Play and Fictional Realities

 "Play belongs essentially to the ontological constitution of human existence; it is an existentiell, fundamental phenomenon." (Fink, 2016: 18) [Heidegger's concept- An existentiell understanding addresses the facts about things in the context of the world, in terms of their existence, but differs from the ontological understanding. The latter is reached by going about our daily business, interacting  with things in the world, whereas existential understanding is theoretical and ontological in character.]

Eugen Fink’s book ‘Play as a Symbol of the World’ reminded me of Kurt Kallenbach’s assertion that our “persona” belongs to the “game” but we, the living beings, do not. Fink’s book unpacks the nature and essence of play, and in this publication, I will draw a parallelism between the ontological nature of play and the international legal system of commerce.

There is a maxim in law which states:

“Quid fas non veritas est” meaning “legality is not reality”. I find this meaningful since play has something which escapes the ‘actual’ too. Fink explains that:

"In playing we are certain of our social contact with our fellow human beings in an especially intense way. [...] Every kind of play, has an interpersonal horizon. We thus live in play, [...] the human being as the 'subject' of play." (Fink, 2016: 15)

Piaget explained how play in children evolves into adult games. For Piaget, the games that children play are a sort of unconscious embodying of a tiny microcosm. The social interactions emerge into the bounded space of the game. As the child develops into an adult, the games become bigger microcosms; they transform incrementally into the functional games that adults play. Thus, work is a form of play; acting as a lawyer for example. The legal game is nested into broader games. Piaget claimed that we start by playing games implicitly and unconsciously. Then we begin representing the game more consciously. Later, only after we know how to play the game, we start extracting and learning the explicit rules. At the later stage of moral development, we can realise that we are not only game-players and rule-followers but that we are also producers of rules. Therefore:

“You start by not knowing how to play games. Followed by being able to play a game with yourself. Then you can play with others. Then you can play ruled-governed games with a lot more people. And then you realise that you make the rules and you can make new games.” (Jordan Peterson on Jean Piaget) 

From Piaget and Fink alike, we find in play a sort of representation of the very essence of the world. But if we think about play in this way, then the human being seems to be "the only being in the vast universe who is able to correspond to the prevailing whole.” (Fink, 2016: 30) And in that way, it looks as if the human being is relating to something that is beyond this world, something that perhaps links to its real nature.  

The monopoly metaphor potentially describes this phenomenon the best as we, the men and women, are the living beings playing games, not the tokens within the games. Kurt Kallenbach explains that: 

“the birth certificated person is the “thing” one chooses to represent oneself in the game. The living being is NOT in the game, we are born in the game but since we are not in the game, we don’t have to get out of it. One only needs to recognise that we have subjected ourselves to a set of rules that are not the laws of nature, and nature is God. The living being is subject to the truth, whereas the fictitious character is subject to a different set of rules.”

Fink proposes a similar idea when he asks:

"Does play perhaps become a metaphorical dramatic play or spectacle of the whole, an illuminating, speculative metaphor for the world? Heraclitus poses the aphorism: the course of the world is a playing child, moving pieces on a board- a king's power belongs to the child" (Fink, 2016: 30)

So, in the legal world, we assume to be the “token”, we objectify ourselves and at the same time subject ourselves to a set of rules established by the world around us. As Piaget suggested, we play unconsciously, we learn how to play consciously, we understand the rules, but the latest stage of moral development is rarely acquired. At the latest stage, we should be able to understand that we are the ones freely subjecting ourselves to the rules of the game (society’s; church’s; corporate’s) that someone or something else set up for us. Only from there, from the position of internal kings, we will be able to set up our own rules within broader games. But why is it that in “the games of life” we do not seem to understand that "in the projection of a playworld, the one who plays conceals himself as the creator of this world"? (Fink, 2016: 25) On the contrary, we assume the legal world as a real and inescapable world, as if that is objective reality as such and there is nothing we can do to live without it. But Fink suggests that:

