HUMAN PLAY, to which our present reflection aims to do justice,1 has many forms of appearance and shows itself as open and masked; sometimes it disguises itself in the demeanor of serious life, of pompous solemnity and affected dignity and at the same time is a mischievous, cheerful, and delightful activity, a carrying out of life that is full of buoyancy and exuberance, far from care and concern for the future, removed from the harsh hours of service and work—it is by no means only the domain of children and the paradise of youthful happiness; it beautifies and lightens the lives of adults, too, banishes boredom and gloom, conjures an illusory dream world within the pallid everyday routine. It socially and joyfully brings human beings together in entertaining and short-lived communities. It binds and releases with a gentle hand. It fascinates and enchants, relaxes and carries us away for a while from our burdens, offices, duties. It frees us from our real situation and brings marvelous possibilities before us.
Everyone is familiar with play from their own experience, from the days of childhood and the hours of free time and recreation; each has already played with others and watched unfamiliar games. It is easy to name games, to describe types and forms, yet difficult to bring the colorful variety into conceptual formulation. Play in its vitality and transformative power withdraws again and again from a perspective that would fix it in place; it shuns firm contours and escapes the net of reflected determinations. Its impulsive immediacy is far removed from the spirit of sober scientific knowledge and philosophy’s speculative flight of thought; play does not reason argumentatively and yet it is not thoughtless. Its immediacy does not imply a dull animality, nor the unconsciousness of vegetative processes; it is illuminated by an understanding, reaches from the simple2 tendency to imitate to the projection of new possibilities for lived experience. It knows modes of deep absorption and the heightened alertness of symbolic representation. The players, taken in the broad sense, which encompasses both the active participants and their spectators, move within an aura of sense; they understand the game that is played and its rules, as well as the playful activity and its motivations.
Play as a common and manifold phenomenon of the human world, which occurs just as much in solitary dreamers as in groups or even masses, is not only in itself suffused with sense and sense-manifesting; it is evaluated and estimated in a variety of ways. Such appraisals run a long spectrum and end in extreme antitheses. Sometimes play is affirmed, marveled at, lauded, construed as an “intact” existence that is primordial and close to the origins, as the “being whole” of human life—in Schiller’s words, the human being only fully is when he plays. . . .3 At other times, however, play is disparaged as idleness and dalliance, as a frivolous waste of time and lack of seriousness. Or one allows it to count as a factor in relaxation, as a recovery and break, as an occasional release from the harsh yoke of the labors and serious tasks4 that are necessary for life. Play ends up being viewed under the aspect of a pleasurable reward. The cultural critics of our day see in play a colorful social phenomenon with positive and negative features. The civilizing apparatus of a highly technological society weighs on the human beings who inhabit it. They enjoy the comfort and benefits and yet are hemmed in by a thousand different practical constraints that the rational system imposes on each of them in production, consumption, traffic, and regulation of communication. In play, we escape, it appears, the preplanned world and externally apportioned time. We reclaim a land of free impulses and imaginative fulfillment of dreams. We dispose over space and time at our own discretion, in the presence of external resistance as well as in our imagination. We create new powers and a singular feeling of freedom from the experience of play. Play becomes therapy for the modern human being of industrial society. However, it also brings dangers with it, dangers of a new kind. Because it seizes hold of the masses in huge events that resemble the ancient circus, because sports on Sunday offer conversational material for the drab workweek, an immense industry for entertainment and diversion has emerged, a factory for the consumption of play, but more alarming still is the possibility of the exploitation of the drive to play, an encompassing manipulation that is in control precisely where individuals feel themselves to be free and enjoying their own free choice. The need for play enormously increases in intensity and scope within the social body today.5
In earlier epochs the mass of human beings had little time for play, and even children did not remain undisturbed in paradise for long.6 They learned much too early the burden of labor and knew days that ran their course according to an externally imposed calendar. A large extent of free time and the kinds of play possible within it were the privilege of a ruling class that possessed power and wealth. Today, abundant7 free time has already become a social problem. It must be “organized and managed,” must be taken into consideration in city planning, in the sites for sports fields, in theaters, in places for amusement with automated games, in children’s playgrounds, and the like. If long ago in the feudal era the play of the privileged class was occasionally so bored with its own mode of life that it sought new, tantalizing material for games by imitating the class that was oppressed and encumbered by the drudgery of work, and in idyllic pastoral games was deaf to the approaching revolution’s rumbling thunder, then today the masses within the modern apparatus of civilization live—one could say—almost like princes. They have prosperity and much free time; they are bored and they need pastimes. Programmed entertainment has become an important sector of industry. Everyday life is permeated by elements of play.
