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Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Trópos
Hermeneutics of Play: 
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
5
Saggi
2012-11-01
2023-05-24
2012-11-01
2023-05-24
139-155
1
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
2012/11/01
10.13135/2036-542X/7622
139
Gulf University for Science and Technology
2036-542X
1
155
Hermeneutics of Play: 
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7622/6346
5
                                                      trópos • anno V • numero 1 • 2012 — ISBN 978-88-548-5420-8
                                                            DOI 10.4399/97888548542089 — pag. 139–155 ( 2012)




                                                    Hermeneutics of Play
                                                                    The Absent Structure

                                                    T B–B
                                    Gulf University for Science and Technology



   : In several philosophical traditions, play is supposed to express a (method-
      ological, ontological) state of non–foundedness. I retrace the philosophical
      function of play in the hermeneutic tradition as it has been developed by Ast,
      Boeckh, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. I also refer to im-
      portant parallels in Derrida and Wittgenstein. Those philosophers identify ‘play’
      as a sort of ‘style’ that is not necessarily empirically present, but which can
      still be ‘seen.’ I contrast this intellectual model with Gehlen’s anthropology
      of games. Play as an ‘absent’ (stylistic) concept is compared to the idea of the
      ‘absent structure’ in structuralism.

   : Philosophy of play, hermeneutics, structuralism, Huizinga, Gadamer.



                                                                    L’art est un jeu. Tant pis pour
                                                                     celui qui s’en fait un devoir.
                                                                                               Max Jacob



. Introduction

In several philosophical traditions, Spiel, jeu and game are supposed to
express a (methodological, ontological) state of non–foundedness by means
of which foundational, metaphysical ways of thinking are reviewed or over-
come. Theories of non–foundation are not new. The Socratic refutation
of the techne says quite clearly what is not true but leaves wide open any
positive definition of terms like ‘knowledge’ or ‘the good.’ Socrates founds
an entire theory of knowledge on (a kind of holy) non–knowledge. Hegel’s
conception of Weltgeschichte (world history) as the manifestation of a Geist
exposes some of the main characteristics of philosophical definitions of
the game as a model of non–foundation: the Geist of history is absolute
self–reflexivity or self–consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) whose condition
is absolute liberty. The consciousness which is merely itself (which has

                                                                                                          
      Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


already found itself ) strives for nothing and is thus free and unfree at the
same time. Circular, gamelike structures of philosophical thinking appear
also in Nietzsche and Heidegger who have characterized the history of
philosophy as the symmetrical reversals of metaphysics, Christian versions
of Platonism, historical theories or any ideologies.
    Hans–Georg Gadamer introduces the notion of Spiel (play or game) in
relationship with Heidegger’s ideas on the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer’s
hermeneutics is determined by the notion of ‘historicity’ (Geschichtlichkeit)
claiming that within every process of understanding we are constantly
referred back to our own historical position. The process of understanding
is deprived of its (theoretical or methodological) ground and understanding
can look like a game. The game as a philosophical model is supposed to
represent the state of non–foundedness because it serves as the ground of
what cannot be grounded otherwise, as it has been expressed by Eugen Fink:
“The lack of a point of view can stimulate the human play drive: reason,
sense, and end will be grasped through the metaphor of the game.” (Fink
: , my translation)


. What is a Game?

Huizinga’s definition from the Homo Ludens has become the arguably most
classical definition of play or game: “Play is a voluntary activity or occu-
pation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to
rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and
accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that it is
      . The distinction the English language makes between play and game presents problems for
this article. What non–English authors like Gadamer, Huizinga, Derrida and Wittgenstein call Spiel
or jeu cannot consistently be translated as either game or play. Both in the English translation of
Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, by G. Barden and J. Cumming, and in Huizinga’s own English
translation of Homo Ludens, the word Spiel (or spel, in Dutch) is translated as play. Equally, Derrida’s
jeu in La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines (in L’écriture et la différence) has
been translated by Alan Bass with play. In English the distinction between game and play is neither
very clear nor much reflected in theoretical literature. Edward B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture ()
puts forward the fact that to play a game is something all participants of the game must have agreed
to, whereas a play can also be played against the will of some participants. One can be played with
but one cannot be ‘gamed with.’ Mary Midgley writes that Huizinga’s Homo Ludens “concerns Play
in general, but including Games, and [Huizinga’s] point is that Play is an essential element in all
highly regarded human activities.” (Midgley : ) Here, Game is conceived as a sub–category of
play, which is certainly consistent in regard to Huizinga’s book. However, on further scrutiny the
distinction between play and game can turn out to be a fallacy. Midgley’s main point is that games
can be considered as games only when being conceived as games by the people who play them.
All other human activities which are not games in the proper sense but in which we can observe
some gamelike moment must be called play. However, what are we doing when we ‘see play’ in
those activities? We see them as games. Game and play are not different in regard to their essence but
appear as a doublet.
                                                                    Hermeneutics of Play      


‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’.” (Huizinga : –) The game has ‘light-
ness,’ it fascinates through its superiority towards any finality and adopts an
apparently indifferent attitude towards ‘real life,’ and the feeling of tension
and joy together with the consciousness of being ‘free’ from daily life pro-
duces a certain state of mind that Friedrich Schiller previously characterized
as the ‘lightness’ of the game. The game, since it is totally liberated from
any end, cannot be troubled, in the words of Eugen Fink, “by a fundamental
incertitude.” (Fink : , my translation) Huizinga provides a list of
necessary qualities of games. (Huizinga : ) They must:

    a)   be voluntary;
    b)   be executed within certain fixed limits of time and place;
    c)   follow rules freely accepted;
    d)   follow rules which are absolutely binding;
    e)   be provided with an end in itself;
    f)   be accompanied by a feeling of tension and joy;
    g)   ensure the consciousness of being different from ordinary life.

The self–sufficiency of the game, which refers every philosophical ground-
ing back to itself in a circular fashion, produces a lightness settling down
right within the tension between superficiality (the fact of having no pro-
found ground) and profoundness (the fact of having no superficial ground),
in order to free itself once and for all from all determinations of philosophi-
cal grounding.
    Systematizations of game like the one provided by Piaget (), who
distinguishes between ‘spontaneous games’ (games without link with the
social world) and ‘institutionalized games’ (games partly controlled by so-
cial factors), claim to trace some games back to ‘spontaneity’ and others to
‘motives.’ Piaget’s system is inspired by Freud’s distinction between Lust-
prinzip (pleasure principle) and Realitätsprinzip (reality principle): games of
the Lustprinzip lean towards an immediate satisfaction in being completely
independent from reality whereas games of the Realitätsprinzip adapt partly
to reality. However, the latter do so not because they are concerned by ‘real
action,’ but because they try to modify their relationship towards reality
or to ‘assimilate reality to them.’ Piaget’s example is that of a child who
repeatedly conjures up dangerous experiences, trying to deprive those situa-
tions of their precarious character. Piaget concludes: “I can reduce the game
to a search for pleasure but only on the condition that this search will be
seen as subordinated to the assimilation of the real to the I. Ludic pleasure

     . Schiller writes in the fragment Der Geisterseher about a pantomime dance of young boys and
girls: “Leichtigkeit und Grazie beseelten jede Bewegung.” (Schiller : )
   Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