"play is conspicuously set apart from the whole futural character of life. Play [...] has the character of a pacified 'present' and self-contained sense- it resembles an 'oasis' of happiness arrived at in the desert of the striving for happiness that is otherwise our condition. Play carries us away as though transported to another planet where life seems lighter, more buoyant, easier." (Fink, 2016: 20)

Why could play not be pointing us towards the real truth about our very essence? In this publication I’ve examined the nature of this phenomenon we call truth by explaining the alchemical principle of the subtle versus the dense. In Fink’s above paragraph, I see this principle as meaning that perhaps play transmits us the very essence of our real nature, a lighter one than the one which is easily perceived by our senses. One that lives in the present time, away from constructs of time, space and more than anything, away from “density”. Is perhaps, therefore, the material world the illusion? Or is this world perhaps a form of play in its very essence? One which transports us “away” from “reality” and in which play in fact is just bringing us closer to the “real” reality?

And if we are thinking about play on those terms… it follows that we are seeing in play a form of transcendence from this world. Could play be a tiny glimpse of transcendence, of making the non-actual ‘actual’ for a moment? Is not play full of meaning?

"Play has only internal purposes, not ones that transcend it. […] Play 'interrupts' the continuity and context of our course of life that is determined by an ultimate purpose. It withdraws in a peculiar manner from the other ways of directing one's life; it is at a distance from them. But while it appears to escape the standard flow of life, it relates to it in a manner that is particularly imbued with sense, namely, in the mode of portrayal" (Fink, 2016: 20-21)

More importantly, does this interaction between the imaginary and the material reality have a meaning? Fink asks:

"What human and what cosmic sense does this imaginary dimension have? Is the strange land of the non-actual the elevated site where the essentiality of all things in general is invoked and brought to presence?" (Fink, 2016: 30) 

So… what comes first? Fink’s question is key to reflect on why do we perceive the fiction as the real, is it because from that place we create the real? Or is it because we are subjecting ourselves to somebody else’s games? This idea resembles Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the “shadows” projected into a wall become reality for those inside the cave who cannot see the trick being played. On a similar note to this idea of transcending illusion, only when the individual is able to come out of the cave and see things for what they really are, only then he is freed from the illusion. Fink also explains that:

"The entire Platonic doctrine of Being, which in large measure has determined Western philosophy decisively, operates again and again with models of reproduction like shadows and mirroring and thereby interprets the structure of the world." (Fink, 2016: 29) 

This quote leads us to a very interesting characteristic of play:

Appearance and Mirroring -

"The playworld is not suspended in a mere realm of thought; it always has a real setting, but is, however, never a real thing among real things. Yet it necessarily requires real things in order to gain a foothold in them. This means that the imaginary character of the playworld cannot be explained as a phenomenon of a merely subjective appearance." (Fink, 2016: 25)

The non-actual is dependent on the actual and games act as mirror-like representations of the actual, what we could call in this instance: the living.

"The ontic appearance (mirroring and the like) is more than just an analogue of the playworld; it occurs within the playworld for the most part as a structural aspect in its own right. Playing contains a "mirroring" in itself: the playworldly comportment according to roles." (Fink, 2016: 29) 

Maritime law has created a mirror-like playworld which appears as real but is a mere copy of the real. The real is beyond the game, and only once we separate ourselves from the game we can attain the real. Kallenbach has an explanation of how that happens when a child is born, this diagram represents the mirroring between the fictional realm (above) and the living beings realm (below):

Kallenbach says:

“The age of majority is irrelevant because it is not chronological. The age of majority is when this “child” or “man” is willing to take all the responsibility and thus full liability for his life. It is the moment the “child” is willing to assume 100% responsibility of his estate, both his land and property, or his will and testament. Does that mean he can have insurance? No. Does this mean he can let the State take care of him? No.”

