EUGEN FINK’s Play as Symbol of the World, which appeared for the first time in 1960, is rightly considered to be the key work of its author. It brings together much of what Fink had previously worked out in the 1930s, and sheds light on research that Fink was still to present until his death in 1975. Since, with the theme of play, Fink connects the philosophical directions of his gaze—the anthropological and the ontological, the pedagogical and social-theoretical, but also the aesthetic—to his proper concern with the cosmological, this theme is interwoven into many of his works. Since the present volume gathers together only those texts in which play forms the primary reference point, we shall connect what is worked out in them above all to those works of Fink’s in which play is also discussed substantially.
Play as Symbol of the World does not, however, merely bring together a multitude of individual facets that are characteristic of Fink’s work. Much more essential is the fact that here the decisive, fundamental feature of Fink’s thought, his cosmological formula, is explicitly expressed and unfolded. “Play as Symbol of the World” itself already has a formulaic ring to it; what is essential is to make the sense of that formula known through this formulation. The formulation says simply: “play” is related to “the world” (thus neither identical with the world nor fully different from it) in the mode of the “symbol.” Play—world—symbol are initially the three unknowns in a relation that comprises the core of the formula as such.
The genesis of the meaning of this formula originated with Fink’s dissertation, which he composed in 1929 under Edmund Husserl’s direction and which was published for the first time the following year in Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung [Annual for philosophy and phenomenological research].1 On the final pages of this work, titled “Vergegenwärtigung und Bild: Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Unwirklichkeit” [Bringing-to-presence and image: Contributions to the phenomenology of non-actuality], in the context of an analysis of the spatial image, the reader is confronted with the concept of a relation between the intraworld and the world, or, in the wording of the investigation itself, between an actual non-actual thing (the spatial image) and the actual thing in which it is included. If the image, measured against the actuality of space, presents a specific non-actuality, then the perception of the image, insofar as it embraces the image as its content, is, as a “medial act,”2 related to both, to the image itself and to the image in its emplacement within space: the real bearer of the image is then also still in view when one’s interest is turned toward the image itself. The relation to the bearer is not thereby attenuated or “neutralized,” as Husserl thought, but rather appears in a unique way, which Fink characterizes as “transparency”: Only in the mode of such transparency is the bearer there for the apprehension of the image and is it capable of “shining [scheinen]” through the image, although it does not itself thereby come to appear [erscheint].3 Moreover, the special co-presence of the bearer in the manner of transparency prevents it from being grasped within the unity of a horizonal system of relation—from being, not indeed neutralized, but transposed into the background of a world of perception consistently unfolding in horizons; on the other hand, this co-presence guarantees the unity of the perception of the image as an act that brings together the apprehension of the image and the co-givenness of the bearer in the mode of transparency. Here for the first time, Fink develops that complex and in itself paradoxical structure that says that, within an intra-situation, what likewise fully surpasses it becomes illuminated in its withdrawal—this is the nucleus for his world-formula. And already in his dissertation, Fink remarks that this structure of medial acts holds manifestly for all apprehending of a non-actuality with the structure of the spatial image, and he mentions, next to consciousness of the image and presentation, “the apperception of play.”4
The edition of Fink’s folders of handwritten notes stored in large cardboard boxes from when he was Husserl’s assistant, which has been prepared by Ronald Bruzina,5 shows how Fink time and again refers to the structure of such non-actuality and in doing so also mentions play. Thus one reads already in a note from around 1929: “World as the whole of beings is itself not a being, but rather the play-space of beings. World ‘given’ in play-space-consciousness, a consciousness which is not an objective consciousness (consciousness-of), but an unthematic, horizon-forming consciousness.”6 An early indication of this play-space-consciousness shows up for Fink “in egological temporality as depresentings,”7 whereby “time constitution” is itself “in play.”8 As Fink records in a late review of his drafts for the edition of Husserl’s Bernau manuscripts on time: already in the confrontation of these years (1932–1935), the time-constituting subject began to recede in favor of time as world-time, insofar as the latter proved to be an “encompassing, supraobjective and suprasubjective primordial happening [Urgeschehen].” In this “leap away from ‘transcendentalism,’”9 the theme of “life” comes to have more and more significance. Thus, the concept of the “great play of life,” which Heidegger took from Kant’s 1792 Anthropology Lecture Course and adduced to characterize the existential concept of world, quite probably gave Fink the first impetus for his anthropo-cosmological conception of play, which would then stand at the center point of Play as Symbol of the World and other works.10
The notes and shorter studies further attest to what extent Nietzsche increasingly comes to the foreground in these considerations.11 The first more detailed text to interpret play cosmologically with explicit reference to Nietzsche is a lecture Fink delivered under the title “Nietzsches Metaphysik des Spiels” [Nietzsche’s metaphysics of play] in March 1946 within the framework of the Habilitation procedures in the philosophy department at the University of Freiburg.12 Fink’s work anticipates not only the result of his interpretations of Nietzsche that he would compose in the coming years, but also in particular his own conception, to think of play as a symbol of the world. In his lecture, Fink brings into relief the systematic approach of Nietzsche’s thinking. For him, this systematic approach is an “ontology of becoming,” and he grasps it as an ontology of play, of which he likewise says that Nietzsche unfolded it merely as a “metaphysical intuition.” In doing so, Fink translates the relation of the Apollonian to the Dionysian into a cosmological dimension: if the Dionysian is conceived as the “playing of temporalizing time” and the Apollonian as “what is temporalized in the temporalization,” the connection between them is interpreted in such a way that the Dionysian, as the comprehensive concept for becoming, for the processual, for creative production, drives the Apollonian forth from out of itself and therein makes itself finite. With that, not only is a differentiation within the concept of play anticipated, to which Fink will return time and again: the play of the world, on the one hand, whose movement, on the other hand, drives the play of the intraworldly forth from out of itself. Insofar as the Apollonian stands for what is available and visible, what is arranged into the historicality of a world that is specific in each case, and the Dionysian, from the perspective of the Apollonian, is what is unavailable, that which sets the latter into appearance, a paradoxical relational determination on the path to Fink’s world-formula is likewise indicated: it is a matter of thinking, from out of the visible, from out of the phenomenalized, and from out of the temporalized, that which exceeds them: that which itself phenomenalizes, temporalizes.