would thus be the affective expression of this assimilation.” (Piaget :
, my translation) Still, Piaget’s explanations do not answer the question
‘Why do people play?’ In spontaneous games he observes a moment of
spontaneity that can be perceived from a distanced point of view outside
the game while inside the game everything is well founded and nothing
is merely spontaneous. Even pleasure is not a positive quality in games
because, strictly speaking, pleasure does not exist in the players but only in
the game. The pleasure is not produced by the player’s consciousness, but
it develops independently. Gadamer, when seeking to free the concept of
play from its subjective meaning in philosophy since Kant, insists that the
player herself cannot inform us about this surplus that makes the game a
game: “Play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those
who play,” and we cannot find an answer to the nature of play “if we look
for it in the player’s subjective reflection.” (Gadamer : )
    Piaget’s ‘reality principle’ does not explain the existence of games either.
The triumph of the winner of the game is an internal triumph which cannot
be measured with ‘present’ categories of the ‘real’ social or historical world.
Even games of imitation and make–believe get their attractiveness not from
their perfect correspondence with reality but — like the real mimesis of the
good mime — from an inner correspondence with themselves: games are
‘good games’ if they are ‘real games.’
    The model of mimesis/imitation as a typical function of play has been of
particular interest for Derrida who detects a clear pattern of non–foundation
in the game of mimesis: “The mime imitates nothing. And to begin with,
he does not imitate. There is nothing prior to the writing of his gestures.
Nothing is prescribed for him [. . . ], he does not obey any verbal order,”
says Derrida about the mime. (Derrida : –) The mime does not
follow a script nor does he write his own script. In a way, he does ‘imitate’
but he does not imitate something. He does not think of his activity as an
imitation, he does not think that right now he imitates this or that. This is
exactly what the Swiss anthropologist Gustav Bally established in  when
writing about the relationship between playing and thinking: “In play there
is no indication of a duality of action in the sense of premeditations like ‘I
will do this’ or ‘now I do that’.” (Bally : , my translation). According
to Bally, all we find within the auto–motive activity of the game is a certain
mood or attunement (Stimmung) created by every game within its own
limits; and this mood decides how the game is perceived by the player. The
German phrase ‘Ein Spiel spielen’ repeats the noun to express the ‘what’ of
the corresponding verb, a rare phenomenon of linguistic self–sufficiency
which has fascinated Gadamer when reading Huizinga (Gadamer :
, fn. ). There is something inside the game that can only be captured
from this very inside, but which cannot be grasped by means of empirical
                                                          Hermeneutics of Play   


observations or philosophical systematizations because it is a matter neither
of objective rules nor of the player’s subjectivity.
   This is one of the reasons why purely empirical descriptions of games are
limited. The failure of such attempts becomes particularly clear in the work
of Arnold Gehlen who attempted to define games and their involvement
in social behavior. Through a particular ‘anthropobiological’ approach,
Gehlen attempts to put Max Scheler’s and Helmut Plessner’s ‘philosophical
anthropology on an empirical ground. Gehlen’s empirical approach can
be seen as diametrically opposed to Huizinga’s philosophical one. Gehlen
observes circular developments within all sorts of socializing processes,
which leads him in his main work, Der Mensch (), to the development of
a full–fledged ‘theory of play.’ Gehlen explains that gamelike structures can
be found in the intellectual development of young children and provides
an empirical description of circular patterns of actions and stimuli: “Here, a
movement of the legs produced a particular sensation in the soles of the feet
which then functioned as the stimulus for a continuation of the movement:
the movement furnished the incentive for its own repetition.” (Gehlen :
–) It is true that the circularity is similar to the state of self–sufficiency
experienced in a game: “In the sensorimotor circular processes, interaction
with a part of the world provides the impetus for its continuation; the
movement takes on a value of its own that spurs its further development and
finds gratification in its own vitality.” (Gehlen : ) Gehlen recognizes
that there is still another surplus in the game: “The behavior of jumping
balls on the roulette wheel, the chance distribution of colorful cards, etc.,
constitute the truly recreational or stimulating aspect of play and encourage
active participation in objectively meaningless, random events. The simple
redistribution of money is not a satisfying game in itself. . . ” (Gehlen :
) However, Gehlen also decides to reduce this surplus to an empirical fact:
“[Play] must involve ceremony, risk–taking, rules, colorful or stimulating
objects, and often even special clothing.” (Gehlen : ) The problem is
that any empirical definition of games has to end here and that any further
experiential surplus will be defined as merely “imagined, unstable interests,
which are divorced from needs.” Gehlen ascribes those interests to the
fact that the human being is not as specialized as the animal and cannot
always give specific directions to her actions. (Gehlen : ) In other
words, Gehlen eliminates from his agenda of anthropobiologism all those
unstable interests that lend games their paradoxical ontological foundation
and which have fascinated Huizinga, Fink, Bally, and Gadamer.
   Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