Among the culture-critical censors, judgments vary on the advantages and disadvantages of modernity for life. They see an advantage in the growth of play with its spontaneity and its vital freshness, a disadvantage in the big business of gigantic mass events, in their planned, technologically and economically arranged implementation. However, perhaps it is premature to denigrate present-day life according to the standards of past ages. Is it so certain that play in the small format of individuals and groups was “more essential” than play in the great format of the masses? Does human play still have more changes before it that we cannot foresee, primordial stances of the collective soul, too? Even the human history of play has not yet come to an end that would provide a complete overview. Even if we collect a substantial amount of ethnological material, research the customs of play belonging to primitive and civilized peoples, and attempt an anatomy of homo ludens, we will still scarcely8 arrive at a conclusive result, because the human being always plays with play, too. In this remarkable human possibility of comportment there is a provocative theme for ceaseless attempts. That makes all utterances about play fragmentary and preliminary. Indeed, it may almost be desperate to strive for an assured total understanding that would not be tarnished by partisanship and prejudices, that would not be ensnared by the protean charm of playful metamorphoses, that would not be enticed by the gracefulness of the play of the dance, would not be enthused by the spectacle of contests or the blissfully playful activity of children. Can one muster a value-neutral indifference to a phenomenon that is so colorful, so dazzling and shimmering, that spans both the most elevated cheerfulness and tragic seriousness, that is lived with exhilaration and at the same time mirrors the dark sides of existence? Or is the perspective more valid that, inimical to all levity, does not banish the heavy shadows that are cast over the landscape of our life, does not gild them with dream figures, but rather keeps vision clear for the evil and terrible features of humanity, denouncing a deceitful gossamer and a concealing appearance, an illusory world of self-made delusion in play?
Contemplative reflection is already as such alien to play, has no nearness and kinship to that which it wants to grasp. Playing and thinking appear to exclude each other. The reflective human being all too easily goes astray in the labyrinthine phenomenon of play, in its grottoes and secret recesses, in its beguiling appearance, its con-artist world and its fantastical constructs. Play can be spoken of from the distance of the disinterested, who watch an unfamiliar game and then describe a strange human comportment—however, it can also be spoken of in the mode of testimony from experience, thus from the bright sense that play brings with it—and which still remains fully enigmatic despite all the light of understanding. After these reservations, play may now be inquired into according to its anthropological status, according to the problematic of its mode of Being and according to its world significance.
According to the popular view, play has no clear significance vis-à-vis the human manifestations of life. To be sure, the phenomenon is common. It governs the early phase of childhood, which soon transitions into the preparatory phase for adult life; when playtime grows smaller the seriousness of learning begins. Play is increasingly displaced from the center of existence, becomes peripheral, while other kinds of conduct occupy life’s stage. What anthropological status, then, does human play have? Because it is fleeting and unstable, is it itself a transitory mode of human comportment that the human being forgets or sets aside when more essential tasks claim him? Is it itself rubbish and useless exuberance because in it exhilarated mirth and all manner of masquerades occur? Is the human being only a player occasionally and casually? Or does play belong precisely to the fundamental phenomena of our existence? That is a question for which there is no short answer ready, because the human being who poses the question never knows himself the way he knows his surrounding environment. The latter is filled with facts, things, and processes, which we also do not investigate all the way to their basis, but which are present and, as objective findings, can at least partly be pre-scientifically and scientifically grasped, known, determined, and conceived. The human being who wants to know is not a clear discovery for himself. He strives after self-knowledge, and the formulations of his self-understanding guide his historical trajectory like stars or will-o’-the-wisps. Because the human being exists relationally, in relation to encompassing nature, to inanimate matter and to the animate realm of plants and animals, his self-understanding always also includes a total interpretation of all things. However, this brings with it the danger that he seeks to understand himself from that to which he relates in praxis and theory.
