Our question concerning play is led by a fundamental philosophical problem. This problem is the relation between the human being and the world. And this relation is a special manifestation of the relation of innerworldly beings to the all-encompassing world-totality. While we are accustomed to observe the processes of motion in animate and inanimate nature as lawfully regulated sequences, and to speak of a mechanical and even biological causality, we assume that human activities—at least in part—do not belong to a lawfully determined sequential continuity but rather proceed from independent acts of freedom, that they present creative incursions into a context of events otherwise determined according to rules. We are already, in an innerworldly way, familiar with the phenomenal difference between an event that is bound to occur and one that is not. We, of course, do not remain content with this familiarity; this difference unsettles and disconcerts us as soon as we contemplate it. How are natural causality and freedom compatible with each other? Can both exist together in a comprehensive actuality that encompasses them? Is not the rule-governed coherence of natural occurrences continually “punctured” by human activities that actively encroach on the course of nature? Many an attempt has been made in philosophy to come to terms with this difficulty. One attempt at a solution is the denial of human free will. One says: “free will” is an illusion; in our activities we are no less lawfully determined than the stone when it falls, only the determinative laws of human psychical life are still not sufficiently known to us. The assertion of the “illusory character” of human freedom is more a naturalistic “dogma” than something known—above all, the proof is still lacking as to how and from which lawfully determined motives the illusion of freedom can emerge at all, of how it is possible for the deterministic character of human activity to conceal itself, so to speak, in the feeling of freedom. Another attempt at a solution is the division into spheres: one relegates the self-enclosed natural realm to what happens causally, and “ethics” to what happens freely, and carves the human being himself into a sensuous being belonging to nature and into a “moral being” belonging to the intelligible realm of the spirit. Artful theorems have been developed in order to determine the juxtaposition of the two spheres and the corresponding relations between them, as already in the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans, in the system of “occasional causes” in Geulincx and Malebranche, in the doctrine of the “pre-established harmony” between the realm of nature and the realm of grace in Leibniz, and in the Kantian separation between the human being as a member of the world of appearance and the human being as a “citizen” of the noumenal world.
Yet in all these divisions into spheres it cannot be clarified how the human being, who freely determines himself in his embodied activities, intervenes in the actuality of nature. Free action is indeed not merely ethical self-legislation, not merely a moral phenomenon; the freedom of the human being reveals itself also in sensuous deeds; it objectifies and materializes itself in what the activity of work is able to construct. The human being in his freedom deliberately produces indeed not merely the forms in his soul; he produces artifacts that are then situated in space and time, he transforms the face of the earth and stamps his traces on it in a thousand different monuments of his power. Technical production streams into nature, already presupposes nature as a setting, as material for its work; this technical production cannot at all be thought of as housed in a sphere separated off from nature. It was perhaps a disastrous, “idealistic” one-sidedness to interpret human freedom predominantly from out of morality. Already in the first reference to the intraworldly motion of things it becomes clear how the distinction, initially familiar to us, between a lawful boundedness and a free unboundedness of occurrences becomes problematic—and how from there motifs of thought emerge to determine the manner of motion belonging to all motions in a total and comprehensive way. These motifs press toward a cosmic understanding of motion. The question arises as to whether the motion of the whole of the world can be appropriately grasped and explicated with the categories of the innerworldly understanding of motion. The motions of inanimate nature, the course of the stars, the ebb and flow of the sea, the gust of wind, rainfall, and so forth are included in the total motion, but so are the motions of growth, the blooming and wilting of plants, animals and human beings, conservation in the exchange of matter, the passing on of life through the generations—as well as, on the other hand, the form of motion of human activities, the ethical deeds and activities of work: all that belongs, too, within the total motion. But how are these manifold motions of things in the one universal motion of the whole? Are single motions added to a sum of motions, are they entwined into a unified fabric? Or must the obscure distinction between world and thing be supposed here?
This distinction is “obscure” because we are all familiar with it and at the same time misconstrue it. We move about with it where and whenever we understand beings, but we are not able to grasp it: we slide into representations and models of thought that are oriented to what is intraworldly. We try to think of the total motion of the cosmos, for instance, in terms of celestial orbits, of the sun’s course, or otherwise in the image of a great “growth,” a natura naturans, or, like the early materialists, as a shower of atoms, or as a deliberate rule of the gods or a divine world-architect, or as the creatio continua of a creator god—or perhaps also as a game. If the world’s movement is to be grasped as play, the play of the world cannot be understood and interpreted simply without tension according to the image of the innerworldly play of human beings. To be sure, the human being is an innerworldly thing of a special sort, insofar as he comports himself in his very Being to the cosmos, stands forth with understanding into the whole of the world. But nevertheless it is in no way already certain that the whole has a structural constitution like the intraworldly thing, which is stamped by an ecstatic openness to the whole. The “play of the world” is a speculative formula that does not express phenomenal results but rather points out a way of thinking. Human play, in contrast, is a tangible phenomenon with which everyone is acquainted, that is universally familiar, and of which each has an intimate knowledge from the testimony of his own lived experience. We are conversant with a manifold of individual features, are familiar with a wealth of examples of forms of play, rules of the game, and customs of every kind, and we are able, without further ado, to cite specific structures of play-comportment. However, because our view of human play is subordinate to the fundamental question concerning the connection between the human being and the world, we cannot commence arbitrarily. We begin with the question concerning the “non-actual” character of play. For, as we initially only suspected, a special reference to the world is hiding in this odd character of play. Such a suspicion appears incredible at first. For how, precisely in the “non-actual” aspect of play, is an indication of the most actual of everything actual, of the world itself, supposed to be contained? Yet here it would have to first be clarified and understood in what sense the talk of “non-actuality” in play is meant. We usually distinguish in a common and tangible manner between “actuality” and “non-actuality.” Without an explicit ontological clarification, we make use of these concepts in an approximate and conversant mode of understanding. “Actual” and “non-actual” is a simple and rigorous opposition. This opposition is more rigorous than that between “large” and “small,” “warm” and “cold”; for the large and small, the warm and cold “are”; they are, in each case, actual. To be sure, the same thing cannot be large and small, warm and cold at the same time; when one determination applies the other cannot apply; when the one is “actual,” the other is “non-actual.” Admittedly, if we take large and small, warm and cold as determinations of degree, then a thing can very well be both large (larger than other things) and small (in relation to larger things). Then what it actually is, is expressed in its degree of magnitude or heat. The actual determination of a thing in regard to its own properties of magnitude and temperature presupposes the actuality of the thing, its existence, its existentia. The actuality of properties is only possible on the basis of the actuality of a substantial bearer of properties. Actuality, for its part, is not a property that can belong to a matter or a thing—or even be left out. If the actuality is left out, the whole thing with all its properties vanishes. What kind of remarkable character is this: the “actuality” of a thing? Is it anything in the thing at all? We can see actual things, feel them—but can we also see and touch the actuality of these visible, tangible things? The sensuous perceptibility of a thing often counts as proof of its being actual—and yet the actuality of beings is never sensuously perceived. Actuality is a determinate, fundamental manner of the Being of beings, an ontological modality—and stands in a relation to “possibility” and “necessity.” Everything that is actual is at the very least also “possible” but does not at all need to be “necessary.” Thus conceived, “actuality” is taken to be an ontological modality of existing things, is assessed as the being actual (as the existentia) of beings. Philosophy finds itself seriously perplexed when it is supposed to specify in what this character of being actual, of existentia, might consist. It finds help, for instance, by referring objective beings back to the representing subject. If the connection of representations is not subordinate to the arbitrariness of the subject, if the latter cannot capriciously combine representational contents, but rather experiences a concrete restriction in attempting to do so, then the object is manifestly actual. Or one says that there must exist a connection with subjective reception—or that the experience of resistance guarantees for us the being actual of represented objects. Or one says in general: the occurrence of a spatial and temporal position constitutes the being actual of actual things; space and time are the two principia individuationis, the principles of individuation, and being individuated is synonymous with being actual.
But—one will perhaps ask—is actuality nothing other than the being actual of things, let alone of objects, for the representing subject? Is this subject not also for its part actual—and is its self-experience characterized by the aforementioned criteria of actuality? Does it experience itself “receptively” or as “resistance” or as positioned within space and time? Clearly not. But is, then, the actuality of the subject another sort of actuality than that of objective things? Is it not more radical to ask whether actuality in general is primarily a determination of beings, a character of things and states of affairs that enigmatically adheres to them, or a total character of a universal presencing [Anwesen]? We also speak, for example, of actuality tout court and do not mean thereby an actuality of these or those things, but rather the total field of the actual. There is only one actuality, however many dimensions it may have. The one total actuality is not first assembled from many individual actual things, however, but rather actuality tout court gathers together every individual-actual thing in advance. The concept of actuality is polysemous and problematic. And indeed the concept of “non-actuality” is just as polysemous and full of questions. When, as was said, we go about unreservedly with our everyday understanding of the distinction between “actual” and “non-actual,” we live, as it were, in the conviction that this alternative is exhaustive. Either something “is”—or it “is not.” Something is “actual” or it is “non-actual.” There is no third option. The either-or is exhaustive, tertium non datur. That is clear without further ado. But must we not hesitate and become apprehensive if we take a closer look at what we have formulated to be so “clear”? Either something is or it is not! What does “something” mean here? Not a thing or a state of affairs; for if we think of a thing or a state of affairs, we think of something that is a being, and a being is something actual. Only in an improper way do we speak of the possibility of a being. But we can represent “things” and “states of affairs,” imagine them, have them as representational images in our soul, “merely think of” something—and say that what is thus merely represented, merely imagined, merely thought of, exists only in our soul and not in “actuality.” Because we can “intend” and “imagine” beings and because it is sometimes difficult to separate what is merely in our soul and what is both intended by us and also actually existing, we can therefore ask whether “something” is actual or non-actual. What is imagined is nugatory; it cannot be recognized in its claim to be actual. But what is merely imagined and therefore nugatory is nevertheless not simply nothing. It exists as imagined, as a phantasm, as a representational content. What is merely represented is not something actual, but it is nevertheless itself actual as an intentional moment of an act of representing. An actual act of representing contains a sense of “non-actuality.” We thereby see how the statement “either something is actual or non-actual” contradicts itself in its operative presuppositions; for the “something which is not actual” is nevertheless, for all that, itself actual as the act of representing something non-actual. The unreserved, blunt, and immediate harshness of the common distinction between actuality and non-actuality cannot be maintained. There are not only actual and non-actual things—or, formulated more precisely, there is the “actual” and there is not the “non-actual”—but there is also the mediation between both; there is something actual that contains something non-actual as a represented, meaningful content. The chimera and other mythical creatures do not exist, but there is the poetic, imaginary production of such mythical creatures, an actual consciousness of non-actual content. That is a harmless affair, as long as the human being understands how to reliably separate his actual imagining from the non-actual figments of his imagination. Where imagining is not aware of its contrast to the apprehension of actual things, where it is infatuated by the impressive power of its images, the danger always exists of taking the non-actual to be actual, indeed even to be something more ontologically actual than common everyday actuality. And this danger is most dangerous when we surmise a realm of superhuman beings, when we populate the land beyond Acheron with the dreams and anxieties of our heart. Precisely in the relations that concern us most of all, in the relation to the divine and to the realm of the dead, we also become most confused by actual representations of non-actual objects. Here it is perhaps most difficult to specify what the characteristic of truly actual Being is—what distinguishes a mere dream of the heart from the truth.
