Towards the World: Eugen Fink on the Cosmological Value of Play

Abstract

According to Eugen Fink, a thorough elucidation of the meaning of play has the capacity to lead us towards an understanding of the world as a totality. In order to go beyond Plato’s understanding of play as an inferior copy of serious action, Fink provides an analysis of the cultic game. This form of playing cannot be said to be the origin of all play, but it enables us to demonstrate how the act of playing transcends circumscribed beings inside the world and provides a relationship with a higher whole, in which the community participating in the play is encompassed. A masked shaman does not represent a particular god, but brings to presence the action of gods upon humans as such. Thus, the cultic game is a symbol of a more important reality, not an inferior representation of an individual reality. This, however, is still not a sufficiently radical interpretation of the ontological dimension of play: the whole is only understood as an action of gods, i.e. mediately. Fink strives to demonstrate on the contrary, how play is a fundamental understanding of the world as a whole without any mediation. Such a relationship is, according to him, essential for humans, and it is already anticipated in several fundamental human actions such as work, combat, governance and love. The reason for this is that these actions all fight against human finitude against the background of the infinitely powerful world. But again, these actions only relate to the world by transforming factual entities that surround us, i.e. again only mediately. For this reason, Fink demonstrates, through another series of structural descriptions, how humans, things, space and time are all profoundly transformed when they enter the playing field. Fink thus presents a complex of reasons on the ground of which we can consider play as the only human activity that teaches us in a direct way how to transcend individual beings and understand their relationship with the world as a totality.