Anthropology is situated in a Tantalus-like position. The human being can interpret himself as “material,” as the “animal that has logos,” as made in the image of divinity or as the vessel of world spirit. Each respective anthropological conception makes a preliminary decision concerning the status of human phenomena. A biological lens thus sees in play something like the “cunning of life,” which drills its vulnerable and endangered young in advance, awakens and cultivates their capacities, before they become involved in the merciless struggle for existence, or harmlessly works off the pent-up aggressive drives in the mature living being. A function useful to life is conferred on play. In a theologically determined anthropology the evaluation is more ambiguous: play can be viewed suspiciously as frivolity, which detracts from the care for the salvation of the soul, or even appreciated as a comportment that is rapturously drawn away from common need, which beautifies the celebration of divinity. One can even venture the attempt to determine the human being from his phenomenal relations without such preliminary decisions concerning the human being’s “essence.” Here we initially encounter the relation between the human being and nature. Certainly he is himself a natural creature, brought forth by nature and rolling along in its deluges, yet never calmly appearing in advanced growth; he is rather the founder of unrest who does not let things stand as they have for eons. He proceeds offensively against his surroundings. Driven by need and conscious of his creative power of freedom, he transforms the earth that bears and endures him; he transforms the wilderness into land inhabitable for human beings. Work brings him all the necessities of life. It becomes a power that permeates his life. The human being is a worker. That is not an arbitrarily contrived characterization; it is the way in which he communicates with nature and preserves himself. Yet work is not an isolated possibility of the individual; it happens within a community, it is an elementary social phenomenon. The togetherness of human beings in groups, peoples, is stirred by contradictory strivings, by the contention for power and rule. Indeed, struggle is just as elementary as work. The human being is a fighter. Human beings in each case belong to one of two sexes; they emerge from the loving union of both halves of life; they are born, grow up, spend a fairly long time in the light, then must go down again, pass away into death. That is not blind fate, which they suffer unwittingly; they know themselves to be involved in the round dance of love and death. They also seek to understand themselves as lovers and mortals. The anthropological conception of the human being that is oriented by labor today dominates half the globe. Perhaps that is a disastrous one-sidedness insofar as it makes one fundamental phenomenon, one human relation, absolute, and “interprets” the other features of equal status that belong to our polysemous existence on that basis. Can the struggling, raging “will to power” or the love of the sexes with its mysteries or the shadow of death over all human things be understood in a sensible manner and methodically derived from the active entwinement and imbrication of the human being in the economic production process? It can be doubted whether the human being in the discord of strife exists as “totally” as he does in the concord of erōs, in the tensions of the world of work or even in the bright happiness of play. Yet from doubt there is still a long way to a reliable human self-knowledge.
What status does play have? Is there a quick and concise answer to this question? Have not traditional customs and cultural conceptions in the changing course of history decided on the “meaning and value” of human play? Can the individual liberate himself from all collective judgments and prejudices concerning play and determine what and how it “is in itself”? What the human being can say about the human being indeed never has the straightforwardness of an objective collection of facts, and is for the most part clouded by a “partisanship” lurking in the background. One says of play that it belongs to children, that it is their sort of authentic life, the original way in which their environment and shared human world emerges, that it is a gentle kind of training for existence. However, among adults it appears in a reduced form—as a counterweight to the seriousness of life and its difficult decisions, as “recovery,” a break, filling up of free time. Others in turn set play over activity that serves the extension of life and self-assertion, elevate it to creative existence. Play remains resistant to such classification and fixed determination of place in a hierarchy, balks at its relegation to social classes, biological stages of life, or gender [Geschlechter].
The human being plays—always from the core of his life, even when he is thereby hidden and veiled in a hundred masks. As an eruptive power of life, play prevails throughout the Being of the human [durchwaltet . . . das menschliche Sein] and cannot be specified as an unambiguous, goal-oriented carrying out of life. There is no work in which playing crystallizes and comes to an end. Its process is itself its work, it happens spontaneously9 and ceases, it is an activity that happens for its own sake. Initially, a play activity appears to be not much different than any other activity of everyday life, thus like a message, like a sequence of steps in a labor process, like a business errand—just like an action that runs its course for a time within a sense-imbued framework and in a succession determined by the end. To be sure, everything humans do is underlain by a base of vegetative and animal ways of carrying out life, run through by an undercurrent of unconscious and obscure drives, steered and pulled in a manner alien to consciousness, but activity as such, which feels itself to be conscious and “free,” pursues an intention, has a goal, and exists ahead of itself in the projection of the goal. That holds for all deeds that alter need [Not-Wendung] through labor or for the militant unfolding of powers, for the striving after love and for the gloomy futural horizon of death. Yet in playing, the time in the future that remains outstanding is submerged as a motive force of acting. The futural whip drops away that otherwise goads us, hounds us, drives us, uses up the moment as a means. An existence pacified in itself in its carrying out of activity pervades the player and bestows a pure, felicitous present. One can object that this is only possible because playing is not a serious carrying out of anything, not an actual struggling with the recalcitrance of nature that is opposed to the efficacy and works of human drudgery, not a life-and-death struggle for power and rule, not a sacrifice for the beloved other, and not mourning for what is irrevocably lost. Playing, one says, is something that happens “as if.” It brings features of an odd non-actuality along with it, an imaginary appearance that is more than a mere subjective delusion, more than an illusory representation of consciousness. An “appearance” that stands there as a structure that allows the players and their audience to be in accord. This irreal feature in the real occurrence of play is a difficult problem, insofar as we understand talk of “appearance,” irreality, and constructs of the imagination in an approximate manner and can clarify it for ourselves in view of the phenomenon of play, too, yet at once fall into perplexity with every attempt at a conceptual determination.
