2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

“EIN SPIELEN DER LIEBE MIT SICH SELBST…”
dialectic of reciprocal mediations. Only then, and for the first time, the Absolute becomes
really expressible, or rather comes to the expression that marks the sign of true comprehen-
sion. Once the concreteness of the Substance as explicated in the multiplicity of its deter-
minations has been recovered, then God and God’s love acquire their full meaning because
they are no longer the vacuous objects of an intuition but rather the process itself of recip-
rocal self-determination. The absolute is the circle itself.
In the passage of the Vorrede that follows immediately the famous polemic with Schelling
culminating in the “nights in which all cows are black”, Hegel claims for himself the right
to use, and in a different and richer sense, such “trite” words as “God” and “Love.” After a
description of the circle of absolute knowing expressed in terms almost identical to those
of the previous quotation from the final chapter, 31 he goes on to say:
Das Leben Gottes und das Göttliche Erkennen mag also ein Spielen der
Liebe mit sich selbst ausgesprochen werden (68/18)
Literally translated,
the life of God and the divine knowing may thus be expressed as a
play(ing) of Love with itself. 32
The reference to love, and God’s Love in particular, is not casual. The young Hegel had al-
ready stressed the particular status of the members of a love relationship: they are in oppo-
sition but, in that opposition, united. In a fragment from the early theological writings, we
found a quite clear statement of the reasons why love is so important: on the one hand the
union of the lovers in love is radically and qualitatively different from the oppositions we
31. “[Das Wahre] ist das Werden seiner selbst, der Kreis, der sein Ende als seinen Zweck voraussetzt und
zum Anfang hat, und nur durch die Ausführung und sein Ende wirklich ist” (68/18).
32. The different semantic scope of “Spiel” and “Play” constitutes a major obstacle to the understanding
of all the passages in which Hegel uses Spiel and its cognates. In particular, what seems more troublesome
is the breadth of the German term, that covers both the relatively “unstructured” meaning of
“play” as well as the more regulated activities that the English language denotes by “game,” not to
speak of the area covered by all the cognates of “sport.” The English translator of the Phenomenology
has in fact opted for the latter (and quite narrow) meaning by rendering “Spielen” as a “disporting”
(Eng. tr. 10) Although clearly correct, this perhaps unavoidable choice narrows the semantic richness
of the German term to just one of its component. In order to limit the possibility of misunderstandings,
I have tried, in the following, to use the German term “Spiel” as a kind of technical term that covers
the three distinct areas covered by “play”, “game,” and (partially) “sport” in English.
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