In the second half of the 1950s, Fink developed this relational determination, whose sustaining moment is the concept of play. Three aspects are relevant in this determination: not only the difference between the intraworldly, on the one hand, and the world itself, on the other hand, but also the problem of to how to gain access to the world by philosophical means, since the world withdraws when the intraworldly advances. Fink implements this program with respect to the theme of play above all in three steps: within the framework of an “existential anthropology,” his Summer Semester 1955 lecture course Grundphänomene des menschlichen Daseins [Basic phenomena of human existence]13 is devoted to the demonstration of fundamental structures of phenomenality—one could say, to a description of the human being within the tension of his intraworldly situation. Fink breaks this phenomenality down into five “fundamental phenomena,” into work, ruling, love, death—and play. The subtitle of the writing that opens this volume, “Oasis of Happiness,”14 published in 1957, is announced as “Thoughts toward an Ontology of Play.” Lastly, the book Play as Symbol of the World—which arose on the basis of a lecture course delivered in 1957—follows in 1960, again taking up points touched on in both previous writings and placing them within a cosmological perspective.15
In Grundphänomene des menschlichen Daseins, Fink proceeds on the basis of the phenomenon of play. Although he does not connect horizons of everyday understanding or horizons of the philosophical tradition’s understanding to what is to be discovered in the phenomenon of play, he approaches his analysis of human play by looking at how it shows itself to everyday understanding, as he did in his seminar from the year before, “The Philosophical-Pedagogical Problem of Play.”16 However, this approach is undertaken with the aim of bringing out precisely what remains covered up for common understanding. “Phenomenon” here does not yet mean fundamental phenomenon, but rather the way in which play is commonly experienced, the closest access to the way in which “play” shows itself to everybody. Insofar as the everyday interpretation of play places it in a one-sided opposition to work, to the “seriousness of life,” and thus conceives it as a “marginal phenomenon” in the carrying out of life, it distorts it.17 This demarcation between what is serious and what is not is incongruent with the distinction between play and non-playful comportments of existence. For, play as the kind of play that involves portrayal, for example, can indeed unveil a more profound seriousness than would be opened up in the everyday immersion in life. Thus the phenomenon of play that possesses its mode of Being in the everyday understanding of play covers up the “more profound sense,” the fundamental phenomenon of play, how the everyday understanding of play at the same time points toward the latter—a problematic that Fink will take up again in 1966 in “Play and Philosophy.”18
In fact, there is a moment that is constitutive of play that is opposed, not indeed to a factual stance of life called “serious life,” but rather to a particular fundamental tendency of life. With Aristotle, Fink catches sight of this fundamental tendency of life in the universal striving for happiness, for eudaimonia, correlatively in life’s universal concern with the attainment of this goal that is constantly pursued.19 Despite partial fulfillments, this goal remains unreachable in life; striving toward it is therefore constantly in progress. In play, this tendency of life to be driven out beyond itself comes to a standstill for a certain time and in a certain space—in imaginary time and imaginary space. Play is not happiness, not the fulfillment of the universal intention; yet by interrupting this intention, it temporarily liberates one from this directedness and precisely thereby presents, in a spatially delimited way, happiness, an “oasis of happiness.” Play fulfills, even if in its own delimited way, the universal intention of serious life; it does not stand opposed to the latter but first becomes understandable through the universal tendency of care belonging to human existence itself: “Only a being determined essentially by ‘care’ also has the possibility of ‘carelessness.’”20
That, therefore, play stands precisely in a particular relation to the tendency of care belonging to life, indeed in such a way that, in it, the goal-directedness of caring life is suspended in a determinate way, grounds its “carelessness.” Even play sets goals, which are goals in its playworld; yet these goals that are immanent to play are not “projected out toward the highest ultimate purpose.”21 These immanent goals of play can, however, be related to the highest goal of life, insofar as these immanent goals, which are not at all immediately subordinate to the highest goal of life itself, make the latter first of all visible. Fink expresses this as follows: Insofar as play “appears to escape [entziehen] the standard flow of life, it relates [bezieht] to it in a manner that is particularly imbued with sense, namely, in the mode of portrayal [Darstellung].”22