In playing, one says, we are transposed into a fantastical situation, as it were: we are not subject to the difficulties and pressures of our ordinary actual real condition; with unrestricted wishful thinking, vivid juggling of fantasies, we produce a dreamed-up condition that suits us. We act as if it existed; we act according to a fictive goal for activity. Yet in so doing we are not bound by our deeds; we reserve for ourselves the right to immediately break whole chains of experience in the dream-world of play, to declare that they never happened and to create new sequences of events right away. Played activities can begin anew at each moment and have different “pasts” in each case, according to whim. The temporal sequence of events in the sphere of play takes place to a certain degree on two temporal levels, as the time of playing and as the time of occurrences in a “non-actual realm” that is put into play [erspielt]. And something similar also holds for the space that is occupied by play activity—and on which the imaginary setting is erected.
Certainly, it would be a misunderstanding of play to want to write it off as a pure product of the imagination, as an immanent dream with vivid imagery, as engagement with mere “figments of thought” that run their course within the interiority of consciousness. Play happens “outside,” as an activity of human beings, as solitary or cooperative activity, carried out in open, intersubjective space and proceeding within a commonly apportioned time. Nonetheless, human play is pervaded by irrealizing moments of sense, is run through by fantasy and dream. But it always has a sensuous hold in actually present things, a basis in everyday reality.
That holds for all kinds of play. One can quite roughly distinguish mere diversionary games that help us pass the time, and then more essential kinds of play: the games of children, competitive games, and kinds of play in which there is portrayal or the playing of roles. This is obviously not a complete catalog, but rather only an indication of three basic types with differing relevance. In each type we find that odd mixture of sheer actuality and imaginary appearance, which makes human play into a provocation for conceptual understanding. Card games have their exciting atmosphere in the mingling of sociable intimacy and rivalry, of individual skill and fortune’s favor. Factors that generally10 govern social life are here set in motion and consciously represented on an inconspicuously small scale, to the delight of the players.
In child’s play an “imitation” of adults occurs, but from the perspective of a still undeveloped understanding of life. Indeed, the brisk animation springs from the young living being’s drive to employ its motor skills, yet there are already sense-moments of conscious imitation at work therein. The dichotomous structure of human play, its mingling of what is actual and non-actual, emerges most clearly in role-playing and games in which there is portrayal. Even a preliminary glance can confirm this. Role-playing occurs as the production of sense of an imaginary playworld that does not lie before the one who created it like a finished product, but rather “involves” him, draws him in, and engulfs him—sometimes with such an intensity that the player “gets lost” in his role. And yet he never actually loses himself; he remains the actor who is presently portraying King Lear or Wallenstein. He does not even fool himself about the identity of his person in the great emotion caused by the drama’s poetic power. However, he knows that his ego is taken in, “possessed” by a sense that he lets become present in a sensuous spectacle with the gestures and gesticulations, the mimicry of his body, the modulation of his voice. He lends his own figure, though in theatrical costume, to the “heroes on the stage,” and animates them as an interpreter of the poet. The process on the stage takes up time. The time portrayed in the stage play belongs to an imaginary realm; it coincides with the play’s length of time just as little as the space on the stage coincides with the Castle of Eger. But both spaces and both times are there with each other, exist “at the same time” and yet not like other simultaneous occurrences within the same spatial field. To a certain degree, a spatio-temporal clearing arises on the stage from out of an irreal play-“world” whose irreality is nevertheless created with real means, where sensuous spectacle and fantastically generated appearance are mixed. And the spectator in front of it belongs to a play-community that encompasses actors and the public. Thus, not only the people acting in roles, but also those for whom they portray and figuratively, pictorially bring to presence an imaginary sense are participants in the playworld, even if they do not appear in it.
