2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S PIELEN, THE ABYSS, AND THE CHILD
puts the meaning of life in an another world? How , and why, can Nietzsche think that the
love of chance and the identification with the rolling dice is essentially different from the
love of God?
Let us begin from the opening pages of the Zarathustra. In his first discourse, he nar-
rates three metamorphoses: he tells the story of the spirit that became a camel, then a lion,
then a child. The camel is the spirit in the age of nihilism, the animal that interprets life as
a succession of weights to be carried, and that accepts life only because it despises it. When
the camel becomes a lion, the spirit experiences the will as affirmation of independence, as
a vindication of its independence and of its freedom. However, the definitive overcoming
of nihilism, according to Zarathustra, can happen only in the age of the child, of the playing
child. He says:
The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a selfspinning
wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes-saying.”
For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes-saying” is needed:
now the spirit wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world conquers
(gewinnt) his own world22 The first Zarathustrean illustration of play is all contained in these two concluding sentenc-
es of his first discourse. The paradoxical status of play, however, is already well-delineated,
in spite of the concise description. Play is compared to forgetting, to movement, and, most
importantly, to a self-spinning wheel. Zarathustra’s image is much more than a metaphor
since play, in all the Indo-European languages has an essential connection with movement
or, to be more precise, with the freedom of movement. The engineeristic meaning of Spiel,
play, gioco, juego, etc. all point to the space between the mechanical components that war-
rants the possibility of their movement. In this sense, play is the closed space within which
its constitutive movement can take place forever. This means, as it has often been noticed,
that to play means always, although not exclusively, to be played, and in all the meanings
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra (New York: Viking Press; 1966) tr. Walter Kaufmann, 27.
Cf. the German: “Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich
rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen. Ja, zum Spiele des Schaffens, meine Brüder,
bedarf es eines heiligen Ja-sagen: seinen Willen will nun der Geist, seine Welt gewinnt sich der
Weltverlorene.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Berlin: de Gruyter:1968) 27.
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