We now ask: how and in what sense is human play determined by a peculiar “non-actuality”? Play as a comportment and an activity is just as actual as other human activities. All activities are “actual.” Initially, one might well say that activities as such have no special distinction, that they are no more actual than passive comportments. In an actual human being, an inaction in which he, for instance, pauses for a moment, is just as “actual” as a subsequent lively bustle. Doing and leaving undone, movement and rest are only different modes of the continually actual human being. But already early on in philosophy the essence of being actual is elucidated by way of the model of activity. We find manifold “capacities” in an organism: it has, for example, the capability of nourishing itself, of growth, of sensuous perception. On occasion, “capabilities” can persist when they are not used. The capability to see exists as a capability even when we are asleep. Our seeing is then potential. Seeing exists in potentia. It exists in actualitas when one opens one’s eyes, in their activation. The being-at-work, the energeia of the sense of sight determines its active actuality. Aristotle used the phenomenal distinction between the readiness and the use of a capability as an analogical guiding model for an interpretation of Being as power and an interpretation of actuality as the energeia of the power of Being. Since then activity has a privileged actuality-character, as it were. To be sure, the human being is also “actual” as an animal, as a living being, but he achieves his particular human actuality in self-actualization through his deeds. “Being actual” does not simply belong to the human being—as it does to the stone, the blade of grass, the slow-worm; he instead actualizes himself in the decisions of his freedom. Taken as activity, as a spontaneous enactment of life, play is also a mode of human self-actualization. And yet we hesitate to say this. Why? For the most part we have an idea of the meaningfulness of human life. The individual does not know with complete clarity and distinctness what he is aiming for in his inmost will to live—but he does know that he is aiming for something, that a striving urges him on. Each human being is a vital project; each brings a unique tone to the immemorial, eternal melody of existence. The individual’s life project is not at all openly disclosed to this individual himself; his inner goal does not lie unconcealed before his eyes; most seek their way errantly. Only a few go with unswerving certainty through life and see the star toward which they are going. Human beings, however, are as a rule guided by common interpretations of the right path for the human being, are determined by intersubjective ideals, morals, and doctrines of faith. All seek the path to human felicity; the majority attach themselves to communal hordes that seek disparate paths to eudaimonia. The human being cannot rest content with simply existing on the earth, without questions like the animal; he seeks a sense, asks why and wherefore. His earthly sojourn is unsettled by the perpetual concern to find the right and valid sense of life and thereby true happiness. In everything that he does and leaves undone, he assesses, he evaluates his life circumstances according to a pre-projected ideal. He does not simply live out his life; he comports himself to his life by continuously taking a position with respect to it—and in doing so he is by no means certain and assured of the measure according to which he assesses. This tension of the uncertain search for happiness overshadows all the works and days of the human being and at a deeper level of understanding constitutes that which one calls the “seriousness of life.” We are aware of this seriousness in the harsh struggle for our daily bread, in laborious confrontation with formidable nature, in subduing the passions and desires, in the needs of the soul, in the despair of our conscience—but also where we painstakingly learn, where the human being seeks to understand and to fraternally help his fellow man. The seriousness of life determines all activities that mediately point to the final goal, which are done and persevered in for the sake of human felicity. The activities that have a shade of the seriousness of life count for us as serious activity, as an activity that “makes sense” and is imbricated in the highest sense of existence. However, a non-serious activity stands over and against such serious activity, a non-serious activity that does not receive its sense from the architectonically structured total configuration of human goals but rather appears to a certain degree to be “senseless.” Activity then has a peculiarly non-binding character; it is not derived from the totality of that which is foreseen, nor from the project of life—it is “aimless.” Of course this is not to say that we would thereby act without any plans whatsoever. Yet such a plan of action has no anchor in the project of life otherwise guiding us. Serious activity is, as it were, “sporadically” interrupted by “islands” of a non-serious way of carrying life out. Of course, no one will fail to recognize that an enormous significance belongs to such intermittent pauses in the economy of our life, that we relax in the non-seriousness of play, recover, renew ourselves once more, that we plunge back into the untroubled lightheartedness and mirthful idleness as into a refreshing pool. If play itself, in this sense of a higher economy, thus serves the serious life and is a “means” of renewal, then play itself still has certain serious elements. Yet playing activity in itself is non-serious, is without the weight and the burdensome character of human actuality as the task of self-actualization—it is relieved of seriousness and with its floating lightness has an enticing power for the human being. It entices us into an “aesthetic” bearing toward life and thus into an underdetermination of the reality of the human being. The “playful” is a well-known category for in-sincere, non-serious activity, for an “acting as if” without obligation, without commitment. The posture of play can be revoked at any time, the rules of the game rendered void. When there is merely a semblance of occupation, for instance, a self-important demeanor without real industriousness, we say that one is “playing around.” We call a flirt “playful.” For the most part the concept of the playful has a negative undertone and means an insincere, illusory activity, an acting-as-if. There are playful variations on the serious ways in which we carry out our life, as when we pretend to work, pretend to fight, and pretend to love. But it is not settled that the playful consists only in such variations on the seriousness of life or that it has its domain therein. The customary and typical conception of play concedes a positive significance to the play of children and tends to judge dismissively the play of adults, unless it should serve indirectly as restorative play.1 All play activities thereby fall under the aspect of the “not-serious.” To be sure, no one would dispute that play activities are actual, but, as activities of non-seriousness, they bring with them a sense of “non-actuality.” This non-actuality belongs to them even if they are kinds of play that do not involve roles. This is not entirely easy to see. Human action is not merely an actual process like the flight of a cloud. The billowy cloud is, to be sure, seen and understood by human beings, but it is understood in such a way that it does not thereby evince its own “sense.” But surely each human action—be it the most insignificant enactment—evinces the goal intended by it. Nearly every action of the human being is a gesture that has a sense [Sinn-Gebärde] and that refers to the whole of existence and the final goal governing it. Play is an action that, in its sense-gesture, does not have this reference, that instead withdraws precisely from such a reference and displays itself as non-serious and illusory. That holds for the countless games of amusement with which we while away our time. The pastime is already a case of non-seriousness that has a unique structure: we fill up free time; in doing so it is quite a matter of indifference with what we fill it up, how we best escape a menacing boredom; we fill in a stretch of life not with what we genuinely want and aim at but rather with trifles. Each human being has only a finite supply of time. The number of hours and days is measured for each; only we do not know how great this number is. But we do know that it flies by with each day, with each hour of this one life that we each get—that we cannot get anything back again which we missed out on. And yet we spend portions of this precious and irreplaceable time of our lives in non-serious, illusory activity, “move the pieces on the board back and forth.” According to the common conception of play, “non-actuality,” as an existentiell non-seriousness and as an “acting as if,” forms a characteristic moment of actual play. In its being actual, play thus bears within itself as a constitutive feature the illusory variation on serious life.
The moment of non-actuality of course emerges more starkly in those kinds of play involving portrayal. Wherever the player slips into a “role” and wraps himself up therein, the activity of play becomes two-dimensional: there is at the same time the activity of the player and the activity of the human being in the playworld. What sort of strange character of “non-actuality” belongs to a play-world? This non-actuality is not simply nothing, it is an “appearance” that is, an existing appearance. But in what way and where is this appearance of the playworld? Is it similar to an imaginary representation, where we indeed actually imagine but in doing so do not represent anything actual? The imaginary object is only in the imagining soul, is a psychic reality, not an objective and intersubjective one. But what is going on in the appearance of the playworld? Is this only an imaginary product of a solitary soul? Is there not here a certain objective reality? Or does this playworld-appearance exist for all those playing together—and to a certain degree also for the spectators of such play? If we see a scene in the theater, then together with this we see the events on stage—but we nevertheless, together with this, see not merely that which is simply actual in these events, human beings of flesh and blood, their dress, the mise en scène; we also see, together with this, the playworld and understand the roles of the players. And this not because each, having himself been stimulated by the movements and words of the actors, would elicit the imaginary representation in and for himself. We see the play simultaneously as a play of simply actual human beings and as the portrayed life of the playworldly figures. Here, of course, the great question arises as to whether we grasp the playworld essentially enough when we view it as an objectively present mirror-appearance of actual life, so to speak. Certainly, it displays itself to an impartial observation of the phenomenon of play as a sort of mirror-appearance. The principal categories should be drawn from a discussion of mirroring in general in order to be able to characterize in more detail the relation between actuality and non-actuality in play. Yet this is not without danger. The mirror-image displays itself in its very self as “derivative” of the archetype, as an imitation of the archetype. When philosophical confrontation with the Dionysian violent play [Spielgewalt] of human life and the world was led into a primal animosity and extreme fervor—in Plato’s battle with the poets, with Homer and the tragic Muse—critical thinking began with the mirror-character of play and thereby already reached the verdict that all poetry is only imitation. The interpretation of poetic art as mimēsis governs the metaphysical interpretation of art for a long time hence. The poet, says Plato, resembles the painter, and the painter resembles a mirror. So long as we suppose play to be derivative appearance, to be mirroring, and suppose mirroring to be a reproduction of archetypical things in residual silhouettes, we are all held under the spell of the Platonic interpretation. We must free ourselves from this spell.
The aspect of “non-actuality” belongs to play in a manner that is generally well known. Every reflection on human play, however preliminary, somehow makes use of this well-known essential feature in its statements. Playing is considered to be a comportment that is characterized by a certain “non-seriousness” and “in-sincerity,” to be an “acting as if,” to be a neutralized acting that does not make any decisions, does not bind us in our deeds, an acting that remains “non-binding,” is, as it were, a mere trying out of possibilities that does not entail inevitable consequences. We can call off an activity of play at any time—nothing at all has been changed thereby in our serious life. As long as we are only “playing,” we cross over no Rubicon—neither in war nor in love. What we do when we play, we do only for fun. The carefree cheerfulness that we feel in the enactment of play, the transformation of the entire attunement of life into something bright and light, almost floating, has its ground in being taken away from the existentielly heavy dimensions of life: occasionally, for all too fleeting hours, play relieves us of the burden of life’s cares; we plunge back again, as it were, into the insouciance of childhood, rejuvenate ourselves in this dreamlike happiness as in a refreshing sleep. Certainly, not every form of cheerfulness and jesting in the communal life of humans is connected to play or is even merely of a playful sort, but conversely we can still say that every game is attuned with excitement in its enactment of life, is an exhilarated way to enjoy life. This delight we take in play [Spiellust] need not at all be a primitive joviality [Lustigkeit]; as delight, it can embrace, encompass, and to a certain extent include all feelings of the human heart—it extends to the dark delight in tragedy. In play we experience a peculiar creativity, a creative and happy fortune: we can be everything, all possibilities stand open, and we have the illusion of a free, unrestricted beginning. In other cases we are determined by the history of our course of life; we find ourselves in a situation that is no longer open to choice; we are the product of our earlier deeds and omissions; we have chosen in a variety of ways and have thereby lost countless possibilities. The path of life, so to speak, is determined by an uncanny, accompanying contraction of our possibilities. Every activity that we earnestly carry out makes us more determinate and at the same time less possible. We continually determine ourselves, do irrevocable things. The more we attain to determinate actuality in the self-actualization accomplished through our deeds, the slighter do our possibilities become. The child is potentially: that does not mean that it is not yet this or that but rather that it is still “everything,” that it still has a thousand open possibilities, that the whole of life still oscillates in it before all determination. The old man has the history of his self-actualization behind him; he has in one way or another squandered the thousand possibilities, has realized himself, and with each step in the course of life has narrowed the open range. Perhaps the old man, if he looks back, senses the unlived possibilities wistfully, the omitted life that is something entirely different than the neglected and misused one. What we have “neglected” is indeed judged from the sense-context of our self-actualization; we then regret not having chosen decisively enough in a particular case. But when the old man looks back on his life that has passed by, perhaps an insight into the lot of the human being in general, that of only being able to become “actual” in the perpetual loss of possibilities, unsettles him. The child is indeterminately everything, the old man is determinately little—we are born as many and die as one. The inexorable contraction of our possibilities, which accompanies our course of life and is the implacable law of serious life, is alleviated in its sadness—by play. For in play we enjoy the possibility of retrieving lost possibilities—indeed, even far beyond this, of attaining the openness of a mode of existence that is not determined and not bound. We are able to cast off the burden of our own life history, can “choose” what we wish to be, can slip into any role of existence. However, we are precisely not able to do this actually and truly, but rather only “in make-believe.” We can only escape our actual and decided life in an illusory way. Liberation is a mere dream. The rapture pertaining to play transposes us into “non-actuality.” In the mode of non-actuality we can, so to speak, begin anew, without history; we can choose in an imaginary space and an imaginary time. We again attain unwasted freedom as freedom in the dimension of a mere “appearance.” That playing as playing is an actual, real enactment of life, that it occurs amid and among the serious activities of life, no one would contest—but the actuality of playing is determined as such precisely by the fundamental character of a non-serious acting-as-if. Playing is an illusionary variation on human self-actualization. Playing itself decides nothing, but it copies in manifold ways the enactment of life in which each moment decides in one way or another. The non-seriousness of play frequently consists in precisely the illusionary imitation of serious life. Play is imitation in the space of the imaginary. Indeed, the character of a creative transformation, a fantastical variation on serious life, in playful imitation must not be misconstrued. Play does not exhaust itself in a slavish reproduction; it also brings forth entirely new motifs, gets new possibilities to flare up, possibilities with which we are not acquainted in the space in which we otherwise carry out our lives. As a variation play is creative—but its productive power can only unfold in the useless realm of the “non-actual.” The non-seriousness of play does not stand as an autonomous sphere “alongside” the realm of serious life. Certainly there are a plethora of activities that occur specifically in the realm of play and that do not as such have the character of providing a variation. That is the case, for instance, in kinetic games that arise from the joy in limb-loosening movement and that effect an amplified consciousness of the body, a sensuous bodily delight. Modern sports present a clear and methodically developed expression of this play that arises from the predominance of the body. It does not provide a “variation” on something and also bears no moment of non-actuality in itself. It is initially a sign for a new relation to nature, a truthful discovery of the sensuously embodied rootedness of the human being in the elementary media of air and light, a performance training on a magnificent scale. But manifold motifs of the more general phenomenon of play enter into this sphere of sports, for instance in the way that competition in sports ever more comes to be a playful variation on the real battles of nations and occasionally an exhibition resembling the ancient circus. And thus events that are initially about sports attain, via superimposition, a mediate play character that is now also determined by the contrast to so-called serious life. The contrast to serious life is generally determined in play not merely as distance but also as imitation. In its zone of non-actuality2 play repeats “serious life”—but takes all burdensome weight away from it, raises compulsory life, so to speak, into the light, floating ether of the “non-binding.”