To be a spectator has a double sense. We can watch an unfamiliar form of playing without interest, and we then see a more or less comic and useless kind of behavior. Or we take an active interest in the sense of the play, see in Oedipus’s suffering the essential misfortune of human existence and fall under the play’s spell. The playworld is a spellbinding circle, an odd sphere that enchants, entrances, ties us down, and temporarily transforms us. If one customarily opposes the conduct of play to serious activities and situations of life, lets playing be contrasted with work or struggle, then one overlooks how far the playful [Verspieltes] extends, even in the so-called serious life of professions, the relations of the sexes, the false pomp of the funeral procession—and one also overlooks the fact that human play privileges for its thematic content precisely the great, tragic, and fateful stories, that we “play” the panting exertion of labor, the spitting rage of battle, the grief of Electra, the wedding celebration of lovers—and occasionally we even again play non-serious playing itself. The non-playful mode of existence is a favorite theme of play. Children playfully imitate adults, and poets and actors playfully imitate the sufferings and joys of mortals. The spellbinding power proceeding from play is thus marvelous. How can a phenomenon of life that is so saturated by the non-actual and by fantasy touch us so much, move, enchant, and spellbind us so much that we become “entranced,” as it were, and forget for a while the actual situation together with its events?
With critical awareness one can withdraw from the play’s spellbinding and enchanting power; we can distance ourselves from the dream fabric of the play-world and realize that the “hero” becomes a citizen when he removes his makeup, when the mask drops away, that even the spectator who was just a moment ago a witness of incredible events reflects soberly on the performance of the mime and starts joking with his neighbors about it. One then distinguishes with some fluency the real aspects of the bearer from the illusory ones11 in the playworldly scene. One distinguishes the wooden floor of the stage and the citadel of Thebes, as if the latter were an augmentation, the effects of lighting and the heavens blazing12 above the battlefield. One distinguishes the props and the fake “deadly weapons.” The great dramatic play enters into the aspect of a successful technique of illusion that does not merely use words in order to establish a world of sense in consciousness but rather uses real human beings, acting beings, in order to bring about an embodied, sensuous view of what happens.
That such distinctions are possible is incontestable. Yet whether something is thereby conceived is questionable. Does the simple difference between being actual and non-actuality suffice for ascribing to play its place and status? In order to defame it as a way of acting riddled by nullities, an acting “as if,” an impotent, merely apparent occurrence? To be sure, no one will say that it is nothing, yet one is quick to assess it according to the standard of serious and weighty things, to take from it its bloom, which {is} “such stuff as dreams are made on,”13 to denounce its significance as fluff and mischief, in the best case to let it count as a kind of embellishment of our otherwise difficult or boring days. Play, one says,14 belongs to the realm of appearance, even if it may also contain serious and actual basic elements. From this perspective, the gaze of the contemplative observer is oriented on that which is comprehensible in human play, as present in simple and plain actuality, even on activity as such, on the ball game or theatrical acting [Schauspielerei], but not on the “playworld” thereby presencing along with it. The latter is at once localized in an impotent representation, far removed from actuality, and is considered to exist only in the imagination. The term “imagination [Phantasie]” becomes the catchall for a phenomenal moment which one doesn’t get—or about which one has already made a negative decision.
Perceptions, corroborative memory, experience that is in agreement, rational processing of these for scientific, intersubjectively verified knowledge—all of this aims toward objects in the human environment, toward objects that exist, that are, that appear in subjective presentations and prove to be “actually” given in highly complex systems—even if only provisionally and until further notice. They encounter us from out of more encompassing horizons, from out of regions, from out of the world’s breadths of space and depths of time, without it being the case that the whole that encompasses us would ever become a defined, enclosed object. We do not face the universe as an external “subject.” We are included within the totality. All epistemological comportments that secure an “actuality” of objects are fundamentally “intraworldly.” In the imagination, however, we are not bound to the fixed orbit of actuality that can be experienced. We can rethink things, imagine their figures and properties in ways other than how they are; we can invent arbitrary combinations—we can also, however, swing out beyond what is present and given, leave it behind in an adventurous dream of thoughts and send ourselves to the ends of the world, fly beyond the limits of experience. We can even be “carried away” from the space-time continuum and the strict causal chain of events, certainly not “in actuality,” yet in the imagination, which, in fairy tales all the way to speculative philosophy, lends us wings. Thus not only things in the environment, near and far, but also the totality of the world, which cannot be reached by experience, is able to become a theme of fantasy-inspired representation. Not, however, in such a way that we represent the universe as an object, but rather in such a way that we think it in an analogy to innerworldly models, an analogy that is at once posited and canceled. Thinking regarding the world, cosmological thinking, can never do without the imagination wandering in the nebulous realm of the non-actual. However, it is also not able to explain it as a legitimate instance of knowledge but can make use of it as an operative resource.