This peculiar interpenetration of the playful and the serious, the goal-related and the careless, withdrawn from real time and real space and yet integrated into them, characterizes play in what Fink determines to be its peculiarly “ambiguous nature.”23 The analysis of this ambiguous nature is able to indicate the structural constitution of the basic phenomenon “play.” Fink attempts to clarify this ambiguity of play, its vacillation between actuality and non-actuality, by analyzing play as appearance [Schein] and symbol. This path compels a confrontation with the metaphysical tradition, which, beginning with Plato, interpreted play as an image. Thus it is not only in his early work, where he treats of the image, that Fink mentions play. He also, conversely, makes reference to the image in his later analyses of play. He shows how, through the interpretation of play as imitation, of imitation as copying and of copying as mirroring, play was indeed associated with a higher Being, yet in the concomitantly accomplished reduction of it to a mere reflection was fully robbed of its independence. Even this metaphysical interpretation of the concept of play, its interpretation as copying and mirroring, its directedness toward a divine Being, is, according to Fink, to be cast off. This is accomplished in a comparison Fink undertakes between the image and play, whereby the character of the non-actual is here to be clarified anew.
The essential character of the image comes forth only when the image is interrogated in its original ontological constitution, thus not when it is thought in advance as the mere derivative of a more primordial original. The image is original not as a copy, but rather only as the image itself. And Fink adds to this: “The less ‘reproductive,’ the more strongly ‘symbolic’ an image is.”24 This shows that Fink does not employ the concept of symbol in the sense of a representation that has recourse to reproductivity. The image is not a symbol for something else, it is a symbol in itself. It is a symbol not, for instance, because it is non-actual, but because it presents an actual non-actuality, something imaginary within real space-time. As Fink establishes, every kind of image is an “independent sort of being,”25 an “objective or ontic appearance.”26 It “contains as a constitutive aspect of its actuality something that is in itself specifically ‘non-actual’—and, furthermore, in this way rests on another, simply actual being.”27 The poplar mirrored in the water does not cover up the piece of the water surface on which it appears; the mirroring of the poplar is as such actual and comprises within itself simultaneously the non-actual poplar of the mirror-world. In just this way, playing is an actual comportment that comprises within itself the imaginary playworldly comportment according to roles.28
In what sense, then, are we to speak of this imaginary thing in the image-or playworld, of this objective or actual appearance, even of a symbol? The image [Bild] and play are not first symbol-forming [symbolbildend] in such a way that they point to this or that, thus to beings; rather, they proceed by symbolizing because they, as Fink established already in his dissertation, are themselves of a medial constitution. Insofar as the emergence of imagistic or playful non-actuality marks a rupture in reality, however thin; insofar as it leads to a rejection of actuality, so to speak—it opens up a space in which the imaginary can move. In this opening up of space, the imaginary is medial in a primordial sense: play “has the structure of ‘mediation.’”29 The fact of this mediating role, this being-medial, designates the sense of “symbol” meant here. It is only because this space of mediality is opened up within the imaginary that the image- and playworld can indicate manifold relations that are opened up in existence. Still more, play reflects the fundamental feature of existence, the universal concern of life, for it is precisely where existence is liberated from this fundamental feature that play lets the latter “come to appear [erscheinen]” in its momentary absence. Something intraworldly (a particular instance of play) can in this way mirror the intraworldly aspect of human existence as such.
Fink connects the symbol back to its etymology, to the Greek symballein, and interprets this as a “a coming together of a fragment with what completes it.”30 It is, however, not to human existence alone that the symbol-mediality of play points; rather both form only one half, insofar as existence is mirrored already in the playworld. If, however, existence is the symbolon in the mode of the playworld—then what corresponds to it as the other half? Fink’s answer: the world. “The world comes to appear [erscheint] in the appearance [Schein] of play.”31 What “completes” human-play is the non-phenomenal, and thus not to be phenomenalized, character of the world. Seen structurally, this is the way in which Fink attempted thirty years prior to determine the transparency of the image and the peculiar co-having of actuality in being related to the image. Fink characterizes the mediality of existence in many places as a “relation,” as the way in which existence is admitted into world-space and world-time. Consequently, in the mediality of the symbol, the mediality of existence lights up [scheint . . . auf] in the manner in which existence relates to the world; this “testament” of the world in the mediality of the playworld thereby points to the authentic counterpart, the other symbolon, on the basis of which the togetherness of both halves first becomes intelligible—as if it were as phenomenologically accessible as human existence itself.