Human life is structured in elementary dimensions. It is difficult and arduous in the field of work, whether it be harsh physical work or the intellectual types of work; it is brutal in the field of ruling, where the tense difference between those who command and those who obey, between masters and servants, rends brotherhood asunder; it is unsatisfactory and full of disappointments in the meeting of the sexes; it is bitter in sickness, sorrow, and loneliness; it is full of terror and uncertainty in relation to superhuman powers—but it is cheerful and weightless, light and exhilarating in play. To be sure, play does not bring us the profound happiness that is perhaps necessarily bound up with profound sorrow, but it confers a certain pleasurably attuned feeling of happiness, even when we play out [erspielen] the awful horrors of tragedy. The happiness of play is connected most closely with the “non-actuality” belonging to it. To be sure, it is an actual, if also ephemeral happiness, but an actual happiness in regard to the illusionary non-actuality that lies in its very self. This shows itself clearly in those instances of play in which roles are played explicitly [eigentlichen Darstellungsspielen], which contain a scene, a stage, and a portrayed sense of action that encompasses an enclosed “playworld” with specifically chosen types of roles. The theater is the clearest form of play involving roles, but it is not the only one. In every kind of play in which the role-character of the players predominates and one moves about with a fictive conception of oneself, a “non-actual comportment” is portrayed in an actual comportment, and such self-rapture in the realm of an “appearance” is felt with excitement and pleasure. The “appearance,” this thoroughly nugatory and unstable formation, has the secret power to carry us away, to lift us above and beyond the life that is so thoroughly determined by care—to a place where we can freely shape our lives and yet not deprive ourselves of any possibilities with a decision. We live from the inexhaustible, fundamental source of the imagination, but such an unresisting and spontaneously creative life is enacted only in the impoverished dimension of the “as if.” We are rich at the price of poverty—rich, inasmuch as we can all still slip from one skin into another, can make our deeds undone; poor, inasmuch as this existence is played out not in true actuality but rather in the land of the imaginary.
Seen in this manner, “non-actuality” is thus an essential, fundamental feature of human play. And it is not merely a fundamental feature; it is the decisive fundamental feature. The actuality of play activity is a perpetual, continual, productive comportment to the “non-actuality” of the playworld. Wherever there are philosophical questions about play that are connected to the general problem of Being, it is precisely the moment of actual “non-actuality,” the strange entwinement of Being and appearance, that requires conceptual mastery. How can something even be “non-actual”? The most obvious answer is initially always that which is related to human cognition, that which reflects on the fact that we can represent mythical creatures in our power of imagination, although these beings do not exist in connection with actual things and events. One then says that what is actual as an act of representation need not be actual as what is represented by it. The creatures of myth only have a “mental existence,” are only in our head, so to speak—as “fancies,” as illusory thoughts, as poetic inventions; they are not out there among actual things—among houses and streets, human beings and vehicles. We can obviously think of many things that do not exist at all. As just one example among many, we form the concept of the “nothing”—we think of something that is not some existing, actual thing; we think an object of thought that does not exist at all, that is the comprehensive concept, as it were, for all that “is not”—we think it actually, without thereby positing it as something actual. But the nothing presents certain difficulties. Does it have only a mental existence? Is it a thing belonging only to thought, an ens rationis, in Kant’s terms? Is the nothing only in our thinking, or in our empty intending and imagining? Does the nothing have no significance and no relevance for beings themselves, for the being-a-being of existing things [das Seiendsein der seienden Dinge]? Can we understand the “Being [Sein]” of beings without understanding it from the horizon of the nothing? Isn’t the nothing also a cosmic power against which the totality of the All [Allheit des Alls] gathers itself and comes into relief in the first place? In view of the theme to which we have restricted ourselves, we cannot begin a speculative treatment of the problem of the nothing. But in any case the problem occupying us, of “non-actuality” as an essential feature of play, has some connection with the fundamental problem of the nothing. It nevertheless becomes clear in a still wholly preliminary interpretation of play that the “non-actuality” emerging here in no way bespeaks absence in the sphere of external things or a merely “mental” existence in the representing soul. Instead the non-actuality of the playworld, the scenery with its figures in their roles, truly occurs in the midst of the objective actuality of things, not indeed like a simply actual thing alongside other simply actual things, but rather as an objectively present “appearance,” which rests on simply actual things and overlays them in an entirely unique way. The play-appearance is not merely in the human soul; it is in the midst of and among things and is nevertheless separated from all other things. It is objective—and yet not an object alongside other objects. It has no immediate vicinity to its surroundings. It is delimited in a strange way, framed and “enclosed” in itself.
All this requires closer interpretation. In the history of philosophy, critical confrontation with the enigmatic actuality of play, which keeps open an existing appearance, a dimension of “non-actuality,” in itself, begins in the thought of Plato, thus at the beginning of Western metaphysics. Although Heraclitus had, in monumental simplicity, characterized the course of the world as a playing child, employing a cosmic metaphor of unbelievable boldness, nowhere did he unfold the ontological constitution of play; he did not provide the categories for the interpretation of its marvelous symbolism [Sinnbildes]. The explicit groundwork of metaphysics is carried out in Plato in a manner that always operates with the distinction between archetypical actuality and the reproduction of afterimages [urbildlicher Wirklichkeit und nachbildlicher Abbildung], in order to carry out fundamental ontological separations, but the operative models of thought themselves are also to a certain degree taken into consideration and called into question. Plato’s thought, which was rooted in Heraclitus and Parmenides, could not stick with the brusque Eleatic separation between Being and nothing: he conceived things, which were already commonly called “beings,” as mixtures, as an intertwining of Being and nothing, as an existing nothing and a nugatory Being. All things emerging and passing away, the onta gignomena, sensible things in the broadest sense, simultaneously are and are not; they are, but they are not really, continuously and without change; they are not truly, are not being in the mode of being [in seiender Weise seiend]; they are not ontōs on. Transitory things only are to the extent that they, in a manner difficult to explain, “participate” in the stronger Being of the ideas, of the formative powers of light that bring all finite things into their character, conferring on them a face and aspect. Each finite and transitory thing refers to the idea and bears witness to it, manifesting itself as an imperfect reproduction and afterimage. What is decisive here is that such reproducing and afterimaging pass through the dimension of a qualitative differentiation. The transitory sensible thing is a reproduction of the non-transitory idea. The resemblance between the sensible thing and the idea is maintained within the space of the non-resemblance between the transitory and the non-transitory. The sensible thing only resembles the idea insofar as something transitory can at all resemble something non-transitory.
In order to indicate this correspondence of resemblance between the sensible thing and the idea, a correspondence that is broken by an unbridgeable non-resemblance, Plato takes up particular phenomena from the realm of sensible things—phenomena that prove to be derivative in themselves and furthermore are determined by a moment of reproduction. Such phenomena are, as it were, existing “non-actualities.” Plato operates with the phenomena of the “shadow,” the “reproduction,” and “mirroring.” Shadows, reproductions, and mirror-images occur as specific appearances within the total realm of sensible things. We commonly distinguish a corporeal thing itself from its shadow, from its image and its mirror-image. Shadows and mirror-images refer to the actual thing itself; they manifest themselves as derivative of, dependent on, and conditioned by it. As the shadow refers to the actual sensible thing, so does the sensible thing analogously refer to the idea. The relation of the Being of the sensible thing to the Being of the idea is thus explained by Plato metaphorically through a familiar relation of reproduction that on the whole is played out in the sphere of sensuous actuality. Plato thus draws the models for the ontological devaluation of the sensuous sphere from precisely the very sphere he wishes to devalue. In order to demonstrate the sensible thing speculatively as a mixture of Being and nothing, he takes up a sensible phenomenon in which a mixture of actuality and non-actuality is attested to phenomenally. The shadow, the reproduction, the mirror-image serve as operative models of thought for the formulation of the metaphysical problem of Being in Plato. The founder of metaphysics does not thereby proceed in such a way that he first investigates his guiding model of thought—the structures of reproduction—and only then makes speculative use of them. Rather, the clarification of the guiding model is carried out—to the extent that it is advanced at all—in the course of his central philosophical questions. We already said that play, too (above all when it is taken as the play of the tragic Muse and as the poiēsis of the poets in general), assumes the aspect of a reproduced imitation, of a mimēsis. The “non-actuality” that belongs to every instance of play as one of its moments appears, after all, to point in this direction. That, however, is the question that is to be examined. Is the so-called non-actuality of play determined as a certain kind of afterimaging, a certain kind of imitative mirroring of serious human life? Is play a mimetic repetition of non-playing existence? If our first, provisional descriptions are correct, which spoke of a variation on serious enactment and also of a scene portraying an imaginary playworld, then the “non-actuality” that constitutively belongs to play must manifestly be interpreted as mimēsis. But are these descriptions correct? Have they been taken from the pure phenomenon in a sufficiently impartial manner? Could it not be that the Platonic tradition still dominates us, even when we “describe” given phenomena that appear to be entirely “ahistorical”? The dominance of metaphysics does not merely overpower those who, in the wake of the ancient thinkers, contemplate what they had thought, but rather is documented in an intellectual legacy that holds us inconspicuously under its spell through the power of self-evident notions.
Before we can more properly and rigorously pose the question as to whether play is a reproduction of an actuality, a real mirroring of human life in the irreality of a peculiar appearance, we must first make clear to ourselves what a “mirror-image” even is. If the mirror functions as the guiding model for the interpretation of play as mimēsis, and the categorial concepts for the exegesis of play are attained with recourse to mirroring, the problems for understanding thus begin already with this guiding model. We know well enough what a mirror is when it comes to using one in an everyday manner, but we lack the concepts that would suffice for interpreting it in a way that would enable us to understand and grasp it. We thus initially pose to ourselves the question concerning what mirroring is at all. Now, one might think that this question can be answered by reference to the theory of optical natural occurrences in physics. Here, the laws of refraction of light rays in translucent media and deflection in reflecting surfaces and all optical effects in general would be determined precisely and with scientific reliability. However, mirroring is indeed not merely and exclusively a problem in physics; it is also a question of our understanding of perception. And an onto-conceptual distinction is at work in this perception of a mirror-appearance when we separate the thing itself from its mirror-image and characterize the thing itself as “actual” and, conversely, the reproduction of the thing in the mirror-appearance as “non-actual.” In what sense do we use the ontological concepts “actual” and “non-actual” here? In terms of the onto-conceptual understanding, which is already at work in the conception of a mirror-image, we are attempting to carry out a meditation—a meditation on something that everyone is familiar with, but something that, despite all familiarity, cannot be explicated sufficiently enough. What is a mirror-image? Let us therefore take up this question not in the way that a physicist would understand the issue, where it is obviously a legitimate problem, but rather let us take it up ontologically. The things in nature all around us are diverse and abundant, belong to different realms, and are for us innumerable. We roughly distinguish the realms of inanimate things, plants, animals, human beings, and things made by human beings. As diversified as such things are according to their realms, they nevertheless exist as mixed together, so to speak, in the one all-encompassing total actuality. In no way do all inanimate things exist in a heap, with all living beings together separated off from it; rather, the inanimate and the living are intermingled according to a dispensation that is imbued with sense; for example, in a human settlement the sustaining earth as a setting, houses as dwellings, human beings and their apparatuses, tools and vehicles, domesticated animals, but also the space of the air and the bright sky are all “together.” All things of this sort “are,” are actual. Now, it belongs to the particular conditions of corporeal things in light that they cast shadows, delineate a silhouette of their appearance, so to speak, to their surroundings in the direction facing away from the source of light. The shadow is, as a shadow, no less actual than the thing casting the shadow. Or, in other words: trees on the lakeshore are mirrored in the water. The mirrored reflection as such is just as actual as the mirroring tree. In the moment, however, when we view not merely the shadow, not merely the mirrored reflection as a phenomenon of light, but rather perceive in this phenomenon of light a “reproduction [Abbild]” of the tree, a silhouette of its appearance, a mirror-“image” [Spiegel-“Bild”], a peculiar differentiation is carried out: a new dimension is opened up, so to speak. We recognize in the shadow an image of the tree, in the mirroring even a faithful reproduction. The shadow presents us with the outline of the shape; the mirroring even gives back the colors of the tree on the lakeshore. We say the mirror-image lies on the surface of the water; it extends out upon it. Yet the mirrored tree does not lie on the water like an actual log floats on it; the mirrored tree is there and is also not there. Its image never “covers up” the water. The mirror-image does not lie on the water like a piece of cloth, like a coat of paint, a speck of oil, or the like; it lies on it in such a way that we see at the same time its irreality. We say it is only a mirror-image. We distinguish between the real tree and its reproduction on the water. We do not confuse the two. It is not at all easy to characterize the way in which a mirror-image lies on a real being, here the tree image on the surface of the water. We see through the mirror-image—it does not prevent us from recognizing the actual water. As the effect of radiance on the water, it is a particular circumstance of this water, but as an “image” it is the presentation of a thing that is not “in the water.” The image is an irreal thing presented in the real radiance on the water.