. Liberty and Presence

Cultural anthropologist Roger Caillois places being free in first place among
his six qualities defining game: “. free, . separated, . uncertain, . un-
productive, . rule–following, . fictional.” (Caillois : ) Huizinga’s
conception of the liberty of games is more subtle than Caillois’s since it
points to a paradoxical moment within the formation of liberty. Huizinga’s
formulation that play “follows rules freely accepted but absolutely binding”
shows that “liberty in games” is different from liberty we encounter in real
life. Where in real life we agree on certain rules, we do it either voluntarily
(in which case the act of following those rules will be voluntary as well); or
the rules have been imposed upon us, in which case the act of following
those rules will also be a matter of force. In games, on the other hand,
liberty has another status: the playing of a certain game must be voluntarily
agreed upon, but once the game is played, all liberty towards rules will
have to be cancelled. Only the philosophical distinction between inside and
outside (the distinction which the game strives to cancel) can crystallize
two distinct moments, once of liberty and then of force. To play or not to
play: this decision is a matter of liberty only as long as we look at the game
from the outside; at the inside of the game, however, the player is like a
slave following absolute rules.
    John Rawls expressed a similar thought saying that “if one wants to play
a game, one doesn’t treat the rules of the game as guides as to what is best in
particular cases.” (Rawls : ) The game has been liberated from liberty,
its liberty is so absolute that it cannot be compared to any liberty in the
real world. Liberty’s purpose, its dependence on a Lustprinzip granting an
eudaimonia or an, as Mill declared, “well–being” of the “liberated, eccentric
individual” (Mill : chapter III) exhausts itself into a repetitive, auto–
motive occupation in order not to obtain but to become its own Lustprinzip,
its own eudaimonia.


. Games and Philosophy

It is possible to see the world as a game in describing it as a self–contained,
self–sufficient entity. An example is to see the world as what Heidegger has
called ‘die Erde’ as an image or a metaphor depicting the world as “that
which cannot be forced, that which is effortless and untiring.” (Heidegger
: ) Another example is to see the world as a riddle and to ask philoso-
phy to solve the riddle of the world. For hermeneutics (since Dilthey), the
riddle of philosophy is always present because it flows out of the hermeneu-
tic, circular constellation of the individual and the general. Dilthey writes:
                                                        Hermeneutics of Play   


“A part that belongs to the nexus of the whole has a meaning relative to this
whole to the extent that it realizes a relationship already inherent in life.
 [. . . ] Here we come upon what seems to be an insoluble riddle.” (Dilthey
 : ) To say that philosophy is a riddle suggests that it is more than
 an accumulative catalogue of questions waiting to be answered in a certain
 order, but it allows a gamelike moment to enter into the process of philo-
 sophical thought. In a riddle, the answering of questions produces infinitely
 new questions, references to old questions, etc. The infinite production
 of questions and answers follows a gamelike pattern, it reckons with the
 unforeseen and it often repeats the same questions. And all this happens
without causing annoyance, without degenerating, through its infiniteness,
 into a ridiculous circle of absurdity. The constellations and relations of the
 questions and answers seem to be directed by invisible structures helping
 to strive towards one solution: the Solution of the riddle. Dilthey believed
 that there is a “point in the secret of life that remains inaccessible to rigor-
 ous thought. We cannot think of the events’ last cause. The constellation
 remains a riddle.” (Dilthey : , my translation)
       The game lies on the ground of philosophy in the same way in which
 it lies (in Huizinga’s view) on the ground of civilization. Any gamelike
 disposition within philosophy cannot be looked for since this very disposi-
 tion represents a riddle that is incessantly guessed but never solved. It is
 hidden for anyone who looks for analogies or cause and effect relations. The
 disposition of objects in the world and in life, just like the disposition of the
 questions and answers in philosophy, is that of a game — and philosophy
 about it is a game itself: it is a Rätsel. This is how the riddle is transposed
 onto philosophy: to look for game in philosophy is philosophy as well.
       Eugen Fink believes that the gamelike constitution of human thought
 cannot be found, but that it always has to be seen anew. For him, the equation
‘world = game’ does not represent a “phenomenological result” (phänome-
 nologischer Befund), but opens a “path of thinking” (Weg des Denkens). (Fink
: ) Also Gadamer’s comparison of the process of understanding with
 a game of chess does not claim that the mere knowledge of the rules
 of chess comes close to an experience of philosophical understanding. In
 Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik Gadamer describes the case of a
 difficult and very complex constellation of chessmen which can arise within
 a game of chess where the solution can only be guessed like the answer
 to a riddle: “For in it we have ‘seen through’ something that seemed odd
 and unintelligible: we have brought it into our linguistic world. To use
 the analogy of chess, everything is ‘solved,’ resembling a difficult chess
 problem where only the definitive solution will makes understandable (and
 then right to the last piece) the necessity of a previous absurd position.”
(Gadamer : ) At first sight it looks as if Gadamer alludes to the knowl-
   Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


