THE INTRODUCTORY LECTURE sought to make clear the fundamental significance of child’s play as a distinctive key phenomenon for the existentiell self-understanding of human life. It thus proceeded from the methodological difficulty that child’s play appears as a theoretical theme in the viewpoint of adults—and thus appears differently than it does to the living child who plays. The phenomenal character of this phenomenon is extremely problematic insofar as it is not fully accessible to the ways in which research is conducted by the positive sciences (for instance, psychological diagnosis, behavioral science, milieu sociology, ethnology, and so forth), but rather always requires an interpretation of objective observational findings through categories of life that the one who understands creates from his own inner biography after the fact, from the submerged memory of his own being a child. Access to the independent world of the child is difficult, is continually threatened by erroneous interpretations that assess the distance in life between childhood and the world of adults sometimes too slightly and sometimes too greatly. Then, with methodological caution, a provisional distinction was made between the “play of movement,” which is a “testing-out” of the kinesthetic possibilities of one’s own body, predominant in early childhood, and the “play of sense [Sinn-Spiel]” of the one just beginning to speak, in which the child already imaginatively forms a fictive “playworld” and gives itself a “role” in it. The play of sense gradually achieves a “portraying function” and is the child’s first sense-imbued engagement with its environment, is the beginning of a self-relation and world-relation. It is thus by no means the case that, in playing, children only “reproduce” the adult world, that they only stand in an imitative relation to it. Each generation, each new surging wave of life brings a unique and original tone to the immemorial melody of human life, lives from an obscure and almost unconscious inner anticipation of life toward the future, to a certain degree as a vital project. The child anticipates its future in playful self-portrayal. (Reference to Plato’s insight into this state of affairs in the Laws.)
What constitutes the peculiar enchantment of child’s play is not merely its fresh and lively primordiality and cheerfulness, but above all the lack of concealment and disguise. The child still plays in a naturally innocent way, while the games of adults are “masked” in many ways, indeed even contain veiling and tabooing as moments of play. If child’s play displays an affinity to the mentality of primitives, to a way of magically associating with things, if it bears archaic features in itself, then it still must be surprising that children in our time evince a particular interest precisely in technological things and prefer toys that are copies of technological gadgets. Can the technological world, the product of a late, rational culture, be “near and dear to childhood”? There are almost no purely natural things anymore in the environment of modern human beings—except for clouds in the sky and stars in the night. It would be wrong if one wanted to interpret the child’s “archaic primordiality” as a particular closeness of life to wild-growing nature, not yet deformed by humans. In this regard, much “romanticism” is touted by pedagogues. It is not only the technologically perfected toy that is difficult to interpret, but also the fact that the child’s toy often simulates technological gadgets.
Above all, the discussion hinged on two problems: on the question of an actually revelatory access to the world of the child (according to the criteria of understanding that is possible here) and then on the relation between the child and the modern technological world (exemplified in the problem of toys). The discussion was very lively and opened up a plethora of insights drawn from experience, exemplary observations, and questions aware of the problems. In the course of discussion the distinction between bodily games of movement and games of sense receded and human play’s bond to the body was emphatically given prominence. The body is the earthly site of human existence; we exist “bodily.” Only an ancient tradition in intellectual history, Western Platonism, overshadows this elementary truth—and once disparaged the body as the “soul’s prison” and as a source of the sensuous blurring of our ability to behold the ideas. Our times affirm physical education. Certainly—but our times consider the latter all too much as a task that takes a backseat to the education of the intellect and of character. Yet it ought to be recognized that all essential phenomena of the human being’s existence are bodily. Embodied, we are the children of the earth; we live, work, struggle, die—and play in a bodily manner. Only when the total embodiment of the human being is recognized and acknowledged will the current underappreciation of physical education in the pedagogic space of schools disappear.