But how can this irreal thing overlay, so to speak, an actual thing without covering it up? Is this a relationship similar to what otherwise occurs in cases of translucent materials? For example, we see through glass and we also as a rule see the glass at the same time. Does the mirror-image lie on top of the water to some extent like a translucent glass? By no means. When we see through glass and in doing so see also this translucent medium, the glass that is being looked through is just as real as the thing seen behind the glass. Here there is no difference between irreality and reality. In contrast, the tree is nothing actual at all in the mirror appearance on the water; it is an actual reproduction of the simply actual tree on the lakeshore. And yet the irreal image extends out on the real surface of the water. And even if this extension of the image does not cover up the surface of the water, indeed does not at all disguise it in its pure self-showing, but rather gives way without resistance, the image is nevertheless dependent on the real image-bearer, here the surface of the water. An image, as a real phenomenon of the presentation of another real thing in the mode of a remarkable irreality, needs a simply actual basis in order to provide expanse for the image appearance; it needs lines, shapes, and colors of a simply actual sort in order to be able to present in them the outlines, figure, and colors of the thing imaged by it. Lines, figures, and colors become two-dimensional, as it were, are lines and shades of color playing on the light on the water, and are “at the same time” the outlines and colors of the tree in the image. The talk of “two-dimensionality” is admittedly misleading here; there are not two dimensions of simple actuality, but rather the dimensions of the simply actual and of the irreality imaged by it. The mirror-image manifests itself, however, in a thoroughgoing dependence on the original. It produces no new lines, shapes, or colors, except where the medium of presentation with its own colors darkens the colors of the original thing in its rendering in the image world; colored things are mirrored in a darkened manner in the dark blue or peat-brown water. The mirror-image that is there of its own accord, so to speak, in nature—but needs the human being who perceives it in order to be recognized in its irreal content—is an imagistic repetition of the thing itself, is dependent in everything on the thing that is mirrored, and on the circumstances of light between the things. The mirror-image copies. But insofar as it copies and is dependent on the original, it opens in the first place a region of a strange “appearance”:3 we see into, so to speak, an irreal realm. The mirror-image works on us like a “window” into a non-actual and yet visible land. If we stand on the shore and look down into the water, the green depths and their mute life may stir us in a mysterious way—but it is still more mysterious that the trees of the mirror world, and beyond that the lofty sky and the flight of white clouds, once again appear on the water and yet are not really attached to it. The human being who bent over the water for the first time and recognized himself in the mirror-image opened up a mysterious and enchanting domain: the mirroring of actuality in itself. In the Sonnets to Orpheus one reads, “Mirrors, no one has ever yet described / you, figured out what you honestly are. / You are merely a few sieve holes inscribed / on sliced regions of time hopelessly far. // You are the prodigals of the empty chamber / when dusk spreads on the woods enormously . . . / Like a sixteen-pointer stag the chandelier / strides through your impenetrability. // Sometimes you’re full of paintings. And a few / seem to be brushed right into your background / while others you’ve sent timidly away. // But the most beautiful of them will stay / till bright Narcissus catches and breaks through / to her chaste lips hidden in the beyond.”4
To ask what it means to mirror is not simply to pose an arbitrary ontological question. It is through mirroring that beings separated into originals and reproductions and first became ambivalent for the human being, so that he could ask what beings are.
With its grand beginning in Plato, metaphysical philosophy’s relation to play is one of a stimulating ambiguity. On the one hand, Plato’s thought oscillates in the element of the playful, is a high, sublime play of thoughts, is in all seriousness and rigor detached in the free distance it takes from itself, serious in its jests and jesting in its seriousness, full of Socratic irony and subtlety, familiar with and enjoying the allure of the mask. The playfulness of this thinking is much more than a merely artful stylistic element. However, on the other hand, Plato struggles passionately against the world-significance of play, against the wisdom of the mysteries and tragedy, against the poets, who base their claim to speak the truth on the inspiration received from the Muses and Apollo. This struggle does not consist in the simple denial or rejection of the possibility of mania, of enthusiastic inspiration from the god; Plato does not oppose an “enlightened” reason to poetic intoxication, but rather a reason that is itself ecstatic—which signifies the true mania. What poetry claims to be, philosophy is for Plato. It is a passion that is inflamed at the sight of the beautiful form of the young man, intensifies in conversation with youths and looks out from the beautiful forms and the magnanimous souls to the beautiful in itself, to the uniform beauty of the idea, and ultimately finds its way from the sensuous sheen of beauty in general to the non-sensuous truth only accessible to thought. To the poets’ myth that the beautiful is true, Plato does not simply oppose another myth, that the true is what is really beautiful. Rather, he interprets the beautiful as a path and step toward the true, as a prefiguration of the true that opens itself up to pure thinking. He takes the beautiful to be the veiling of what is really true, to be a sensuous reflection and glimmering. What comes to light within the realm of sensible things in the enchanting luminosity of the beautiful is a beacon, as it were, lighting the way toward that which truly is. The radiant flame of the heavens that lights up our day and allows the plants of the earth to grow and grants them visibility and flourishing is the visible, derivative image of the highest idea, the idea of the good. As the visible in general is related to the invisible realm of thought, so the beautiful is related to the true. The beauty of the beautiful is in itself already a reference above and beyond itself. Or to put it differently: in beauty the terrestrially visible already gleams as though touched by the non-sensuous light of the idea. The intensification of being beautiful is therefore of the greatest import for Plato. Beauty is gradated in itself and points from one step to the next, has the tendency to point beyond itself. The well-formed body is beautiful, the soul more beautiful, thought more beautiful than that and more beautiful still the true Being of the idea that is accessible to thought alone. The comparison of the beautiful becomes the path into philosophy. The power of beauty is interpreted as an escort to the truth. The beautiful is the psychopompos, the guide of souls. In many dialogues Plato lauds this soul-guiding force of the beautiful and, in connection with it, the daemonic enchantment by erōs. Philosophy is erotic passion—for Plato a passion that arises in the sensuous and leaps from it. The guidance of souls by the kalon, by the beautiful, is—like everything high and mighty—also exposed to the greatest danger: the guidance [Führung] can be perverted into something that leads one astray [Ver-führung]. This happens when sensuous beauty is not recognized in its referential character, when we fall prey to it and become more strongly bound to the sensuous by it. And Plato sees just this danger in poetry, which does not understand itself as a prefiguration of philosophy and as able to be superseded by it, but rather poses as the most autonomous and primordial mode of interpreting the world, indeed even as an inspiration from the god. Plato reinterprets the concept of the theion, the divine: the gods represented in traditional myths, who behave in a manner human-all-too-human, who are jealous and contentious, engaging in amours and appearing in all sorts of altered forms, are not truly divine. The god is essentially good, without weaknesses and wretched human features, is unchangeable, constant, continuously identical in his very self. The god is like the idea—or, more precisely, the idea is the true god. And from this speculative concept of God, which conceives of God from the idea, Plato now also grasps the essence of mania, the essence of what it means for a human to be seized by the force of the god. True mania is philosophy. The way in which Plato presents this intoxication of reason, the ecstasy of spirit, nevertheless bears many features that appear to be taken precisely from the mania that is being combated. On behalf of philosophy, Plato speaks the language of passion, of erotic frenzy, of yearning and rapture. That is no contradiction; for sensuous pathos belongs indeed to the path of philosophy—as the beautiful shows the way to the true. Or at least can show it. If the beautiful is conceived in its true soul-guiding function, then philosophy can determine the provisional prefiguration of the true that is concealed in the sensible image, as it is brought about by the art of poetry. It is then on the basis of philosophy that one must5 put art in its place and determine its character.
That is the sense of Plato’s critique of the poets. This critique does not condemn poetry absolutely, it condemns only the claim of poetry to its own primordial truth, which would be outside or even above philosophy. Like beauty in general, poetry, which indeed moves in the element of the beautiful, is a preliminary sensuous likeness of veritable truth. Still having obscure intimations, thus not yet actually knowing, it imitates true knowledge. Poetry is essentially mimetic. Yet it is an imitation, a mimēsis, of philosophy, only as long as it allows philosophy to determine its character. In contrast, if it wants to speak the genuine truth itself and present itself as the independent wisdom of tragedy, it thus becomes—according to Plato—the imitator of pre- and extraphilosophical life, and insofar as this is already an unknowing imitation, because in it we are referred to sensible things, the art of poetry becomes an imitation of an imitation. The sensible thing is a reproduction of the idea. Poetry is a reproduction of life entangled in reproductions—and thus a reproduction of reproductions, indeed without knowing it; it is even caught up in the delusion that it is hitting on the truly actual. The Platonic critique of the poets amounts to a world-historical decision, insofar as the metaphysics of art, of play, was thereby established for a long time to come—it was decided in advance that the beautiful is subordinate to the true and is a sensuous image for pure non-sensuous thought. That has had great consequences not only for the conception of human beings, but also for the representation of the whole of beings. The human being was interpreted mainly in regard to his “reason,” and the world was interpreted as a rational construct and a moral order. War and play were denied to be fundamental cosmic movements, and the cosmos was interpreted as an ordered structure that emerged as a result of the methodical operation of a reason at work. The world is understood as an architecture structured by gradations: at the top the realm of ideas only accessible to thought, supremely highest of which is the idea of the good, the agathon, or also nous, the world-reason; under it the particular ideas, the archetypes of the same, the different, rest and movement, the inanimate and the animate, species and genera—then follows the cosmos as the reproduction of the idea of the good; it came into being through the dispensation of nous at work, but is imperishable and is thus something intermediate between the eternal ideas and sensible things that emerge and perish, which it contains within itself; and then at the bottom lies the chōra, the dark material that provides the stuff for all the formative activity of world-architectural reason and represents the primal principle of the sensible and what is alien to the intellect. The whole of actuality is interpreted as a universal triumph of the principle of reason and as an effect of a cosmogonic technē. As an artisan methodically brings his work into existence, so nous brings forth the total structure of all beings. And that which comes about through reason is itself rational: is not a vast aimless play, not a dance of things, not an inconceivable ascent and decline of everything transitory. The Platonic conception of the world does not leave play to the side; it does not overlook it—but it banishes it from the essence, displaces it from the heart of the world, pushes it away into the sphere of sensuous appearance, assigns it an intermediate role, a pointing-out-the-way, in which it points beyond itself and away from itself. And yet one can say that Plato does not bring his great confrontation with the power of play, which so captivates human beings, with the art of poetry in general and with tragedy in particular—that he does not bring this confrontation to the victorious conclusion that his theory would indicate.
Until the late writings the problem disconcerts him. And in the Laws, that work of old age, which death prevented him from completing, the relation of the human being to the gods is interpreted from the horizon of play: the human being is called a plaything of the god. Play is thus here not merely a preconceptual and preliminary way of understanding the relation of human beings to the gods—such as the elevated association with divine powers in the community of the festival—but rather play is the mode in which the gods handle human beings: we are delivered over to them like playthings to the child. The gods play—they do not work onerously like mortals; they do not struggle for sustenance; they do not forcefully wrest from the earth stones to build houses, clay for jugs; they do not clear the wilderness; they do not sow in order to reap, nor gather the harvest into barns; they do not stand their ground against one another in a battle for life and death; they are immortal, cannot starve, and are not killed. And if they procreate and love, then this does not have among them the sense of a striving after “immortality” as it does for mortal human beings who can only live on in children and grandchildren, but as individuals themselves pass away. What is the activity of the gods supposed to be? The human being initially tends to represent them as similar to human beings, albeit much elevated. Only a purer sensibility [Sinn] catches an intimation of the gap that exists between mortals and immortals, attributing governance of the world to the gods. And in Plato’s late text this governance of the gods over human beings is interpreted as a game, as a handling of playthings. Playing is the activity that happens in leisure relieved of all need. Because the god is without need, he is able to play continually. Another direction for the interpretation of the activity of the gods—which determines to a greater degree the history of metaphysics—aims at the activity of thinking. It is already found in the pre-metaphysical thinkers but comes to lasting predominance with the foundation of metaphysics by Plato and Aristotle. If one is not willing to accept that the gods sleep—says Aristotle—and yet do not need to work and do not have to conduct wars, then the only thing left to believe is that they are continually concerned with the highest matters, with which the human being only occasionally and in the highest upsurge may concern himself, when his mind is free from need and is gathered together in leisure: namely, pure thinking. The god of metaphysics thinks. He thinks that which is accessible to pure thinking alone: the imperishable Being of the ideas; he himself is the world-reason in whose thinking the ideas are housed. And for this reason the metaphysical god thinks himself: is the thinking of thinking, noēsis noēseōs. This determination of the divine is retained through the history of metaphysics all the way up to Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” up to the concept conceiving itself. When the activity of the gods, divine being, shifts primarily into thinking, play, as the other great possibility of leisure, falls under the aspect of a prefiguration of the true, just as in the Platonic critique of the poets. The beautiful becomes the appearance of the idea—a conception that also governs Hegel’s Aesthetics. But if what it means to be divine shifts to play, then other interpretations of Being, of truth, and of the world result. Both interpretations determine the history of Western thought, in which undoubtedly the interpretation of divine being as pure thought is guiding and the other interpretation of divinity as play accompanies it below the surface, in a noteworthy relationship that is fraught with tension. And yet the late modern thinker who attempts to think the death of the metaphysical god, namely, Nietzsche, says in Zarathustra: “—because the earth is a gods’ table, and it trembles with creative new words and gods’ throws [of the dice]—.”6
The problem of play stands for us in the background of this history. We began with the question concerning the “non-actuality” characterizing play. How must this be understood? Is it an afterimage and a reproduction, an imitation, a mimēsis? And furthermore, is it an imitation of the really and truly actual thing or an imitation of something that is already derivative and residual in itself? Or is play in the end brought into a wrong orientation when one interprets it as some sort of imitation of serious life and of things and events belonging to the serious actuality of human life? The guiding model for an interpretation of play as mimēsis is, already in Plato, the mirror. The mirror is the metaphor for the painter and the painter is the metaphor for the poet. We must inquire into this graduated structure of references. The mirror-image is already not easy to understand and to analyze conceptually. To be sure, everyone knows what a mirror is, yet it is not easy to express this knowledge. We initially left aside the sort of observation a physicist makes; for in our context we are not interested in which laws of reflection are operative for beams of light, but rather in how a mirror-image is seen and understood in this seeing. Mirror-images that are not seen with human eyes, which move to and fro as physical processes between the tree on the shore and the surface of the water, for instance, do not contain a positing of an actual “non-actuality”—which is indeed what we think merits interrogation. The human being sees the image as an image, sees on the actual water an actual phenomenon of light that contains something “non-actual” in itself, sees therein the trees on the shore and the clouds of the sky. But in seeing such things he does not believe that these are actual trees and actual clouds; he knows of their illusoriness, of their irreality. The mysterious dimension of “irreality” is something marvelous, with which we are now concerned.
