. From this viewpoint, games raise interesting questions about the relations between rational and ‘irrational’ for msof activity, and indeed this issue is touched on at the very beginning of Alice: the White Rabbit appears just as Alice is wondering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies’, pondering the relations between utilitarian effort and creative play. This, too, has a wider social application which the book brings out.
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- Copyright © 1941 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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page 448 note 1 The Dodo's casualness about the exact shape of the course is also a nicely Wittgensteinian touch: Wittgenstein argues that the concept of a rough or inexact boundary is perfectly valid (Philosophical Investigations, translated G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, 1963, p. 41, para. 88).
page 449 note 1 Cf. Wittgenstein: ‘The grammar of the word “knows” is evidently closely related to that of “can”, “is able to”. But also closely related to that of “understands” (“Mastery” of a technique)’ (Philosophical Investigations, p. 59, para. 150).
page 450 note 1 Wittgenstein, p. 94, para. 268.
page 450 note 2 Ibid., p. 96, para. 279.
page 453 note 1 Her remark is true in a sense she doesn't intend: the more selfish people in Wonderland get, the more chaotic events become. It's significant, incidentally, that it is the Duchess who later implies that words are commodities: ‘I make you a present of everything I've said as yet’.
page 454 note 1 One of the most indeterminate boundaries in the book is that between the animate and inanimate, as one would expect of a society where animated playing cards dispose of living creatures as bits of sporting equipment.