2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

82
A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
features of play are what Hegel seems to need, as we have seen, in his concept of Play and
God’s Love playing with itself that may bring philosophy to an end. This may suggest, in
other words, that Hegel’s speculation rests on a linguistically infelicitous contingence of
the German language. Once clarified with the help of some English savvy, the word Spiel
would appear to be just an ambiguous term referring to different and unrelated activities, a
word no more puzzling than any of the innumerous homonyms that any language has to of-
fer.
However, a moment of reflection on the uses of “play” and “game” is enough to realize
that the situation is not so simple. In fact, the oppositions “serious vs. non-serious”, “child-
ish vs. adult”, etc., play their role within the very concept of Spiel and within Spiel’s com-
ponents of “game” and “play.” Even the most serious game cannot be totally “serious” if it
is still to be considered a game in the proper and non-metaphorical sense. For example: the
game of chess, even when played by world-class masters for substantial monetary rewards
is a game because it is not considered part of the normal productive activities. It is not
“work,” although the players work as hard as most workers, because playing chess is not a
productive activity. In this sense, the chess player, in spite of all of the game’s seriousness
and brainy reputation, is closer to the child’s swinging in the playground than to the worker
in a factory. On the contrary, when we speak of the “game of love”, or the “game of war,”
we are leveraging on one component of game, e.g. the strict, rule-based, regulated structure,
but we are leaving aside the playful, non-serious engagement. And it is precisely for this
reason that we may say that war and love are “like” a game: although they are not games
at all, with such an expression we want to stress their formal, well-regulated character
while—at the same time— holding fix their distance from real games.
Conversely, even when we say, as we often do, that love, for example, is “just” a game,
we do not generally mean to identify love with a game. We are not saying that love is eq-
uiparable to chess. Rather, we are saying, in an almost prescriptive mode, that love should
not be considered such a serious affaire because, after all, it might be considered as point-
less as a game of chess, where the winner and the loser, once the game is over, are neither
better nor worse off than when they started. In other words, whenever we use “game” in the