For Fink, the phenomenal is what shows itself and is visible; however, insofar as it is not exhausted by its visibility, it is for Fink a symbolon. Its visibility cannot interpret itself; there remains an undissolved remainder, whose problematic can be expressed by the question: In relation to what is the symbol a fragment? If one does not wish to refer the answer to the subject or existence, which appear within the intraworldly, one is compelled to inquire beyond the realm of the phenomenal. How, though, does understanding the visible fragment reach its self-withdrawing counterpart?
For Fink there are no bridges that extend over the abyss rent open with this question, but there are springboards. Lifeworldly knowledge of the encompassing character of the world presents such a springboard. Fink emphasizes that there is a knowledge of the world that is not attested to in the objectivity of experience.32 This knowledge of the encompassing character of the world determines the world mostly as a sum total of individuals, for the whole is hereby likewise represented as a being. In contrast, all experiential knowledge of beings is pervaded by an implicit, unthematic knowledge of the conjuncture of these beings, which is itself no longer of the ontological mode of beings, since it is not nameable and slips from conceptual grasp; this knowing is not to be confirmed through experience, insofar as experience is always related to a being that shows itself. Yet in what does the proof for this thesis consist, insofar as the “totality [All],” which is also known, albeit unthematically, in lifeworldly experience and cannot be measured against beings, can at best be an indication? Fink catches sight of a more viable springboard than this unthematic knowledge precisely in play, more clearly said, in its aporetic structure, which consists in play’s inability to be clarified within the realm of the phenomenal without remainder, in its “transparency.”
Herein lies the decisive aspect of Fink’s cosmological approach. The aporetic structure of play means that the playworld “balks at a simple assimilation into the context of the actual world.”33 Insofar as the playworld posits an objective appearance and thus inscribes a rift in reality—since with it a distinctive time-space-field is opened up, in whose mediality the fundamental mode of human existence is mirrored—it provides an index for something that it itself is, but that is neither identical with it nor capable of grounding it. Thus both—the interruption that follows from the enactment of play in actuality, and the mirroring of the fundamental feature of human existence in the mediality of play unfolded through the interruption—announce in a peculiar way something that itself remains concealed, that does not show itself. The factual, ontic interruption points ex negativo to a legitimate possibility of rupture; the opened space of movement belonging to mediality points to what extends this space to the whole of human existence, to its ecstatic outreach.
In this way, Fink catches sight of a point of departure in the structure of play for philosophical speculation, which asks about the world itself. Fink therefore speaks of a “speculative concept of play,” which becomes stark where “the sense of being” is to be grasped “from out of play”; he defines such speculation as a “characterization of the essence of being in the metaphor of a being,” as “a conceptual world formula that springs from an innerworldly model,” whereby play itself “is already distinguished by the fundamental feature of symbolic representation.”34 Such speculation no longer traverses the positive arrangements of sense that lead from a first to a second philosophy, as is still the case in the philosophical tradition. Yet the fundamental model of such speculation also proves that Fink’s attempt at a speculative determination of the world can no longer be measured in terms of the traditional schema of the Being-in-itself versus the subject-relative Being of the world—it announces another world-relation. In 1934, Fink strictly demarcates what he calls the cosmological concept of the world even from Heidegger’s existential concept of the world: “This ‘existential concept of the world’ is, however, in no way the authentic cosmological concept of the world, nor is it more primordial. . . . It is not because existence [Dasein] as transcendence is ‘ecstatic’ beyond all beings that there is world, but it is because the world as the cosmic container also includes existence that the ecstatic structure of existence is first possible.” The “infinity of the world as the metaphysical constitution of the human being” does not thereby contradict “the latter’s finitude, since this is the antonym of speculative infinity.”35
Since human play points to the world in a special way, insofar as the breach of the world into the intraworldly only just lights up, play is also for cosmological thinking the decisive, Archimedean point, the eye of the needle that only just connects speculation with the givenness of experience. On this basis, speculation attempts to think the “world-position” of the human being, the human’s relation to what is not a being yet “pervades [durchmachtet]” every being.36 Fink conceives the carrying out of this “pervading” also as play, indeed as play that remains withdrawn from human access, as play of the world itself.