We have approached the matter with the most natural mirror that occurs clearly and purely in nature without any human assistance, that is, the reflective surface of water. Ever since the earth existed, the light of the sky had its reflection in oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds, and thus the cloud formations and the brightness of the sky have drawn their opposing traces over the surface of water night and day for a very long time. But only the perceptive living being, primarily the human being, who is able to distinguish between actual water and the non-actual things projected in the form of images on the water, sees images in such opposed traces. But there are still several other things that mirror, that render surrounding things in images on a smooth, shining surface. Yet for the most part these are things artificially produced by human beings: polished surfaces of marble or bronze, for instance, or glass windowpanes—and ultimately, sheets of glass underlaid with a reflective coating, that is, industrially produced mirrors. In his critique of the poets, where Plato posits the equivalence of the mirror, painter, and poet, he begins with an artificially produced mirror. That is not without significance. For the perspective that guides the consideration there is technē. The artisan of some technē, the craftsman of a handicraft, produces his piece of work judiciously: the potter the pot, the weaver cloth, the smith the horseshoe, and so forth. Each makes what is appropriate to his profession. And he does so well the more he sticks to it and perfects himself in his art. The shoemaker who sticks to it in his task will become an ever better shoemaker. Technical ability is developed in specialization. A particular capacity is developed in a good way precisely in the renunciation of being able to do everything to some extent and roughly and to tinker in all skills and tasks more poorly than properly. The “jack of all trades,” if he does not happen to be a renaissance man, is more likely a “master of none.” And Plato lets the artist of a thousand talents appear, who not only makes one thing, but all things, and “makes” not merely artificial things but also natural things. Already in this skipping over of the difference between artificial things and natural things one can see that this “making” of the artist of a thousand talents is no genuine making. For indeed natural things are exempted from the human’s ability to make; they form a precondition for human making. Plato’s supposed artist of a thousand talents “makes” all things by fiddling around with a mirror and capturing mirror-images of all things, natural and artificial. He thus “makes” in the manner of reproductive imitation. Insofar as he makes mirror-images, he does not at all make actual things like the shoemaker and the smith, but rather makes that which is non-actual in the strange dimension of appearance. But the making of such a non-actual thing is itself a powerless, impotent making, is a making of mere semblance. Such making brings nothing into existence, allows nothing to become independent of the activity of work as a self-standing product—it only leads one to believe, merely lets an appearance arise that is only an image of a thing but is not itself an independent thing. The maker of everything in truth makes nothing. The Platonic characterization of the mirror-artisan has features that are clearly caricatures, pointing in advance to an interpretation that devalues the painter and the poet. The painter and poet produce nothing actual; they bring forth only images, only powerless mirror-images—indeed mirror-images of the ordinary actuality of things evident to the senses—and do not at all notice that these sensible things are already reproductions, reproductions and afterimages of the ideas, of that which truly is. The distorting tendency in the way Plato unfolds his thoughts is shown by the fact that Plato characterizes the man manipulating the mirror as, in general, an artisan. A mirror-artisan, though, is in the first place a producer of mirrors, not a producer of mirror-images. And even if Plato distinguishes a producing and a using technē and furthermore places the using technē over the producing one, nevertheless, the manipulator of the mirror is not a “user” in the proper sense. However, Plato treats the one using the mirror as someone who makes a thing. He attributes to use an aspect of production that does not exist at all in the use. Yet no one is so foolish as to ever maintain that in fiddling around with a mirror he produces, fabricates, or confects any kind of things. In the most customary understanding of the use of a mirror there is the knowledge that they are only images that appear on the gleaming surface. Obviously Plato, too, knows this, but by distorting the customary understanding, by passing off the user of the mirror as a producer of merely “apparent” things, he is able to assess the problem in a more incisive form, that is, to pose the question concerning the ontological character of the mirror-appearance. And above all he obtains a determination of place for such appearance in the framework of his principal perspective, which is oriented on the model of technē. The mirror-image is a reproduction of a reproduction, mimēsis mimēseōs. Yet the reproduction has a respectively different sense in the two stages. The sensible thing that is still an actual thing—for example, the ore from which a smith makes an anchor chain—is, as an actual thing, a reproduction of a higher actuality, namely that of the idea. The mirror-image of an anchor chain contains no “actual anchor chain” in itself but rather a non-actual one within the image. One could pose a counter-question to Plato: is the sensible thing related to the idea in which it “participates” as the mirror-image to the original thing? Is the distinction between the idea and the sensible thing not “greater” than that between a thing in the light and its mirror-image? Yet the mirror-image is an accurate and reliable reproduction, only flipped. And if in the image on the water there are five trees on the shoreline to be seen, then there actually stand five trees on the shoreline, too. In contrast, however, Plato thinks of the relation of sensible things to the idea essentially as a relation of the manifold to the one. The one idea of the table appears in manifold brokenness and turbidity, but above all pluralized into all tables. We cannot infer back to the multiplicity of accompanying ideas from the multiplicity of certain sensible things. But a mirror-image, however, shows the same number of reproduced things as there are in the original actuality. These considerations show how, in Plato, there is a specifically guided description of the phenomenon of the mirror—and also shows that the categories for an explication of mirroring were developed with a certain deliberate one-sidedness. We must free ourselves from this. Above all we must make clear to ourselves that in seeing a mirror-image the illusoriness and irreality of things within the image are known; this appearance is an acknowledged appearance that does not pass itself off as immediate actuality; we do not confuse genuine and merely reproduced things. Of course, such confusion can occasionally occur through a sophisticated arrangement, through cunningly applied optical effects, but then in that case we are not at all conscious of the image. However, where we understand an image as an image, we are never tempted to confuse original and reproduction. To be sure, the mirror-image is actual as a mirroring, but it contains in itself, in the space of its image, something “non-actual.” This “non-actual” thing, however, continually has a referential relationship to actual things outside the image in itself. The mirror-image indeed only reproduces; it cannot reproduce anything that does not exist. Indirectly, it has an indicative character. For example, if Hagen of Tronje had entered clumsily to the side of and behind the drinking Siegfried, so that the latter would have seen in the mirror of the pool the raised spear in Hagen’s hand aiming at the Linden leaf spot, he would not have been pacified in the thought that this was only a non-actual image on the gleaming mirror of the water, but rather would have leapt up in order to ward off the attack. A mirror shows “in the image” what is actual outside the image. A mirror-image is not, as an image, merely something actual, an actual thing with the peculiar structure of containing in itself something “non-actual,” but rather this “non-actual” thing refers indirectly to actual things in a reliable manner. The referential relations are familiar and common to us; we make use of them in various ways. They constitute the particular reproductive character of the mirror. We call what is “non-actual” in the mirror-image the mirror-image-world. It is nothing real that one can grasp, touch, smell, or taste, but one can “see” it. More precisely, one can “see into” it; it is visible and is nevertheless not existent. Then is it the case that, by another sense than seeing, we again actually apprehend something that itself is not actual? We can certainly have auditory hallucinations, sense-impressions that simulate objective impressions to us,7 but then the “appearance” is merely subjective, is in our soul and not in the midst of things. But the mirror-image is intersubjectively perceptible; it can be seen by many, indeed in such a way that they can mutually check their perceptions. The sense of sight alone truly has the possibility of becoming aware of such an objectively present “appearance.” But is this due to the sense of sight as such—or to that within which the sense of sight operates: light? In any case, this is a question that has yet to be treated sufficiently. The approach to the question of Being in ancient philosophy is perhaps co-determined in an essential way by the bifurcation of Being and appearance that is possible in the space in which there is light and the sense of sight. We see into the mirror-world, similar and in turn not similar to the way in which we see through a “window.” The mirror-world “opens” itself to our actual world; it is not closed or closed off; it is “broken open” for us, as it were, released to the observer. And yet it does not anywhere pass over into the actual world, is not like the actual room behind a window. One cannot “reach into” the mirror-world, one cannot step into it, it is “inaccessible”—but one can peer into it; it provides us with an “insight.” The mirror-world is nowhere else at all than in such “insight”; it is only the “window,” so to speak, through which we look in. But it has its own irreal space that does not pass over into our space, although it is “opened up” to us. In this irreal space of the mirror-world there are the mirror-worldly “things,” which have a place and a nexus of positions in it; and in it, too, irreal movements run by like a flight of clouds in that sky that we see in the image on the water. The space of the mirror-world has an irreal “depth.” But the whole mirror-world rests on a real bearer of images, cannot exist at all without it. The bearer of images is a constitutive moment of the image that is just as important as the image-world is. Both moments together, in their opposed tension, first yield concrete imagery. The Platonic interpretation of the phenomenon of the image jumps restlessly back and forth between both moments, without distinguishing them explicitly enough. That amounts to a not inconsiderable breach of theory at significant points in the course of his thought.
A further ambiguity remains in the concept of re-production [Ab-Bildes]. We can ask: is each image [Bild] a reproduction [Abbild], and further, is each reproduction a mirror-image [Spiegelbild]? The mirror-image is a reproduction that is essentially determined by the simultaneity of imagistic depiction and the depicted original. The tree on the shore and its image on the water are “simultaneous.” In contrast, one can very well produce an image that re-produces a thing and nevertheless remains as an image, when perhaps the thing no longer exists. Such a reproduction depicts an actual thing, rendering it in the way it looks—and is nevertheless not bound to a simultaneity. But in the sense of such a reproduction lies the fact that a simultaneity existed at the time of its production. The original must have determined the imagistic copy. A photograph, for instance, is a reproduction in the sense now meant. It is otherwise in a painting (of representational art). Here, too, the image depicts something; we recognize things in it, can describe them with names, but we do not recognize uniquely individual things. It doesn’t matter what the painter took for his “model.” The image makes, so to speak, no declaration concerning something factual—it indeed reproduces but does not exactly reproduce a specific, unique thing. The significance of the image does not lie in the reference back to the incidental model. The image can have been freely formed at a thorough remove from a factual model—and still depict something objective. And again in another sense an image can be a configuration of forms and colors in tension with one another—without the character of reproduction. How is play an image? Is it a mirror-image, a reproduction at all—or an image without a reference back to an original? That remains to be asked.
The confrontation of metaphysical philosophy with the power of play belonging to existence established the perspective in which afterward all questions of its human and cosmic significance were already predetermined. Its dangerous enchanting power was banned—insofar as play was shown to be an essentially derivative and secondhand phenomenon. It had to come down from the elevated buskin in which it had strutted on the tragic stage; it was exposed in its merely feigned mask of the god, put in its place by the rigor of the concept for its arrogant wisdom. The poet of the Homeric epic and of Attic tragedy was the typical player, against whom the vehement attack of metaphysical thinking was waged. The Platonic critique of the poets, however, is not merely an external action of philosophy; it is an essential moment in the process of philosophical self-consciousness: metaphysics, at its beginning, finds its self-understanding by asserting itself against play’s mythic-tragic understanding of the world. Self-assertion, however, is always still incomplete when it leaves the opponent “outside” and lets it exist as an independent, if also suppressed, power. Complete triumph is evidently attained if it succeeds in completely melting down the oppositional element and converting it completely to itself. Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics strives after this triumph by assigning a subordinate rank in the hierarchy of truth to the poetic art and reinforcing this determination of place with a poetics. Play is explained fundamentally as reproduction and imitation, is determined to be mimēsis. This concept of mimēsis signifies the veritable disenchantment of play. The metaphysical thinkers’ competition with Homer and the tragic poets seems to be8 won with the insight into the mimetic nature of play.
