2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
According to Hegel, play is both opposed to work and must include it. It follows that,
as we have seen above, the only possibility to make sense of what Hegel is saying is to as-
sume that the division between play and work, or rather between playfulness and serious-
ness is internal to Spiel itself. He would then not be proposing a contradictory definition
but rather drawing our attention to the complexity of the concept of Spiel—and therefore
to the complexity of the concept that Love’s Spiel expresses. In other words, he would be
saying that the life of the Absolute could be expressed as a form of playing, provided that
we do not forget the seriousness that can be involved in a playful activity.
But what is involved in this act of remembering? Or, to put it differently, what is in-
volved in the fact that the Absolute, and any understanding of the Absolute becomes con-
nected with the understanding of Spiel?
Merely stressing that play must be playful and serious at the same time—or even more,
that it can be playful only if it is serious, and vice versa—is clearly not enough. Once it has
been accepted that the playful and the serious must be considered together and as belonging
to the same concept, one has to show its inner articulation. In other words, one has to show
how is it possible that seriousness (all the way to the determination to die) and playfulness
belong together: why and how is it so? The clues provided by language may force the ur-
gency of the question upon us but cannot pretend to take the place of an answer.
In the Preface to Phenomenology, Hegel points explicitly to this problem and rephrases
it in terms of a difference between the in-itself and the for-itself of the “life of God and di-
vine knowledge”. The passage quoted above, in fact, continues as follows:
In itself, that life is indeed one of untroubled equality and unity with itself
[...]. but this in-itself is abstract universality, in which the nature of the divine
life to be for itself, and so too the self-movement of the form, are altogether
left out of account. [...] Precisely because the form is essential to the
essence as the essence is to itself, the divine essence is not to be conceived
and expressed merely as essence, i.e. as immediate substance or immediate
self-contemplation of the divine, but likewise as form, and in the whole
wealth of its developed form; only then it is conceived and expressed in actuality.
(10-11