Yet do we not find here an all too casual and ultimately impermissible transference of the human concept of play to a cosmic happening? If human play points to the world, in what sense then can the world itself still be play? However, an intraworldly concept of play and existence mirroring itself in it would not be applicable to something other than it, to the world itself; rather, the sense of human play points, in itself, even if negatively, to its necessary complement in something wholly other. It is in precisely this that its specific symbolic function consists. Consequently, human play can be interpreted as the prominent, visible end of a total happening, which is itself concealed. The symbol-structure of human play points to the fact that all finite things are “fragments,” “rubble of Being,” which are “subtended” “by the omnipresence of the one, world-wide Being.” Since, for cosmological speculation, the finite no longer signifies a falling away from the idea or a nugatory semblance, but rather “essentially that which is intraworldly,” which “can flare up in the light of the world,” human play, like things, are those symbola, understood not as signs for something else, but symbols “as themselves, inasmuch as they exhibit their finitude as intraworldliness”37 and at the same time—like play—point to completion.
The world, which is never visible as such, appears in play as in a field within itself [Binnenfeld ihrer selbst]; it is “reflected back [reluzent] into itself”:38 “The whole, which is never visible as a whole,” says Fink, “appears in a field within itself.”39 In a similar sense, Fink also speaks of a “proof of the shining back [Rückschein] of the world”40 in human play. Play reflects, consequently, not only the ecstatic openness of human existence toward the world; it also reflects the prevailing of the world itself, or—expressed speculatively—the world itself reflects itself in play and thus evinces human play as a happening within world-play itself. The investigation of human play, in which the world appears, thus ultimately opens onto the speculative demonstration that this appearing of the world in play is itself an event of the enactment of the world; thus while the prevailing of the world was initially to become graspable from out of intraworldly play, it is now the prevailing of the world from out of which every factical enactment of play is illuminated.41
The concept of the “proof of shining back [Rückschein]” in Fink displaces the model of a gradation of horizons, with which Husserl attempts to conceive the world. If horizons are thereby read in a, so to speak, inverted direction—no longer as external relations constituted in the immanence of a subjectivity, but as an announcement, ensuing within the immanence of a life’s ambit, of that which surpasses this ambit—the sense of horizon is itself ultimately surpassed. For a system of horizons is not only connected to a (subjective) bearer but correlates with a particular direction, inasmuch as the openness of such a system consists in the fact that its bearer stands outside it. With the inversion of the system, in the standing-within of the world, the bearer finds itself placed into something that, on the basis of the changed sense of direction, can no longer actually be characterized as an interpenetration of horizons. Accordingly, for Fink, it is insufficient to bind the sense of the world to the relation of horizons, as Husserl does when he defines the world as the harmonious total horizon of all experience; precisely for this reason, Fink emphasizes that Husserl’s analyses of horizonal and unthematic background consciousness are of “high and inestimable” worth for the endeavor to bring Husserl’s analyses of consciousness “onto a path to the problem of the world.”42
Is there not, however, a phenomenological demonstration for the peculiarly negative character of the standing-within of the world, for its “relucence [Reluzenz]”? Such a demonstration may be contained in the fact of human existence itself: For, as demonstrated by the experience of being finite, human existence is a fragment; it exists, without itself being able to determine its own existence. To be a fragment also means, however, to itself possess a sort of transparency: in the discovery of being “not everything,” that which is, the fragment, is open to that “whole” that is itself open insofar as it, as a whole, precisely cannot be de-fined. The “whole” can only be determined negatively: through the limit that is drawn between it and existence. If in this way the world, as something that is encompassing and that is thought in the negative, becomes graspable only from out of something inner, something intraworldly, then, along with this, something else is nevertheless also grasped: that the inner is not in the position to bear itself of its own accord. If, however, existence does not itself occasion its fragmentation, its transparency is also indebted to another, to the “world.” If human existence as a symbolon is the visible medium in which the invisibility of world “presents” itself, then the fragment “points” to a “whole” whose “part” it is. “To present” or “to point,” along with “whole” and “part,” should be in quotation marks here, since there is no experiential foundation and thus no direct presentation for which a whole or part, as part of a whole, could be caught sight of. And yet, insofar as it demonstrates in itself that it is a fragment, the fragment shows this as well: that it belongs in a context that does not show itself.
In what way, however, does that prevailing of world, the play of the world, become determinable? When Fink formulates that the world, in shining back into itself, comes to appear in the appearance of play [daß die Welt im Schein des Spiels in sich rückscheinend erscheint], the appearing of world is on the one hand thought as an event of an enactment, is on the other hand withdrawn from the visibility of everything phenomenal, from everything that appears within the world. The appearance, then, is rather the cosmic happening that in each case lets an individual, intraworldly thing appear. Therefore, Fink understands the appearing of the world to be “the universal emergence of all beings,” which releases from itself that which is customarily called the “world,” the “world-dimension of presence,” intraworldliness, and thereby at the same time withdraws, remains hidden in the “nameless realm of absence.”43 This cosmic movement of the appearance of the world as the process of the extension of intraworldliness, of individuatedness, this movement from “the world-night to the world-day”44—Fink also refers to this as play.