Seems fair to say that only he who is fully liable can have a voice. Only with responsibility can freedom be attained. Thus, the more responsible, the freer. Nonetheless, full liability terrifies us, and so does freedom as a consequence, resulting in a “seriousness” of life which is mistakenly confused with “the real life” counterposed to play. Fink points out to the misconception of play in adults by arguing that "play is not understood in the content and depth of its Being. [...] It is thereby obscured and distorted. It is considered to be something non-serious, non-obligatory, and in-authentic, to be caprice and idleness." (Fink, 2016: 16)

I argue that it is precisely because it is “non-obligatory” and “non-serious” that play represents something meaningful and even transcendental. "The most obvious the seriousness of life becomes, the more obviously play disappears in regards to its scope and significance."(Fink, 2016: 17) And when we think about the “system” in this way, the legal system, the political system, the economical system, the religious system… don’t we feel a little bit freer? The philosopher Osho writes:

My teaching is: Drop the idea of work. Gurdjieff used to call his system ’The Work’ and I call my system ’The Play’. The very idea of work is dangerous, it will give you more and more ego. And it is not accidental that many of Gurdjieff’s followers went mad and died in agony. The reason was, he was trying to put the Eastern realization into Western terminology. And for the West, ’play’ is a dirty word. The West has been work-oholic for long; it is intoxicated with work. (This Very Body the Buddha, p. 33) 

Moreover, what if we are always “playing” when we act the roles we take up when interacting with others… When can we really say we are not acting a role? "Perhaps the adult plays just as much [as the child], only differently, more secretly, in a more masked manner" (Fink, 2016: 18)

This is certainly interesting wording which ties in with the definition of ‘legal person’ in Sweet & Maxwell (7th Edition, Section 113, p.336):

"A legal person is any subject matter to which the law attributes a merely legal or fictitious personality. This extension [...] is one of the most noteworthy feats of the legal imagination. Legal persons, being the arbitrary creations of the law, may be of as many kinds as the law pleases. Those [...] recognised by our own system, however, all fall within a single class, namely, corporations or bodies corporate."

Roles are a form of archetypal representations. Being a mother, for example, means certain traits which one could extract from very idea of ‘mother’. When the girl plays with her doll, she pretends to be her mother, she is acting out a role which she has seen from her mother and perhaps from other mothers around her and is extracting the essence of the archetypal form of a ‘mother’. Fink argues that “at the same time, it is no way the case that the little girl actually believes that the doll is a living child. She does not deceive herself about this. She simultaneously knows about the doll-figure and its significance in play. The playing child lives in two dimensions. Its essence, lies in its magical character." (Fink, 2016: 24) We can clearly identify the two worlds in this example, the actual and non-actual, being lived at the same time. I propose the question: when we step into our ‘jobs’, are we able to distinguish between the roles we play in society and our real essence? Or are we lead to believe that we are actually those roles?

"For here [in the concept of the player] there exists a very peculiar, though in no way pathological, a splitting of the human being. The player conceals himself by means of his "role"; in a certain measure he vanishes into it. He lives in the role- able to distinguish between "actuality and "appearance" (Fink, 2016: 24-25).

However, can the player call himself out of the role? There are roles in which there is the self in the role and some that the individuality and therefore conscience and free-will is lost in the role, like a police officer for example. In that case, the man or woman behind the ‘uniform’ is the living being endowed with free will and conscience, the police officer is the plaything. In the same measure that he is capable of maintaining certain individuality within the game, he is capable of being one type of police officer or another, whichever type he chooses with his limited free will. But that is nonetheless constrained to a set of rules which the game bounds him to. As a man, he is free to play or not that game, to act as a police officer or not, as in the grand scheme of things, he is not obliged to be acting that role nor playing that particular game.

When we talk about Natural Law, we are talking about something that is beyond men’s reach, that binds us all at the same time into this particular game which is life. Finding out the rules is the real conquest of this experience called life. Fink writes:

"playing is maintained and constituted by something binding. Playing is not limitless free. And yet the rules of play are not laws. What binds does not have the character of unalterable. (Fink, 2016: 23)

I suggest that we are not limitless free in our conquest to become Gods and make up the rules of the game of life. But we are ultimately free in how we choose to play it. The microcosmic games within this world, set up by other men, to which we subject ourselves indiscriminately, are not Nature’s laws. Perhaps real freedom consists of unbinding ourselves from other men’s games and aligning ourselves with the only game to which we are not rule producers, the only real, in which we choose life over fiction.