2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
sequence, the Geschick of being could be interpreted as the specific realization of a game
instituted by someone else. On the contrary, they say “Aion/Geschick: a child that plays.”
There are no psychological or mythological undertones in this accent on the ludic world of
the child. The reference to such a world highlights a precise, and, supposedly, extremely
relevant, feature of play by pointing to the relevance of child’s play. What is important
about the way children play? Simply put, child’s play is creative. Creativity, here, means
just that the child at play is capable, contrary to most adults, to invent the game while it
plays. Child’s play is creative because it comports—in the same event—the institution as
well as the execution of the act of playing. The child invents the rules of the game and, by
so doing, creates a leeway which is not of course, spatial at all, but represents the spatiotem-
poral field within which actions are possible. It is precisely this aspect, I believe, that
Heidegger wants to emphasize by recalling the Heraclitean fragment and by underlining his
reference to the world of the child. But there is more in that reference. In particular, there
is another aspect of child’s play that Heidegger brings to the front in the lines immediately
following the previous quotation. He says:
Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into
view in the Aion? It plays because it plays. The because withers away in the
play. The play is without a “why”. It plays since (weil) it plays. [ib.]
Play, as I have stressed in the previous pages, has no external finality, it is perfectly self-
contained. Or rather: play resists the application of the very concept of finality, it resists the
application of the concept of a final cause that finds it raison d’être outside play itself. Does
this mean that play is totally arbitrary? Does this mean that the distinctive mark of any ludic
phenomenon is its improvised, poetic, extemporaneous character, as Nietzsche once em-
phasized? 21 The situation is actually more complex. Play, and especially child’s play, is nei-
ther arbitrary nor rigorous, but both at the same time.
“Play is without a why,” Heidegger affirms, and “it plays since it plays (es spielt weil
es spielt).” This does not mean that play is completely arbitrary, but rather that the mode of
being of play refers only to itself and only from and in itself is its rigor to be found. The
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth, Engl.: Penguin Books, 1978) 25.