The ultimate justification for the employment of the concept of play in this context lies in the fact that speculation thinks the appearing of the world in such a way that this appearing becomes comprehensible on the basis of the formal senses exhibited by the basic phenomenon “play.” These senses are first the exclusivity and, connected with this, the form of movement belonging to play: play is an autarchic system; its foundational, imaginative structure closes play off and lets it run its course within itself; with this a direction of movement is sketched out that is not a linear progression, but rather accomplishes itself in the form of a circle. Accomplisher and accomplishment become one; regarding world-play, consequently, there is no longer a divine person, a creator God, who paves the way. World-play is therefore for Fink, on the one hand, groundless,45 driving all grounds forth from out of itself; on the other hand, it exhibits no personal features.46 World-play is a game without a player.47 When Fink notes that human play becomes a world-symbol because in it “a groundless oscillating-within-itself of the carrying out of life” takes place,48 because in it “the lack of responsibility at the root of all responsibility”49 is to be felt, this is not a refusal to acknowledge responsibility and obligation for human action; it means rather the space of human play, in which the players are liberated from the work of freedom, from the goal-directed and goal-positing structure of care belonging to existence, and which consequently indicates the “free-space” in the play of the world itself, which precedes and opens up both the realm of possibilities of human freedom as well as the factually “free” activities of the human being.
Fink already remarks in notes from the 1930s that “Play as metaphysical essence of the human being . . . has the mode of the play of Being.”50 “Ontogonic metaphysics” proves to be “the path of life to the truth of itself, the completion of its worldly-fragmentary existence,” the “empowering of the power of the play of Being occurring in the liberation of freedom.”51 A continuation of these considerations—renewed in view of Nietzsche—is found in the 1947 lecture course Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit [On the essence of human freedom].52 Here, too, taking the words of Zarathustra as the point of departure—“The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying”53—the essence of freedom is determined as a game. Play is thereby not only the positive essence of human freedom, but also the fundamental constitution of Being as such. Fink thereby points again and again to the fact that at issue in this determination is not a simple, paradigmatic reference, but a cosmic correspondence of the “player of worlds,” the human being: “The essential world-significance of play does not lie in its possible character of being a model for a universal understanding of the world (as, for instance, in Heraclitus’s παῖς παίζων—or in Nietzsche’s hymnal encomium of chance, happenstance, and the divine game of dice), it lies in the position of cosmic openness that the playing human being is.”54
The fundamental significance of Heraclitus should therefore not be overlooked. Not only is Heraclitus and in particular Fragment 52—aion pais esti paizōn, pesseuōn; paidos hē basilēiē / “Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child”55—of decisive significance for Fink’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of play.56 Fink himself also develops his cosmological concept of the world with recourse to Heraclitus’s fragments, especially in view of the sameness of individuating generation and decay expressed in Fragment 15,57 whereby the tragedy of the “moved unity of dismembered and dissected Dionysos Zagreus and simple, undifferentiated Hades” is to point beyond the fate of the finite individual to the “primordial character of the world itself.”58 The world prevails as play, as what makes finite and lets appear from out of the womb of the earth and from the sinking back of every shape into the tomb of the earth. And: “The play of the world is no one’s play, because only in it are there first someones, persons, human beings and gods. And the playworld of the play of the world is not an ‘appearance’ [Schein], but rather the coming to appearance [die Erscheinung]. Coming to appearance is the universal emergence of all beings, things and events into a common presence that integrates everything individuated, into a presence—in our midst. What we ordinarily already call the world is the world-dimension of presence, the dimension of coming to appearance wherein things are really separated from each other, but also still integrated in spatial and temporal vicinity and connected to each other by strict rules. But the world is also the nameless realm of absence, from which things come forth into appearance and into which they again vanish—assuming Hades and Dionysus are the same.”59
When Fink speaks of the human existing in a manner that is most open to the world “when he dismisses all measures and holds himself out into that which is limitless,”60 he is not thereby making an appeal for a noncommittal way of life. The freedom from measures recommended here is meant not in an anthropological but in a cosmological sense. It says that the determination of the world-relation of the human being should not be made from something delimited and intraworldly, nor by means of something measurable, in other words, a being or something innerworldly. Play, too, should not be misunderstood as such a merely innerworldly occurrence.
Yet if the play of the world knows no player and is such that it encompasses everything, where, then, is the human being, what do his ability-to-be-free and his practical, free comportment still mean? If the human being becomes a co-player in the play of the world, which itself possesses no player that plays it—then, considered from the standpoint of cosmological speculation, do not both realms, the play of the human being and the play of the world, ultimately collapse into one? The relation of the human being and the world is, according to Fink, not “a relation between two separate things,” but as a relation it precedes “the differentiation of what is enclosed together within it.”61 In a similar sense Fink formulates that “The proof of the shining back of the world into itself, into a particular intraworldly thing,” is, “seen from the cosmos,” “the same” as what the ecstase of the human being “toward the world-whole” is.62 The human being is accordingly a player in the distinctive sense that with him, who is himself already a relation, a space is opened up that allows him to be free. Human play announces in an especially emphatic way the rift that opens up this space. Formulated speculatively, one could say that the world passes [zuspielt] to the human being the space in which he constitutes himself as a relation and consequently becomes a co-player in the play of the world.