But what kind of triumph is this? Is it a clear and unquestionable success? Or do unmastered questions remain here? The murkiest question is whether play is comprehended in its full and primordial sense when the moment of mimēsis attains privileged9 prominence. Play indisputably has a mimetic character—but is that all it amounts to? And above all, is this imitation something that refers to ontic events and activities? Initially we are not really acquainted with another schema of an “imitation.” A human being imitates another—he repeats his motions, gestures, way of speaking, and so forth. Or human beings imitate the extrahuman processes of nature, attempt to portray gods or beasts. An imitation thus appears to be thoroughly related to an exemplary [vorbildlich] being that is then copied [nachgebildet]. A craftsman imitates a pattern when he manufactures a product. Such a pattern can be a natural form or another product or, ultimately, the “idea.” For Plato every technē is essentially mimetic. In another way, we imitate in moral conduct certain exemplary human beings, who have indicated to us the paths, as it were, to right living, or we imitate guiding images, ideals, in following such ethical authoritative models. The human being’s whole practical and technical conduct is characterized by relations of imitation: but some being or other is always thereby imitated, whether human beings or ideas or ideals. Insofar as Plato interprets play, in the representative form of the poetic art, from the horizon of technē and praxis in the broadest sense, he restricts it to an imitation of beings. And because play is indeed less capable than any simple handicraft, which can, after all, produce actual shoes and actual tables as afterimages of the genuinely existing ideas—because the poetic art only produces in the space of the imaginary, so to speak—it can only be an imitation of imitation in praxis and technē. Thus is play unmasked for the critical gaze of metaphysical thought. And if we want to pose the question as to whether this unmasking is ultimately right, then we cannot do so from a standpoint outside this one: the situation of our question is already stamped and co-determined by the history of the metaphysical tradition.
That means we must formulate our question with regard to what the metaphysical tradition takes to be the basic feature of play in general, that is, mimēsis. Is the imitative character of play actually the decisive basic feature, the substance of its essence? And is imitating an imitating of innerworldly beings? We cannot proceed from the assumption that the interpretation of play at the beginning of metaphysics is false—and that for this reason one could skip over it. It has its strict truth, even if this is a truth of a limited kind. Now, in what does this limitation consist? It does not consist in a partial view, nor in an incomplete conception of the phenomenon, but rather in a completely disillusioned mode of observation. The whole phenomenon of play stands in view, but in the view of a disenchanted spectator. Disenchantment in general is a curious process. It transforms things without the things themselves actually being changed. But all at once they appear to us in a cold light. As long as we are enthused, enraptured by human beings or things, as long as we see them with the eyes of love, they are, as it were, transfigured, elevated, glowing with a deep significance; we are as though affected by a spell, struck by a more secret beam. Such captivation can be perceived from time to time as a daemonic power that leads us to believe a false image; but for the most part it is experienced as a deeper truth; inspiration leads us into the heart of all things. Yet captivation can suddenly and incomprehensibly vanish, the spell can be broken—and we then see all at once the beloved human being “all too humanly”; the teetering bridges between us no longer hold, the dream is over, we are disillusioned. Everyone is familiar with this uncanny transformation of the scenery of human life. All at once, the disenchanted one sees things differently. It is not correct to say that he sees “more truly”; he is more critical, more mistrustful, and he more sharply sees everything that mistrust sees, no longer seeing what the eyes of love see. The enthused spectator who was seized by the captivating power of play and remained under its spell saw the deeds and sufferings of the god on the stage; he became the epopt10 of an epiphany. To be sure, he still knows about the performance, but the performer disappears for him into the god or hero. The essential thing is that which appears through the finitely frail human being. Yet when the play is “over” and everyday human beings materialize once more out of their roles, when the actor removes his makeup, disillusionment returns: the play contains the fatal character of “mere play.” The “god” or “demigod” becomes a mere “role,” the mask a prop. Disenchanted disillusionment has its own lens. It takes in the whole play—but precisely under a disillusioned perspective. The measure of actuality is now the actor who “imitates” a god or hero and in truth is neither—the role of the hero is understood from the perspective of the actor, who is not conceived as a means for the manifestation of the hero. Two perspectives stand opposed to each other: the understanding of play under the spell of play and an understanding of play that withdraws from such a spell and speaks from disillusionment. Plato’s critique of the poets is a great example of the lens of disenchantment. Only when the mask of the god has fallen from the human being’s face can play be unmasked as an imitation of an imitation.
The Platonic critique interprets play as a reproduction. In this, the concept of the mirror-image in fact predominates. To construe the character of reproduction as mirroring amounts to a peculiar overspecification of the course of thought. Initially, the mirror is a natural phenomenon, as a reflection in water, for instance, and is characterized by a simultaneity of original and reproduction. A mirror can only reproduce for as long as the original exists. In the case of a mirror-image we have the same processes in the original actuality and in the mirror-world. Only when something happens in the original can something also take place in the mirror-world. Or conversely: when events run their course in the mirror-world, events of the same kind must also happen in the original actuality. Can this relation between the mirror-image and the original be applied to human play without further ado? Certainly there is the possibility that some kinds of playing operate as an imitation of a simultaneous serious activity; for example, children can imitate the simultaneous life processes of adults. As a rule, however, play does not mirror simultaneous events of the serious sphere. It is no slavish imitation. In no way can we play merely in such a way that we at once do the same thing in the serious realm as we do in play. Taken in all strictness, mirroring cannot offer the appropriate model of play, for playing is not necessarily coupled with a parallel activity in the serious sphere. One does not escape this parallelism of mirror-image and original if one posits, as Plato does, an artificially produced mirror as a guiding model instead of a natural mirror. The artificial mirror represents no less slavishly than the natural one. If play is a mimēsis, it is nevertheless not mirrorlike in the strict sense. The poet, the poiētēs, does not at all relate to the lawgivers, generals, and statesmen like a slavishly, faithfully reproducing mirror that would, moreover, be reliant on legislators, generals, and statesmen acting as seriously during the poetic mirroring—as the poet does toward appearance. If the poet reproduces such forms of life, then this still happens freely—at the very least he is not dependent on the simultaneous presence of his model. He can reproduce from his memory, from his imagination, without the reproduced thing being actual at precisely the same time. One could say that Plato does not intend the mirror-model in the entirely strict sense—we would overspecify his thought to the point of absurdity if we should insist on the simultaneity of original and reproduction. But this simultaneity is not just any moment, not a peripheral feature of the mirror, but is rather the feature that distinguishes the mirror-image from all other reproductions. It is not some vague relatedness to an “original” that constitutes the mirror as such, and also not the exactitude of the rendering, but rather the indissoluble simultaneity of the archetype [Urbild] and its reproduction [Abbild]. This “simultaneity” has its great difficulties as soon as we attempt to grasp it conceptually. There exists spatial and temporal proximity between the tree on the shoreline and its mirror-image in the water. But the mirror-world “in” this mirror-image has its own irreal space that we see into, to be sure, yet remains “inaccessible.” And events occur in this inaccessible, irreal space—clouds sail by in the sky; the mirror-image-world manifestly has its own irreal time. But in the way that the space of the mirror-world opens onto actual space in the manner of a window, so, too, does the time of events in the mirror-world open itself onto the time of actual events. Thus it is rather a simultaneity of two times than a simultaneity within one and the same time. And yet it is the latter, too. For the actual cloud-drifts in the firmament and their luminously conveyed traces on the surface of the water are simultaneous events in one time, in the time of actuality. With the moment of the “image-bearer,” the mirror-image extends into real space and real time; with the moment of the “image-world,” in contrast, an irreal space and an irreal time is posited. Yet it is precisely this irreal image-world that is in a firm relation of dependence on the original; the former renders the latter’s reflection inversely, but otherwise faithfully according to all aspects of the appearance, indeed in immediate “simultaneity.” Mirror-images can last only as long as their archetypes stand in the light; they are bound to them and cannot at all exist on their own. The fixing of a mirror-image in a material receptive to light, as, for instance, in a photograph, is something else. The mirroring of things in natural mirrors was surely a motive for human beings to capture reproductions of human beings and things by means of an artificial fabrication of images. In mirroring one was able to observe the graphic means of nature itself, to study the manner in which it depicts the outlines and colors of an irreal, image-worldly thing in real lines and real colors. Insofar as the reproduction is fabricated in a methodical, technical fashion and receives a lasting form in a specific material, the detachment of the image from the original is accomplished. To be sure, it is still a “reproduction”; it refers in itself to something whose image is captured. But if the image is given, the original no longer needs to be given immediately, too. Indeed, the possibility emerges, in increasing measure, that the formation of the afterimage is also already detached from the exemplar to a certain degree during production; formal elements are combined, characteristic individual features are overemphasized, other ones recede—in a word, it treats the original freely and eschews the character of mirror-resemblance in favor of capturing essential features. The image, although it is still a reproduction, already provides a “variation” on actuality; it does not mirror, it interprets. And, finally, an image can also free itself entirely from every reproductive function, can present a combination of colors and figures without an objective sense. What is it then? Is it then only an expression of tensions in the soul of the image-maker, only a manifestation of psychic reality—or is it a free and at the same time necessary play of colors and forms? Does not play itself here enter into the image-character of the image—perhaps not only a human, all-too-human play? It is not an accident that the Platonic critique of the poets is oriented by the paradigm of the mirror, by that image that, so to speak, contains no elements of play in itself, which in the strongest sense is a reproduction. Plato took up the image-form, which is devoid of all relation to play, in order to use it as the paradigm for the determination of the mimetic nature of play or the poetic art. The mirror is, as it were, mimēsis most of all; it is the unsurpassable extreme of a merely imitative repetition. The human being makes nothing at all with the mirror, so to speak—light itself depicts the counter-images of visible things on the surfaces of the mirror; here the human being can only comport himself by observing in a purely passive way. And if the mirror becomes the disillusioning metaphor for poetic art, then what is thereby implicitly expressed is that the poet produces nothing independent and actual at all—he merely makes mirror-images, repeats in an impotent and merely copying way what already is, repeats beings merely according to their superficial appearance, and only produces something illusory in a nugatory sphere of appearance. All moments in the phenomenon of the mirror that exhibit slavish reproduction and a lack of creativity are singled out by Plato in order to devalue the poet in his claim to truth. Only he skips over the characteristic of the essential simultaneity between original and reproduction in the mirror. And he must skip over it, if he wants to hold on to his destructive paradigm for the devaluation of the poets. Had he also acknowledged this moment, an interpretation of the poet as someone who merely mirrors the serious life of human beings would have scarcely been possible. This counter-critique of the Platonic critique of the poets is not, as one perhaps could suppose, dependent on the overestimation of a single feature in the phenomenon of the mirror. Plato’s condemnation of the poets brings together two moments that are at odds with each other: the productivity of the poet on the one hand, and the completely unproductive function of a mirror to repeat on the other hand. The real force of his critique consists in the thesis that the poetic productivity of which the poets are so proud is precisely the most uncreative and cheapest repetition, is, as it were, a pale imitation [Spiegelabklatsch] of everyday actuality, which for its part is already a reproduction of the archetypal idea. It is not the poets who conceive of themselves as mirrors, but rather in the eyes of the philosopher who knows the stages of truth and of the truly actual, the productive power of poets merely resembles the impotence of a mirror—play resembles the mirror-image. Platonic thought does not have its subject matter in the universal relation between play and the image in general, which is represented by the ancient gods of play, Dionysus and Apollo, by the god of the mask and the god of the lyre; nor does it have its subject matter in the pictorial powers of play and in the elements of play in the free formation of the image—but rather it has its subject matter solely and in the strongest sense in the attempted “exposure” of play as a mirrorlike impotence. This exposure does not succeed, however, as an evident phenomenal proof that persuades those who only ever retrace the course of thought. Plato cites an abundance of good arguments for his thesis—and yet these arguments for the most part operate with awkward11 analogies of play to image.