edge of a formal structure: the relationships between the chessmen need to
be discovered. However, Gadamer does not equate the knowledge of the
general, ever–valid rules of the game of chess with the model of under-
standing. Understanding takes place at the very moment an individual and
unique situation is guessed and transposed into human language. Gadamer
says nothing about the further availability of the result of this individual
understanding. The solution of the difficult constellation does not represent,
even when being fixed by means of human language, knowledge in the
form of a rule or the structure of the game. On the contrary, it applies only
for this one constellation and is, as such, to a large extent, useless for further
games of chess.
    There are first the eternal, proper rules of the game of chess which can
be learned by heart; then there are the rules which follow from those and
which can be learned through an evocation of several different constellations
of chessmen and which form the knowledge about the game of chess. The
difference between both is very much reflected by the difference between
aletheia and doxa as two kinds of knowledge, which is important in the art
of rhetoric about which Gadamer writes: “This knowledge of the good and
its capability in the art of speaking does not mean a universal knowledge
of ‘the good;’ rather it means a knowledge about that to which one has to
persuade people here and now, a knowledge of how one is to go about doing
this, and a knowledge of those whom one has to persuade.” (Gadamer :
) The knowledge of rules is knowledge of the ‘how’ of their use rather
than of the ‘what’ of their meaning. In the example of the chess game,
‘understanding’ describes the experience of being for one moment, in a very
intense way, united with the game in which one is involved, penetrating it
for seconds, intellectually, completely; it appears more through what Plato
calls a ‘philosophical surprise’ (taumazein) than through calculated scientific
reflections.


. Seeing the Game

Huizinga’s game can only be ‘seen’ in culture in the form of a cultural
style though it is not necessarily empirically present. Wittgenstein describes
‘seeing’ as a shifting between perception and thinking: “Seeing as. . . is
not part of perception. And for that reason it is like seeing and again not
like seeing.” (Wittgenstein : II ) Also Wittgenstein concentrates on
the game as a phenomenon whose definition cannot be founded on the
description of fixed rules, but whose existence depends on a certain non–
definable surplus. Wittgenstein suggests calling the decisive quality which
gives the game its gamelike condition a Witz which he believes to find in
                                                        Hermeneutics of Play   


