PLAY AND CULT—these two concepts combine opposites in an almost unseemly manner: play with its cheerfulness, with its lively pleasure and buoyant levity, and the highest seriousness of human existence, the relation to the divinity. Presumption, trifling, a pastime on the one hand, awe, reverence, anxiety, and the most extreme intimacy of the heart on the other hand. Or does play have a connection with the cult that is more primordial than this well-established difference, even more primordial than the occasional endowment of cult activities and sanctuaries with elements of play that belong to art, to ornamentation, to the celebration of the festival? That is our question. What kind of a question? A philosophical question?
Every one of us is acquainted with play, is acquainted with it from the testimony of their own experience and from observation of the everyday human environment. Play is well known as a phenomenon, familiar and common to us. We do not need to discover it as we would something unfamiliar. Everyone has already been a player. As adults we marvel, perhaps with muted envy, at the play of children, the blissful devotion with which they engage in it, the wealth of imagination, the abundance of the forms and self-imposed rules. We marvel in this at the freely unencumbered élan for life. To be sure, even in adult life we are acquainted with manifold “games,” practices for whiling away idle hours, events resembling the ancient circus that serve as entertainment and conversational material for the urban masses—we are acquainted with playful situations in the midst of life’s serious business, when adventurous or fairy-tale-like features suddenly descend on human existence. We are acquainted with playful moments in “flirting,” in sports, in all sorts of ventures and risks, and of course are also acquainted with explicitly delimited events involving play [Spielveranstaltungen] in the theater and cinema, and on the radio and television. Although familiarity with the phenomenon of play is incontestable and encompasses a wide-ranging abundance of forms and structures, we are {not} yet able to express this knowledge of our advance familiarity with play in a sufficient way and to formulate it with conceptual rigor. Our understanding of play has a customary use-character. As soon as we reflect on it, the customary immediacy of usage is disturbed and it loses its fluid self-evidence—and we do not even know how we should approach the problem. All serious thought initially makes our existence groundless. We lose every sure foothold—we no longer know who we are, what the human being is, what custom and justice, thing and world are. There is perhaps no more essential metaphor for this transformation of humanity than the fate of Laius’s unfortunate son. Oedipus stands in radiant glory, the ruler of the city, who won Thebes and the hand of the queen because he knew how to solve the Sphinx’s riddle and to her question gave the answer: the human being. Oedipus obviously knows who the human being is—this knowledge brought him into kingship. He is able to see better, is more clear-sighted than the others; he is the one who most of all understands, to the extent that such understanding comes from human cleverness. He takes his knowledge to be secure, takes his happiness to be abiding and firm. Oedipus lives with an undaunted trust in Being: his world is valid, his rule stands, sons and daughters are the assurance of the continuity of his family line. Then, as a sign of divine wrath, the pestilence breaks out across the city and with terror the citizens and Oedipus himself gain an intimation that, seen from the higher knowledge of the gods, things are not as good as human beings imagined. The intimation demands clarification [Aufklärung], radical truth. And gradually the uncanny unveiling is carried out. The seer, mouthpiece of the gods, is compelled by the king to reveal the horror little by little. Oedipus looks outside for the man who struck dead the former king of Thebes and finds him inside, in himself, revealed to be a parricide and defiler of his mother. It is a compelling symbol that he gouges out his eyes and thereby blots out the sensuous truth that kept him deluded. Only when he no longer sensuously sees and the light of day is extinguished for him does he see more truly what is. Bereft of his eyesight, shattered by the death of his mother-wife, deserted by his sons, void of power and driven from the city, he travels the long, bitter path to Colonus, in order, absolved, to be transported away by the gods. In the tragedy of Oedipus the most extreme and severe human will to truth is interpreted in a play. Philosophy can perhaps express what play is. But play, too, can provide an uncanny disclosure about philosophy. Play becomes a symbol. What does the term “symbol” mean?