Fink presented further determinations of this middle-Being of the human in relation to the world itself within the context of his social-philosophical and pedagogical considerations, indeed where he speaks of a sharing and dividing [Teilen] of and in the world as well as attempts to determine anew the traditional concept of the ideal. The relevant texts likewise stem originally from the 1950s. With them, the systematic architecture of the entire approach of Fink’s thinking is strikingly illuminated, how it is focalized in the theme of play.
In his lecture course Existenz und Coexistenz [Existence and coexistence],63 Fink analyses division according to those two aspects that were distinguished here, namely how in the accompaniment of the human being in the play of the world the world “appears” paradoxically in a non-phenomenal way, insofar as it withdraws in the intraworldly, and how the world in itself plays and lets appear. On the one hand, the world apportions itself [teilt sich . . . zu] and thereby brings forth the symbol-character of itself: in the rift through the halves of the symbolon, the day and night as cosmic powers, the sayable and unsayable, Being and nothing. This primal division [Ur-Teilung] lets Being be, insofar as it founds Being. On the other hand, the human being divides the world by dividing himself into it. Division into the world in this way likewise founds the fact that the human being is a relation. He stands within this participation [Teilnahme], insofar as he is individuated. Such division of the world, in which every horizonal-perspectival sense of participation in the world is grounded, is, according to Fink, not a dis-memberment or dis-section of world; on the contrary: the way in which the world itself appears is a “unifying,” a “gathering” of the world. The experience of the world takes place primordially not in an individuated subject, not above all in the synthesis of a transcendental subject, but rather is grounded in the happening of a unification. This unification is a unification, because in it something other than Being, a nothing, shows itself in a unique, united way, and it shows itself as other, as nothing, only insofar as it likewise withdraws.64
The “co-division [Mit-Teilung]” of the world accordingly has a threefold significance: First, the world apportions itself to us in each case, yet, second, only in such a way that what we gain a share [Anteil] in is of such a nature that it is, even if perspectivally broken, the same whole in which all possible others can gain a share, so that, third, world-dividing as the sharing-with-one-another [Mit-einander-Teilen] of the world primordially founds community. Only because we divide ourselves into the world in such a manner, is communication [Mitteilung] in the customary sense possible.
With his determination of the ideal, Fink even more clearly indicates how the human being takes part in the world in his relation to it, assumes and takes on the space of his ability to be free that is opened up to him. Fink determines the ideal, therefore, as the particular material formation of the universal care-structure of existence; the ideal itself comprises the being-stretched of human transcendence, of ecstasis. Now, the figure of movement belonging to the ideal is precisely, according to Fink, play. Fink’s statement that the human being is a “co-player in the play of the world”65 suggests that, in a reciprocally uniform process of the letting appear of the world, the projecting and discovering of states of sense meld together into and for human comportment. The human being, as the co-player in the play of the world, inscribes himself, as it were, into a circle that, under the visible script of his dealings, lets a circling that is withdrawn from visibility be intimated.
The emergence of what shows itself from out of the world is the process, the game, in which the human being is a co-player. The co-play of the human being is, as Fink formulates it in his lecture course Grundfragen der systematischen Pädagogik [Basic questions of systematic pedagogy], “the human being’s accompanying the creative movement of Being; it is a self-insertion into cosmic correspondence.”66 Fink calls this accompaniment “formative education [Bildung].” The co-play of the human being in the play of the world is “accompaniment in ideal formative education [Idealbildung].”67 Fink operates here with the double meaning of the word Bildung: “Accompaniment in ideal formative education” points on the one hand to the endowment of the ideal with sense [Sinnstiftung von Idealen] (Bilden as bringing-forth), on the other hand to the educational formation of the human being, whereby ideals function as guiding images [Leitbilder]. Fink thinks both concrete aspects back into a single ground. This single ground possesses two “sides”: corresponding to the difference between what shows itself and self-showing there is on the one hand the facing visage of the one “world-ideal,”68 the epitome of the “totality.” This world-ideal is constitutive for the ontological mode of human existence, insofar as it first of all holds open, in its extension, in its lying-out-beyond, the space of movement for the self-relation of the human being, which is likewise a world-relation, enabling his co-play in the play of the world. However, the world-ideal possesses on the other hand its “side,” which faces the world itself and its play and is invisible to the human being. Here in the invisible self-showing of world, which itself does not come to appearance, all formation [Bilden] is also grounded. As the self-showing of the world is itself invisible, so this last formation is formless: “It is the formless, because it is what as such forms.”69 The twofold unity of the world-ideal and the formless is the fulcrum on which the uniform-twofold process of the play of the world and the co-play of the human being pivots. In the world-ideal in the play of what forms as such, the circle is opened up in which the human being in his accompaniment forms ideals—the manifold of ideals, as they appear within the horizon of his historical existence. These are the images [Bilder], since, although they point to an infinite distance, they are nevertheless made finite in the visible formation [Gebilde].
