The ambiguity of the freedom and purpose of play in modern German philosophy

ABSTRACT

Play is omnipresent, but its definition is controversial. In recent German philosophical discourse, it is rightly pointed out that play is ambiguous in the sense of having conflicting meanings. However, it is surprisingly marginalized that this ambiguity can be found already in modern German philosophy, such that one meaning of play is emphasized in some theoretical contexts and the opposite in others. In this context, I demonstrated the ambiguity of play in terms of its freedom and purpose in that tradition by discussing paradigmatic conceptions of play: Play is highlighted as free in Kant and as unfree in Gadamer (1); and as autotelic in Fink and as heterotelic in Adorno (2). This will contribute to the philosophical discussion of play and bridge it with the interdisciplinary one by implying that they share the same concern, the ambiguity of play.

KEYWORDS:

• Play (game)
• ambiguity
• Kant
• Gadamer
• Fink
• Adorno

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this paper and to the participants of the Colloquium on Contemporary Aesthetics (Kolloquium Gegenwartsästhetik) in the winter semester 2023/24 of the State Academy of Fine Arts (ABK) Stuttgart for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the term ‘play’ interchangeably with the term ‘game’, which is consistent with the usage of the German equivalent ‘Spiel’. The difference between the two terms is worth keeping in mind when considering the question of whether the rule is necessary for a play, but it is not relevant in the present text. And the concept of ‘play’ can refer to both ‘play action’, ‘object’ (such as chess) and ‘an ontological sense’ that cannot be reduced to these, depending on the context.

2 In this paper, I employ the word ‘recent’ or its adverbial form to refer to the twenty-first century. The term ‘modern’ is usually taken in the philosophical discipline to designate the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. However, since it is acknowledged that the history of play as a philosophically relevant concept in this timeline begins in the eighteenth century (as suggested in the last paragraph of the introduction), I make use of this term more specifically to indicate the timeline from then to now.

3 The incompleteness of the understanding that takes play only as autotelic, see Section 3.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seonghyun Kim

Seonghyun Kim is a play philosopher from the Republic of Korea who reflects on play through modern German philosophy and vice versa. As a PhD candidate, he is currently writing a dissertation on the concept of play in this philosophical tradition in terms of its ambiguity between activity and passivity at the ABK Stuttgart, Germany.