Assuming that human play is primordially not a pastime, but rather a gathering of time, the consolidation of all cosmic fragments, a symbolic representation of the world, thus magical cult-play that honors the gods, bestows a fleeting, fluttering manifestation on the universe’s prevailing powers of sense, then there would certainly only be a faint, twilight glow, which one denies to the solid relation to actuality, in all kinds of play today. Perhaps human play is the human root of religion and art, of the elevated games of our soul.15
The world-significance of human play is never manifestly brought to light as an identifiable discovery in the phenomenon; it is always an addition of creative consciousness, which brings to presence for itself in the symbol the totality of everything that is. Play as a cosmic metaphor characterizes no mere anthropological occurrence. It also does not mean the manifold and various kinds of modes of play within the human realm, from simple flirting all the way to the profound sense of dramatic play or spectacle. The world itself is interpreted as play. That does not imply any denial of causality in the occurrence of intraworldly things, nor any proclamation of arbitrary freedom in the course of the world; play is used as a model for understanding the total process of the world’s movement as the emergence and demise of all things, as the foreground of the coming into appearance and as the depth of the concealed essence, as the interpenetrated play of opposites, as the removal of temporal demarcations and of the boundaries between life and death, as the rendering nugatory of modalities, when everything possible becomes actual and everything actual becomes possible. The world’s process, which rational understanding can only survey in intraworldly space-times and time-spaces and can only grasp and elucidate in strict categories, becomes, as a totality and all-encompassing unity [Allheit und Alleinheit], a challenge for the human intellect. And occasionally, when rational models break down, the human intellect resorts to the dreamlike power of playfully creative imagination and attains possibilities for understanding the totality in the structures of human play. What the status and truth-value is for such cosmological analogies, which want to force the whole into words as a roundelay of things in an “eternal return of the same,” as a “divine roll of the dice,” can only first be unfolded as a problem at all if the knowledge of intraworldly objects is no longer recognized as the only normative way of discovering truth. The masked god Dionysus perhaps then becomes a profoundly meaningful [sinntiefen] parable for Being and the world.16
The problem of the magical-mantic interpretation of play also surpasses the present phenomenological and positivist “epistemology.” The mode of Being and world-significance of play will remain in the shadows for a long time still. Already in his essay, “On the Essence of Philosophical Critique,” Hegel says: “although we must not mistake this passion for change and novelty for the indifference of play which, in its extreme insouciance, is at the same time the most exalted and only true seriousness.”17 Paradoxes of this sort are clues, not findings. As long as human play is judged from the superficial, though not untrue, perspective that holds that, as a specific embodied behavior, play is led and guided by ideas that only concern an imaginary play-world—that play thus remains in the contrasting shadow of serious life—then an ontological understanding prevails that too quickly only distinguishes being actual and non-actuality, demarcating the simply real aspects of play (embodied activity) from the fictive play-world. The ontological problem of what an existent appearance is, what shadows, mirroring, image, and what symbolic representation are, is not dealt with at all.