However, Plato was not able explain incontrovertibly how the image as an analogue of play could only be a mirror-image. Only if he were right that play and poetry are mirroring, and indeed in the sense of a completely impotent afterimage and reproduction of another, ontologically stronger being, only then would the overcoming of the power of play belonging to existence be achieved. The interpretation of poetry as mimēsis is expressed from the vantage point of disenchantment. Plato certainly does not become a sober-minded philistine; he is never completely removed, even in his loftiest thinking, from the vital élan of play. But his enthusiasm is broken by Socratic irony. Enthusiasm that is not conceptually broken cannot and may not count for him as the higher form of life—he must subordinate it to thought. And the interpretation of play as mimēsis becomes the weapon in this war. Now if we, however, for our part, pose the question as to what extent there exists an analogy between the structures of the image and the structures of play, a certain parallelism cannot be denied. In play we produce an image of life, we provide a “variation” on the serious enactment of existence, we cultivate [bilden . . . aus] as-if-comportments in which we exist only jokingly and playfully, but do not enter into them with the existentiell gravitas of our life. To this extent, a fictive element belongs to every kind of play, even to the most ordinary pastimes. But far and away most kinds of play “portray something.” The character of portrayal can sometimes belong only to the plaything, but as a rule it encompasses the player himself; in the instance of play, this player has a “role,” a specific, sense-imbued function, and in this role stands both for himself and his fellow players. The play-companions, who have been embraced by a sense-imbued interplay and whose respective roles are coordinated with each other in it, live in a communal and a communally apportioned “playworld.” This play-world is itself something irreal, although it involves actual human beings. But it involves them precisely with regard to the characteristics of their roles, and thus as having imaginary attributes. The “playworld” is not an actual/real situation of actual/real human beings; it has a peculiar “illusoriness”—it is nothing actual and yet not nothing. And it also by no means exists only in the souls of the players; these players do not dream a collective dream. If they perform the life-enactment of playing in the real actuality of life, they are precisely at the same time enraptured in an irreal sphere and have therein a communal, “intersubjectively” recognized continuity of sense depending in each case on the overall sense of the instance of play. The “playworld” in fact has a remarkable structural similarity to the “image-world.” It is similarly enclosed in itself and set off against external surroundings. But as the image-world does not, indeed, signify a disruption of the real context of things, and where the image-world appears, simple actuality does not have a gap but rather is continued in the “image-bearer”—as the water qua water passes through the mirror-image of the tree on the shoreline without being disturbed by the irreality of the image-world—so the playworld, too, does not disrupt the real context of human beings and things. The playworld in itself is indeed located in a closed-off space, yet in the midst of this real context as an irreal appearance; it has its real substrate in the playing human beings and their material playthings, which function as “bearers,” as it were. A playworld can never exist alone by itself; it is always reliant on the simple actuality of players and playthings. In a manner that is difficult to describe, it “overlays” a group of actual human beings who are united by the fact that they are playing together, and yet in doing so it does not cover them up. Both the player and the spectator of the play understand the difference between the actual actors and the functions of the roles in play. The one playing enters into his role, so to speak, but he does not lose himself thereby. We are well acquainted with the manifold phenomena of the intensive identification of player and role, but even in extreme devotion the player does not confuse himself with the character that he portrays according to the role. He can “awaken” at any time from his immersion in play. The playworld is an irreal appearance that “embraces” the ones playing, overlays them with the roles of characters and yet does not thereby cover them up in reality. As we still see the water, on which the mirrored appearance gleams, through the mirror-image of the tree on the shoreline, so we can always see the real players through all irreal roles. As the image-world necessarily has a real bearer, so, too, does the playworld. This is perhaps most recognizable in the play activity of the theater. As the frame delimits the image, so the stage delimits the irreal space and the irreal time of the playworld. The playworld-space and playworld-time have neither place nor duration in actual space and time. They do not at all appear in a system of positions of actual spaces and times, no more than the painted landscape in the image on the wall has a local and temporal connection with this wall. But as the irreal space of the image-world needs the surface of the canvas and the bit of wall on which it can appear in its peculiar “non-actuality,” so the playworld, too, needs a bit of simply actual space in order to appear, and thereby takes up actual time, too. And furthermore, each playworld, too, opens—analogously to an image-world—onto the context of actuality; like every image-world, it, too, is a “window.” One could formulate this general analogy between the image and play more precisely with the proposition that the image-world corresponds to the playworld as the bearer of the image to the real persons who play, and that in general the image-bearer relates to the image-world as, analogously, the actor to his role.
But if we thus emphasize the doubtlessly existing “analogies,” then we also ought not to overlook, on the other hand, the essential differences. The image is an irreal appearance; it depends on a thing. This “dependence” can occur in two ways: first, as a natural image that is grounded in specific circumstances of light and its reflection on blank surfaces, but in order to be an “image” it needs the human being who takes it in. Second, an artificial, manmade image of a thing can be produced; the irreal appearance is then deliberately manufactured. We can for now leave aside the difference between immobile and moving artificial images. But a production process and a terminating conclusion belong to the fabrication of an image. The finished image is an artificial thing of an entirely peculiar sort; it differs from a tool, a weapon, a piece of jewelry, and the like. It is, to be sure, something effectuated, an artificial thing produced in the activity of work, but bears in itself an irreal dimension. This is fixed, so to speak, in the image-thing. The “image,” as an artificial thing, is a product. One must perhaps distinguish the production of products that still encompass an irreal dimension in their actual content from the fabrication of other artificial things. But at any rate, production thereby terminates in the result of fabrication. The image-world-appearance of the artificially produced image is a result that has left the process of production behind. But this is not the case with play. Playing is not an activity of fabrication, which would come to an end in a result detachable from the process of fabrication. We do not play after we have fabricated the game or the playworld, but rather we play only so long as we produce the playworld. The production of play does not come down to a result. Or in other words and formulated in a sharper antithesis: playing exists as the producing of playworldly appearance. The production of play primarily concerns human beings themselves, is a relation of enactment to a continually cultivated non-actual sphere of human roles—it only indirectly concerns things, insofar as they are used as playthings. The image is essentially a product, play essentially the act of producing. This fundamental distinction between the human being and the thing also restricts, in a certain way, the previously discussed “analogies” between the image and play. Above all, it should thus become clear that such analogies are still most readily “tenable” when they are not based on a comparison between human play and the pure natural image, but rather on such images in which the human being’s producing power has been documented. That means the mirror-image is most unsuitable for the analogical comparison. Human play does not mirror passively, does not repeat an original as a mere reproduction. In play there is in the strict sense no mirroring. That Plato’s critique of the poets operates with the equivalence mirror = painter = poet signifies, beyond all eristic, the “evil eye” of the disenchanted. It cannot be denied that equivalences between play and the image can be drawn and that a certain understanding of the structure of play even thereby emerges. But the question is whether an interpretation of play under the guidance of the paradigm of the image could bring about a primordial understanding—even if Plato’s malign orientation to the mirror-image were avoided. Everything here hinges on how we conceive the “non-actuality” of the playworld—whether from the role’s distance from the real actor, thus from the vantage point of unmasking, or from the enraptured upsurge of the player who vanishes into the god, that is, from the enchanting spell. In the one case the “non-actual” is such as to remain behind innerworldly things and has an entirely diminished, impotent, indeed almost nugatory Being. In the other case the region of the irreal playworld could be the mysterious and ambiguous sphere where what is more existent and more powerful than all things would come to appearance amid things. The Platonic critique of play encounters play in a late form of culture, as the play of a cult that is no longer truly believed in, as an ironic distance from life, as making fun of a sublime spirituality. Certainly these are features that belong to play, too. But do they constitute its essence? And, above all, can the categories drawn from the phenomenon of the image be used to formulate a valid concept of play? We must proceed further in the direction of these questions.
The interpretation of play as mimēsis, as imitation, and the further exposition of imitation as reproduction—and the elucidation of reproduction as mirroring—these were the essential steps in the formation of the concept, which already the founders of metaphysical philosophy had accomplished so as to determine the place of play and the beautiful: play is associated with the beautiful and the beautiful with play, and both become a prefiguration of the true and are related to that which is veritably true as appearance is to Being. The ontological status of play and the beautiful is determined from their distance to the proper Being of the idea; its positive significance is seen solely in mediation, in the transitional character of beautiful appearance, in its referral to what properly is. The metaphysical assertion concerning the transitional nature of play and the beautiful remains itself somehow transitional, moves restlessly back and forth between recognition and rejection, sometimes emphasizing their distance, at other times their nearness to the truth. Beautiful play and playful beauty are conceived as harbingers. However, a harbinger has a perilous ambiguity: it can indicate and it can dissimulate—it indicates when it points out beyond itself, brings tidings of something that is different and more essential, and, in indicating, itself recedes; it dissimulates when it passes itself off as the true thing. Play in the beautiful can be a harbinger of philosophy as the guide and escort of the soul, as the “handmaid of the Lord,” so to speak, the ancilla philosophiae, but it can also be the worst adversary, a seductive daemonic power that opposes thinking and leads it astray. The metaphysical interpretation of play ever orbits around this referential character, play’s exceeding of itself, the moment of a strange transcendence, but it interprets this transcendence in terms of a paideia that is thought philosophically, as the drawing and e-ducating pull toward the true Being of the idea. And the perspective provided by the model of technē is employed to this end. Insofar as play is taken as a technē and technē in general is already understood as imitation of an archetypical idea, play manifests itself as an altogether derivative technē, as a completely impotent and illusory production, namely as a production of mere appearance and thus as an imitation of an imitation. In this conceptual mastering of play, in which metaphysical thinking grounded itself and asserted itself against a great antagonist, the categories were formed that extensively dominate the traditional understanding of play and Western aesthetics and thereby also determine in advance the situation of our question concerning play. For this reason, negotiating the ancient quarrel between the poets and the thinkers is no antiquated affair, which over and done with would lie behind us, but rather remains a task. And this task consists not least in keeping alive12 a suspicious doubt concerning the intellectual domination of play by metaphysics.
We have already said that the interpretation of the phenomenon of play by way of the phenomenon of the image incontestably has a genuine, concrete ground, and thus does not present an arbitrary, let alone malicious distortion of the facts. In fact, many structural similarities exist between play and the image, which manifest themselves in the analogical parallel between the world of the image and the world of play, between the bearer of an image and the player preceding his role, and so forth. The structural analogies could of course be worked out with much more discrimination and subtlety than we have done in our rough preliminary sketch. We have only gone as far as we have in this direction in order to accentuate the legitimacy in the metaphysical interpretation of play, its fundamentum in re. It is indeed not false, even if it is perhaps fatefully one-sided in overemphasizing subordinate features of play while suppressing the essential ones. The structural affinity of play with the characteristics of the image was the entry point for the metaphysical critique and overpowering of play. Here leverage could be applied so as to topple old idols. That the analogy between play and the image was thereby overemphasized with a view to destruction, and indeed was “overextended” with the orientation to the mirror-image, must be understood from the bellicose situation of metaphysics: metaphysics could only bring its conception of the world as a universal, tiered, rational structure of beings to completion through the suppression of the view that the prevailing whole of the world was a game. “Rational order” or “play”—that was now the question. Work of methodical and technical nous—or the tragicomedy of the ascent and decline of all finite things from the nameless nocturnal womb and tomb of every individuation? Are beings as a whole a taxis, a meaningful structure of universal reason, of the concept conceiving itself, or are they the ultimately inconceivable play “of the child who moves the pieces on the board back and forth”?13 If the founding of Western metaphysics was carried out precisely according to a projection of Being that subordinates Being to thinking, einai to noein, then its position on play had to attain paradigmatic significance. And thus even play was subsumed under the universal principle of reason as a prefiguration of the rational. As the child plays and is rational in a still irrational way, as it prepares and practices for future adulthood, as child’s play is, so to speak, the instinctive anticipation of the later form of reason, so play in general—according to the metaphysical interpretation—is reason that is still disguised, a reason that is disguised in the sensuous, but already shimmering with the gleam of truth. It is precisely Plato’s thematic explications of the play of the child in the Laws that show with all clarity the basic features of the metaphysical understanding of play. And, likewise, all his magnificent interpretations of the erotic moments in philosophy, of the role of the beautiful in the soul’s path to the true, of playful appearance as referring to deeper seriousness and the like, reveal the unconditional will of this thinker to become master over this countervailing power. Interpreting play as an image has legitimacy; interpreting play as a mirror-image, however, is false—it is Plato’s overly trenchant, polemical anti-thesis.
However, what is actually conceived when play is interpreted with the categories drawn from the phenomenon of the image? Is play adequately understood from itself and in its ontological sense when it is described as a reproduction, as some imagistic portrayal of serious life? Play “corresponds.” Correspondence is a basic feature that is proper to it. Only it is questionable whether correspondence must be determined as a reproduction of beings. That, to a certain extent, play has structures analogous to the image and even a correspondence within the framework of these structures nevertheless does not preclude that the most essential correspondence of play precisely does not occur as a re-production. Yet precisely the traditional categories for play at our disposal have been drawn from the analogical relation to reproduction. But what “reproduction” even is remains in the background, unasked in this conceptual formulation. For reproduction as such is indeed not yet sufficiently understood and brought to light when one determines it as a reference back to an original. Certainly there does exist such a reference back to the original; a reproduction is always a correspondence to an archetype. But it is not always such a slavishly unfree one as in the case of the mirror. Reproduction [Abbild] is an image-from [Bild-von]; it bears in itself the referral to something else, is derivative and secondhand in relation to the archetype [Urbild]. And Plato does not tire of emphasizing this aspect of the image’s derivation and non-originality. It is the aspect that interests him most of all, because a grading, a gradation of Being can thereby be conceived as a system of references. Yet is the imagistic character of the image thereby sufficiently determined? Is information concerning the Being of the image sufficient if one always speaks of what has been reproduced? We understand the image’s intention to portray if we recognize the thing portrayed, if we can label it. That suffices for a practical association with images but does not suffice for a theoretical answer as to what an image is as an image. Of what a reproduction is, is now not the essential question, but rather what reproductivity, as something that is apparent and lets appear, is. The dimension of the imagistic itself must indeed also be determined in regard to what it itself is, and not only in respect of that to which the image refers. Although an image in its function of reproduction points away from itself, presents itself as “not being original,” and “expresses,” so to speak, its distance from the original, its non-originality is nevertheless itself an independent mode of Being. As an image it is “original.” And just as little is play that is put in parallel with the image already conceived in itself when it is discussed as a variation or portrayal of serious life. What ought to be asked in the first place is not what is varied and portrayed, but rather what variation, what playful portrayal as such is. For if we only keep in view what the original model for the playful imitation is, then we can indeed characterize play according to its intended content, but we move thereby in a vague and incautious pre-understanding of playing in general, and then we precisely do not experience play as what is genuinely questionworthy. Here it would be especially instructive to investigate forms of encapsulation in which instances of play occur within instances of play, and in which it is therefore not a matter of characterizing play only from its distance from imitated serious life. However much intellectual energy, conceptual subtlety, and contentious passion may lie in Plato’s critique of the poets, the fundamental feature of his thoughts is thereby still predominantly determined from the perspective of the graded reference of archetype and reproduction, original and afterimage—without the dimension of the reproductive in itself receiving a sufficient ontological characterization.