In his late work, Fink integrates play into considerations of aesthetics and embodiment. The results of this are his essay on Mode [Fashion] commissioned by the Spengler Modehaus in Basel and published in 1969, whose subtitle reads . . . ein verführerisches Spiel [. . . A seductive game]; moreover, there are investigations into drama and theater, which he gathered together with further contributions in the short volume Epiloge zur Dichtung [Epilogue to poetry] and published in 1971;70 finally, there are several scattered texts on play as athletic competition.71 In these texts he discovers, in various facets, the human living body as a new theme. As he develops in “The World Significance of Play” (1973)72 and also expresses similarly in other writings from this time,73 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.”74 The fundamental phenomena of existence—work, struggle, love, and death—are related to the body, and play, too, as the phenomenon encompassing even these fundamental phenomena, is, in its cosmological dimension, tied back to the embodiment of the human being.
The “fundamental problem”75 of the embodiment of human existence, emerging against the backdrop of a meta-physical tradition, is treated by the late Fink in, for example, a session of his “Sport Seminar” (1961),76 which is devoted to the questions of embodiment and physical education. Both in looking back to Greek gymnastikē and in view of the not merely pedagogic significance of sport in the age of the dominance of science, technology, and bureaucracy, Fink emphasizes in what way athletic competition enables the human being to stand out in an exemplary way both “in” his body and in his own capacities.77 In this, categories like “power” or “beauty” remain undeveloped, since they, as it is put in “Play and Sport,” must necessarily remain provisional against the background of the metaphysical tradition.78 While Fink thus on the one hand indicates the traditional forgetting of the body, which is always likewise a forgetting of the “nightly” dimension of the world, to which the human being comports himself insofar as he belongs bodily to the earth—Fink speaks of “incarnated” freedom—he emphasizes on the other hand that the human being, precisely in this embodiment, remains related to playworldly appearance, and that means that he remains related to the freedom that makes room for and is granted to him. This comes to light in a special way in athletic competition: while the body ordinarily is the place from which incarnated existence carries out concrete actions, in athletic competition the body in itself, like the “playing child,” the pais paizōn of Heraclitus, comes into a free, unencumbered movement and thereby into a “shining light of appearance”—an “apotheosis of our sensuous existence.”79
The “shining light of appearance” overlaying the dark ground of the earth stands moreover in a specific relation to the “mask,” as the 1968 lecture “Maske und Kothurn” [Mask and buskin] makes clear. The play of ancient tragedy with its delight in the mixture of actuality and non-actuality points to the fundamental rift of human existence that is stretched between two poles, and consequently to the cosmic difference between the dimension of appearing and the dimension of absence. Mask and buskin, those unavoidable requisites of archaic tragedy, raise the question as to how it is at all possible for the human being to live for a certain time, “as if there were not great obscurities around us, as if there were not the night of concealment.”80 In the mask, which transposes him first of all into the possibility of “appearing [scheinen] ambiguously and polysemously,”81 the human being is able to disguise for a certain period his nature that belongs to the placeless and timeless dimension of absence and to raise it to the brightness of appearing, without however thereby forgetting the obscure ground, let alone overcoming it without remainder. “Human freedom is and remains,” as it is also put in Fink’s book on fashion, “submerged in the natural ground of our existence”; “the body is our earthly, terrestrial actuality, where nature and freedom interpenetrate.”82 Like the mask, the dress, which “takes incessant part in the language of symbols and signs belonging to the body,”83 can also “transfigure, adorn, expose while concealing” the body “and increase its expressive possibilities.”84 Fashion thereby “exists in a dress-like medium of incessant seduction and temptation. Its Being is precisely seductive appearing.”85
Manifestations of such a “shining light of appearance” let the temporary shape of the human being—if one turns back to Fink’s dissertation from 1929 and the beginnings of Fink’s thought on play found therein—become “transparent” with respect to his obscure ground—in that paradoxical structure which says that, within an intra-situation, what likewise completely surpasses it lights up in its withdrawal. As it is put in Play as Symbol of the World: “Coming to appearance [Erscheinung] is a mask, behind which ‘no one,’ behind which nothing, is—precisely as the nothing.”86 In summarizing the primary features of play—the production of playworldly appearance, the self-intuition of human existence in play as the mirror of life, the freedom and revocability of its shapes, its capacity to encompass all other fundamental phenomena of human existence (work, struggle, love, and death), as well as to play itself even as play—one final feature comes to light, according to Fink: the festive character of play. “The human being plays when he celebrates existence.”87