In the course of our thoughts up to now, we have perhaps placed too much emphasis on the imaginary aspect of human play, on that which is dreamed up in it, is invented by it, and represents a magical product. The human body in play is of equally fundamental importance. Is it only a real aspect, a simply actual organ for the carrying out of our activity—or does it, too, achieve an imaginary radiance? Is the body just the “prison of the soul,” an instrument for the actualization of voluntary human action, an outer bastion of the intellect [Geist] that is itself without intellect—or is it the concrete, earthbound mode of human existence itself? One should be able to provide information about this, if it is true that, after the kind of play that involves roles, competitive play comes to the fore for discussion. It seems as though it were a pure doing and acting, exclusively a real enactment without moments of fantasy, without its own “play-world.” One always outperforms the other in terms of strength, skill, stamina, vying with the other fairly, and following the rules in a playful semblance of combat [Scheingefecht], and finds the approval of a public. The human body’s capacities and possibilities are given an impressive demonstration. Competitive play requires health, strength, beauty, discipline, and training of the self and the team, and has physical and psychical effects. By “gymnastics” the Greeks understood the trinity of the human body’s health, strength, and beauty. To be sure, this word had different connotations depending on whether it was uttered in Attica or Sparta. Ancient gymnastics is not to be dissociated from the fundamental decisions of Hellenic life, from the relations to war and to play. In our way of life that is so different, the culture of the body is not to be understood from only the striving after health, strength, and beauty. The main goal is not the well-rounded, balanced harmony of human capabilities. The contemporary human being’s awareness of his body is to a great degree determined by the life phenomenon of sports.18 It has almost become its own “form of life.” It belongs to the modern world of work as a complementary manifestation. Perhaps we are just as conceptually helpless in regard to sports as we are to rampant technology. In this century, sports and technology have advanced rapidly and vertiginously. Both point to a change in the basic position of human existence in relation to its sojourn in the world. The human being is not only bodily insofar as he possesses a body, insofar as in a certain sense he is tethered to this constant companion; he is embodied insofar as he always relates to his body, even if in historically variable dispositions. The biological discovery that he is an exemplar of a higher kind of animal does not constitute the philosophical problem of incarnation; it is rather the existentiell situation of being a perceiving, mobile, and thinking midpoint of the appearing environment in a sensuous, sense-suffused way that does. The bodily relation means the psychic-intellectual and concretely active manner in which the human being relates to the natural evidence of his animal existence [Vorhandenheit]. This sense-saturated relation is transformed in the course of history, not only in the way in which the human being “understands” his embodiment, but in the manner in which he “puts it into practice.” The human being does not have, for better or worse, a body like a container for his psychic substance, and he also does not operate in it merely instinctively like an animal. He knows that he “possesses” a body, is incarnated therein. He is alienated or delighted by his body, can feel it as a nagging burden or in free and unfettered movement. The Greek glorification of the body was a magnificent mode of the human relation to the body; another was the spiritual era’s ascetic, world-fleeing hostility to the body.
What does incarnation signify for human self-understanding? A contingent fact, an essential determination of the condition humaine? Is the body the murky, obscure vessel that overshadows the heavenly light of the realm of ideas, the lifelong prison from which death alone releases us, which thus must be called a “doctor” and for which a rooster is to be sacrificed? In Plato we find ambiguous, contradictory statements concerning the body. It is even emphatically elevated if it is beautiful. The shapeliness of the beautiful body is taken to be a sign that points to the pure shapeliness of thought; the body, the beautiful body of the ephebe, for which Greek pederasty was aflame, becomes a signpost to a higher beauty that is more suffused with light, to the beauty of the single form of the beautiful, the monoeides-kalon, which ultimately coincides with the ontōs-on, what truly is, and with the agathon, the good. Pederasty and philosophy are intertwined because the true is first illuminated in the radiance of the beautiful. And the beautiful is not a predicate that among other things can also apply to the body—as it does in other ways to the sun sinking below the purple sea, the towering temple under dark green oaks and silver olive trees. Beauty is first understood not as the enchanting character of nature or as the symmetry of artworks, but rather as the human being’s bodily beauty. We first attain natural and artistic beauty through the body and through its sensuous perceptions. The radiant body is the golden trace that leads to philosophy. No artistic creation can ever fully free itself from the sphere of the sensuous—dance cannot free itself from the supple, flexible body; music cannot free itself from the resounding tone; sculpture cannot free itself from marble and bronze. Yet we are only open to all sensuous things at all because we have a body. Being-sensuous is the human mode of existence. The body is not an appendage of the human being, not an external natural condition, with which the person, finite human freedom, is unfortunately just afflicted and stricken. Certainly, the human being has already at times been ashamed of his embodiment, has suffered in the chains that bind him to the space-time of the world. A long and harmful tradition has misinterpreted the terrestrial mode of existence belonging to the earth and in many ways made us lose sight of the ancient, indeed the most ancient mysteries of the human race, and has obscured19 from us the world-profound significance of elementary, sensuous, and bodily processes of life. We scarcely still know what eating, drinking, and procreating signify in a sense-imbued manner, even if we possess excellent natural-scientific knowledge about them. These processes emerge in a clearer light when we celebrate festivals. We celebrate even the loftiest festivals with the symbolic gifts of “bread and wine” as communion of the earth’s offspring with the Great Mother.