And that holds still more for play, which ultimately is interpreted in an analogical manner by the categories drawn from the phenomenon of the image. Yet the Platonic categories of the image are not sufficient for an understanding of the nature of the image—and even less sufficient, then, for a comprehension of play. This assessment has nothing to do with arrogant, know-it-all one-upmanship. It is a task for contemporary thought—as for every thought that is timely—to put the tradition into question and to whittle away our predetermination by a traditional inheritance that we have more or less thoughtlessly taken up. We have attempted to approach the question of play by way of the marvelous moment of the playworld’s “non-actuality.” Can this irreality be explicated by way of a comparison with the image? One can doubtless make such a comparison—and the Platonic critique of the poets indeed, as we saw, is based on this comparison—but it remains problematic as to whether the irreality of play is thereby understood essentially. The comparison between play and the image forces the interpretation of play into the fatal direction of an ontological devaluation. The gradation of the Being of beings as the slope from the highest idea of the good down to transitory sensible things is expressed by Plato with the help of the phenomenon of the image, which is thereby understood above all as a function of reproduction. As a reproduction or shadow relates to the thing itself, so the sensible thing relates to the idea, so sensuous belief relates to true knowledge. The reproduction is “less” than the archetype, the sensible thing less than the idea, the imagistic appearance less than the simple Being of a thing. The “non-actuality” of the playworld that belongs to play as a constitutive moment is understood as a residual reproduction of a more valid actuality and thus contains a negative accent. In play, one then says, we reproduce actual and serious activities, repeat them in an illusory and unserious way. The non-actuality of play is thereby less than the actuality of serious life. But “non-actuality” and “actuality” are here determined as ontological modes of beings. Here is the critical point. Thought with respect to beings, an imagistic appearance is undoubtedly less than the original thing. The image gives us only the semblance of a being, not the being itself. Yet, measured by actual Being, the semblance is not this either. In relation to actual Being, the semblance is a derivation.14 If human play is primarily an afterimage of innerworldly actual activities of a serious kind or of some original things, then Plato’s critique is justified. But precisely this “presupposition” has become doubtful to us. In play the features of reproduction emerge in a conspicuous form when it is seen with the eyes of the disenchanted. It stands to reason that ultimately the “non-actuality” of play acquires a transformed sense if it is conceived in the mode of its primordiality. Perhaps, then, the “non-actuality” is not less, but rather more than the simple actuality of things. The “appearance” could be something other than only a mere semblance.
In order to point out in advance the direction in which we see a problem here, we will briefly turn once more to the image as such. Even in the case of the image, we are acquainted with the possibility that the reproduction may recede: the reproductive character of the image is at its strongest in the mirror-image; it is already weaker in the case of the artificial image, for which it is not a question of photographic fidelity but rather one of capturing essential features. And it has almost disappeared in the case of the pure composition of colors and figures. The less “reproductive,” the more strongly “symbolic” an image is. We certainly ought not thereby to misunderstand the symbol as a sign and to replace the graphic function of the image by the abstract15 function of the sign. A sign need not be similar in appearance to the thing signified. Traffic signposts in the streets, for example, are signs whose meaning has been determined by convention and can now be read by those in traffic. “Symbols” themselves can appear in various things, in simple things, but also in images and even in signs as well. It is wrong, however, to want to elucidate the symbolic character of the symbol by what pertains to the image or the sign.
But this claim appears to be contradicted by the fact that the “symbol” was initially precisely a sign, indeed an identifying sign, for instance a broken coin whose halves were given to friends separated by great distances. If one sent a visitor to his friend, he gave him the one half to take along as infallible proof: the places where the coin had been split into two had to be matched to each other, the one half had to be completed by the other. Now, both features were significant for the symbol: the “fragmentation” and the “completion.” Symbolon comes from symballein, “coinciding,” and signifies a coinciding of the fragment with what completes it. Now, there are certainly many kinds of forms and possibilities of fragments coinciding into a complete unity. In the coarsest and at the same time subtlest way, Plato offers in the Symposium, in the speech of Aristophanes, an allegorical interpretation of love: the halves of the human being cut apart by the gods seek each other, wandering around, the man the woman and the woman the man; they are symbola, halves of life arranged for completion, which first constitute the whole human being only when they fit together properly. But the male-female completion of the unity of human life does not remove the limitation of even the “whole” human being. In a deeper sense, all finite things in general are fragments—whether they are determined to be maimed or intact, whole or in privation. Each finite being is not everything, is only this, is confined within limits, separated from surrounding beings, is not everywhere, but rather in precisely a specific place, is not for all time, but rather only within a delimited duration. Being, to the extent that it belongs to finite things, is a variously fractured and restricted Being; it is fragmentary, splintered, rent apart and cleaved asunder. Numerous and polymorphous beings look like the rubble of Being. But all such rubble and fragments are at the same time subtended by the omnipresence of the one, worldwide Being, which is everywhere and for all time, which in its simple rest embraces the ravages of opposition and contradiction, the power of negativity. It gathers the fragments and yet does not afterward first piece itself together from them. The whole, in which all finite things appear, is not assembled from finite building blocks—it precedes all dismemberment and contains it within itself. The world-whole is the first and the last whole, which is ahead of all individual things and also lies above and beyond them all. Yet we never find it at all, so to speak, immediately in or among things. It holds itself at a remove from us. We ourselves are finite and are also attuned to finite things in our understanding of Being. When we use the word “Being,” we use it initially and for the most part as the Being of beings, that is, as fragmentary, ruptured Being, as the Being of individuated things. And yet at the same time we always have an intimation of a more primordial unity of Being—and occasionally this worldedness of Being flashes in some finite and frail individual thing; as a fragment the latter experiences a “com-pletion” of a peculiar kind. Not just any kind of completion, but rather the completion by the whole: the light of the world falls on an innerworldly thing and raises it into the great radiance of the universe. The finite thing, the fragment of Being, becomes “transparent,” as it were. Yet we must beware of an unfitting interpretation; we ought not to make the finite thing into a metaphor, a sign for another being. “What is destructible / Is but a metaphor”16—that holds for metaphysics in its distinction between the temporal and the eternal but does not hold for a thinking that strives after world-wisdom, for which the finite is no refuse of the idea and no nugatory appearance, but is rather essentially the intraworldly, which, however, now and then can flare up in the light of the world. The completion here brings nothing along in addition, does not add something that until now was missing and outstanding, does not bring some being to another being, does not in general get rid of the fragmentary character of finite things—rather it more expressly puts them, precisely as these finite individuations, back into the encompassing world-whole. Thus, we must think the completion from the world-whole and not from an intraworldly wholeness. Here it is not a matter of making some rubble whole again in the sense of the wholeness of inner-worldly things, but rather precisely of conceiving innerworldly wholeness as such as a fragment. Things then become symbola—not as signs for something different; they are symbola as themselves, inasmuch as they exhibit their finitude as intraworldliness. We customarily live in a peculiar captivation and blindness: we perpetually deal with beings, with finite and delimited things, but we do not concern ourselves with what such finitude is in general. We live for the day, live immersed in the world and do not at all think to ask wherein and on what basis we live. We are assailed by the incessant intrusion of the things surrounding us, but we do not consider the field, the space and the time of such intrusion. Only seldom and for the most part also briefly do things become “world-profound” for us, attain a reference to the prevailing whole without our being led away by them to something else; rather, in these exceptional cases, we still remain among them, but turn to them more profoundly and experience how the whole resonates through them. In becoming world-profound, a thing becomes a symbol; the symballein of the being and the universe takes place. And this is the most primordial enchantment: the unnamable power of the totality appears in the midst of frail things. The stars of the night sky can revolve around a pair of twinkling eyes, the world-light can shine on a weapon—as on Odysseus’s bow after the slaying of the suitors—and the simple breaking of bread can be a symbol in the highest sense. The human being cannot freely bring about such transformations of things whenever he wishes. The gleam of the world-light on intraworldly things comes unbeckoned—like an avalanche.
And yet there is a strange17 mode of comportment in which a human being’s “influence” takes place in a certain way, that is, the magical practice of enchantment. We are used to viewing this as a possibility done away with long ago, which has been suppressed and overcome by rational culture and only infrequently still occurs as a vestige of the superstitious way of thinking. We no longer believe in magic. But the early human being practiced magic in cultic play, and the child, too, in its play-activity behaves surprisingly like the “primitive.” That at any rate provides an indication of deeper connections. For magical savages and for the child, play is not characterized as a sphere of non-actuality that is determined to be “less worthy” on account of its distance from customary things and their tangible actuality. On the contrary. The “non-actual” has here an emphatically positive character, is a mode in which something that is more powerful and ontologically stronger enters into the customary sphere of life. The non-actual is characterized as the elevated and genuine. The “fairytale-like” and the “wondrous” is that which has validity in the best sense. However, that does not mean that the child and the primitive do not see simply actual things, going around, so to speak, as though in a dream, “sleepwalkers,” as it were. They instead actually have a very distinctive feeling for the difference between customary things and the “fairytale-like.” Only this difference is evaluated in a different manner—differently than as otherwise occurs in the rational culture of human beings and adults. “Non-actuality” is no objection, no degradation. In play they feel closer to what is essential and genuine. Their play has an entirely peculiar and strange seriousness. We lack the proper concepts for it, although we still commonly enough go about with the difference between play and work, play and seriousness. But these schemata break down when it becomes necessary to actually grasp the magical cult-play of the primitive and the play of the child. We will initially try to attain a first preliminary conception of the cult. In doing so, we will first have to address the human side.
The cult in general is indeed a relation between human beings and gods and thus cannot be adequately determined from the human side alone. The human-all-too-human statements about this can always be surpassed and outdone by what the god himself announces through the mouth of his prophets and messengers. However, the cult indisputably has human roots, too. And for the moment we wish to ask about these. The human being in general is, at all times of his earthly history and prehistory, a being that relates itself to itself. The self-relation of human existence is the basic feature that separates us from the animals. This self-relation, to be sure, has a different character in the archaic past than it does in the historical times of culture. It is not yet determined by a differentiated understanding of Being, by a richly developed language, by a rational tailoring of the whole conduct of life. Existence is still simple, yet it is also whole; all primordial fields of life exist for the primitive, too: he loves, he works, he struggles, he fears daemons and the formless, incomprehensible power to which he knows he is exposed, he has the urge to venerate, and he buries his dead. Hunts and war campaigns, nomadic wandering or the earliest form of agriculture, weddings and funerals, sickness, need, joys and sorrows constitute the course of his life. He does not merely live out this life, does not just simply carry on with it—he relates himself in his life to his life. Perhaps not so much as an “individual,” but rather as a tribe, as a horde, as a clan. And such self-relation is thereby also less a specific action than an abiding within traditional interpretations, a maintenance through rites and prescriptions, through rules governing what is taboo. The strict bondage of primitive existence by the taboo, however, does not exclude the fact that now and then the self-relation “actualizes” itself, so to speak, brings itself to life, and renews itself. That happens in festivals. The festival does not have the pragmatic sense of only a relaxation from the monotonous routine of the everyday, an unharnessing from the yoke of work—it is above all the bringing to presence of the whole sense of life, an orientation of the human being concerning his position, concerning the relations determining him: concerning his relations to the gods and to the departed dead, to the daemonic powers who offer fertility to the fields and to women, and who can also send famine and sickness, who can conceal themselves in animals and trees and appear in countless forms. That which incessantly determines the life of the primitive human being to such an extent is both alarming and consoling: he cannot “think” in a non-sensuous way even the prevailing of natural daemons; he must “see” it, “behold” it, have it before his eyes, in order to understand how it pertains to him. And such beholding happens in cultic play. Here the prevailing of the forces under whose power the human being finds himself becomes visible. The sense-context that encompasses him18 becomes lucid. Cultic play stands in close proximity to the consecrating activity of sacrifice and is a grand ritualized gesture, an image of the whole. And precisely therein lies its genuine paradox. It does not reproduce determinate regions, so to speak; it rather lets the whole arise, and in a delimited scene. The whole shines back within itself, so to speak, and shines forth “in the image”: it is made finite in a finite thing—this image is a symbol in the primordial sense. And on account of this, the moment of non-actuality is here grasped entirely otherwise. The cultic dancer, player, or priest is not conceived of as “more actual” than his role of representing the daemon; rather the daemon appearing on the cultic scene is much more actual, forceful, and powerful than the man who portrays him. Portraying has the character of being entranced, of being taken over by the power that is portrayed. The irreality of the scenic image is the space of admission, as it were, for an overwhelming superiority. The whole of all the prevailing powers imposes, so to speak, scenic representation on a delimited, small space within this whole. The whole, which is never visible as a whole, appears in a field within itself. It is reflected back [reluzent] into itself. The totum goes back into a part of itself and elevates this innerworldly part through the proof of the shining back [Rückschein] of the whole. Because of that, everything here is different than in a conception of play as a reproduction of something actual in the medium of a “non-actuality.” Here “non-actuality” is19 the basic feature of the symbolic representation of the whole of the world in an innerworldly being. Cultic play brings to presence the universal sense-context of primitive existence, is an expression of its world-relation. The world becomes lucid here; here play is truly a world-view.