All essential moments of human existence are connected to the body and sensuousness. Our intellect [Geist] is sensuous, and its sensuousness is not a lower preliminary stage, with “seeing and hearing passing away”20 when the human intellect is set in motion. The intellect is not only21 in the senses; the senses are in the intellect, too. We never think as the bodiless “angel” does, removed from everything earthly. Our thinking is language and is documented by voice and writing; our reason needs images, and our activities [Handlungen] refer to the hand [Hand]. Struggle, which founds ruling orders and relations of power and erects cities and states, is the most severe threat to the body. From the very beginning, labor involves the bodily activity of work; only because the human being lives in an earthly, bodily manner can he objectify and reify what he does, can he invent and use machines. And even play with its irreal and real components is bound to the body and exhilarates it. Incarnation pervades all of human existence’s structures of co-existence: mortality and love, work, ruling, and play. There have doubtless been eras with a gloomy view of the body, which we like to call “idealistic,” that dismissively condemned the body, denouncing it as a source of disturbance for the intellect that was resplendent with thoughts, as a confusion of reason, as a blurring of truth, that saw in it a principle of evil, the seat of lusts and wicked desires, that defamed it—and yet still could not discard it. For the sake of the body we need the necessities of life and even for the most part superficial things: food, clothing, a house and tools, appliances, machines, weapons, all the myriad things of an artifact-culture, an immense technological apparatus. The human being thereby surpasses the limited possibilities for embodied action in myriad ways; he installs himself within an apparatus of enormous proportions. He now acts setting out from his own body, with immense formative powers and uncanny energy. The powerful rivalry of economic competition that includes even war has vastly increased and continues to grow. Human beings compete with each other with the utmost brutality and technological perfection.
It is entirely otherwise when competition is to occur as play, when it springs from an accord, a shared sentiment for the joy of existence, when it observes rules that ensure the health and life of the other competitor. A characteristic feature of peaceful competition is the reduced equipment of means that render the competitors’ vigorous struggle more efficient; to a certain degree they contend “naked.” The race, the throw, the jump, the possibilities for enhancing human bodies that are unarmed and not technologically modified are paradigms. Of course, such sports cannot do without equipment, cannot do without the racetrack, the playing field, the swimming pool, and so forth.
Nowadays, people take part in competitive sporting activities that involve machines, such as Formula 1 and Formula 2 racecars, motorboats and fast planes, where psychological toughness, coolness, skill and courage, and quick reaction times are the decisive qualities, where technical struggles, intertwined in manifold ways with commercial interests, are fought out and have a large public, the masses of industrial culture. Playing has then become a technical occupation. Of a completely different essence is that competitive play where bodies contend, where natural abilities and diligent practice are decisive, where a tense, eager carrying out of existence constitutes and stamps the occurrence of play before any technologizing of it, where the human being plunges back, as it were, into a primal situation and casts off the civilized armor like a bothersome garment. Such competitive play is not an impoverishment of human possibilities, not a regression to an archaic form of society that is ignorant of motors, rockets, and computers; it is no antiquating idyll.
One is perhaps quite ready to denigrate a sports performance that is primarily22 played out in an arc of suspense between the human body and free nature, for example, sailing on a stormy sea, climbing a sheer surface, or skiing beyond the ski run. Yet such competitive play is much more than an activity with merely real, simply actual aspects. It is illumined by a peculiar transparency: in such play the playing human body in its beauty, vital strength, and free creative self-actualization is precisely itself the theme of play. If the body is otherwise the place from which activities proceed, whether war, work, love, or even the many and diverse forms of human play, then it remains for the most part that from out of which incarnated existence acts. In competitive play that has cast off technical armament (save for a few pieces of equipment), the body comes into the shining light of appearance; it portrays itself. Even competitive play in this sense is a mixture of embodied reality and imaginary sense. It would be too facile a thought to equate this productive imaginative element with the spectator’s amazement at the competitors. It is fame in a more genuine and primordial sense: the glorification of the body, the apotheosis of our sensuous existence—which has not been lost in the thunder of motors, which is not drowned in the flood of papers, which is not laid to waste in the interventions of a global administration, but rather, old as the world and optimistic about the future, conducts itself like the “playing child,” the pais paizōn of the Ephesian thinker.23 That always happens anew when the Olympic victor in the competition steps onto the rostrum to be crowned with an olive wreath.24