every game. (cf. Wittgenstein : I §§ , ) We “know what a game is”
but we are incapable of “saying what it is.” Behind every definition of the
game is lurking another hidden and unpronounced definition: “What does it
mean to know what a game is? What does it mean to know it and not be
able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow equivalent to an unformulated
definition? So that if it were formulated, I would be able to recognize it as the
expression of my knowledge?” (Wittgenstein : I § ) Wittgenstein’s point
overlaps with Huizinga’s who declares the Witz (aardigheit) to be the essential
quality of games, a quality that cannot be traced back to any other origin
other than itself. (Huizinga : ) Wittgenstein refers to different aspects
of objects provided by sketches representing a box at one time and a glass–
cube at another. He shows how much seeing is linked to guessing: “But we
can also see the illustration now as one thing now as another. So we interpret
it, and see it as we interpret it.” (Wittgenstein : II –) Wittgenstein’s
insight that ‘to see a thing as’ includes perception as well as thinking (Denken)
can be read like a statement of hermeneutic philosophy trying to locate
reflective and self–reflective moments in any kind of understanding and
interpretation or just even seeing. Similar to Wittgenstein, Gadamer’s insists
that “in order to see something when looking one must think whilst seeing.”
(Gadamer : )
     Like Wittgenstein, Gadamer points to some dynamic, creative compo-
nent in understanding as a special kind of seeing or reading that transcends
the limits of a pure reconstruction of an ‘original’ sense. Tzvetan Todorov
calls this process the construction of a “univers imaginaire” (Todorov :
) and Ricœur speaks of an “interprétation créatrice.” (Ricoeur : )
Maurice Blanchot believes that “to read does not mean to write the book
again but to make that the book writes itself or is written, this time without
passing through the intermediary of the writer — without anybody writing
the book.” (Blanchot : , my translation) Gadamer (like Wittgen-
stein) indicates a way of grasping this ‘univers imaginaire’ insisting that
the dynamic moment appearing within any creative interpretation has the
characteristics of a game much more than the characteristics of a regular
construction of a structuralizable textual body. Also Wittgenstein provides
the example of children playing with a box who manage to see the box as a
house only through and within the limits of their game (Wittgenstein :
I § ) and draws a link between understanding and playing. To ‘see things
as’ always means to see them within a game and it even demands to some
extent to enter that game: “And does the child now see the chest as a house?
He quite forgets that it is a chest; for him it actually is a house. Then would
it not also be correct to say he sees it as a house?” (Wittgenstein : II )
     Derrida describes a kind of ‘mute seeing’ that he defines as the coun-
terpart of hearing, a hearing always linked to full presence of expressions.
       Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


‘Seeing,’ the perception of all écriture, is apt for the perception of the game
whose rhythm is always interrupted and destroyed by the voice of, for exam-
ple, the ethnologist or empirical anthropologist: “At first the anthropologist
is satisfied merely to see. A fixed glance and mute presence. Then things get
complicated, become more tortuous and labyrinthine, when he becomes
a party to the play of the rupture of play.” (Derrida : ) This means
that the special kind of seeing shifts between different ‘seeing as’ and con-
sistently closes its ears to loudly pronounced and unequivocal statements
about the world.


. The Absent Game

Several classical definitions of games point indeed to the empirical ‘absence’
of games. Huizinga insists on the impossibility of ‘seeing game in culture’ in
a scientific way and suggests that the models of the game and of culture are
interdependent from the very beginning: they can only be understood as
the very unity they represent. Any empirical separation of the two elements
enabling us to look for the one in the other makes their understanding
impossible:

      When speaking of the play–element in culture, we do not mean that among the
      various activities of civilized life an important place is reserved for life; nor do we
      mean that civilization has arisen out of play by some evolutionary process, in the
      sense that something which was originally play passed into something which was
      no longer play and could henceforth be called culture. The view we take [. . . ] is
      that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning.
      (Huizinga : )

    In other words, the understanding of ‘play’ or ‘game’ in culture is in-
volved in a hermeneutic circle: the fact that there is the element of game
in culture is supposed to be the result of Huizinga’s anthropological work;
however, the precondition of attaining this result is ‘to see play in culture.’
    It is not uncommon to believe that civilization has its origin in the playing
of games. The German anthropologist Leo Frobenius was convinced that
“infantile play represents the foundational source originating in the deepest
and holiest layers from which all civilization and creative powers have
sprung.” (Frobenius : , my translation) However, understanding the
world as a game is not the same as identifying parts of it with games. The
British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor has criticized precisely this naive
empirical attitude in anthropology and history when saying: “Only the
game is used preferably as subject of a pseudo–historical discourse of a
theory which thinks to have attained the origin of human institutions.”
                                                      Hermeneutics of Play   


(Tylor : ) The game is not literally representative of the origin or the
foundation of civilization or philosophy, but it expresses or suggests through
itself, through its circularity and repetitiveness, the non–foundedness of
civilization.
    Huizinga also insists that the game can only be ‘seen’ in culture in the
form of a cultural style, which emphasizes the link between play and style.
The existence of style often depends on those qualities that are also domi-
nant for the game. For example, style for some authors is clearly dominated
by visual components. Marcel Proust believed that style is not a quality of au-
dition, but a “quality of vision” (Gay : , fn. ) and Johann Gottfried von
Herder made the perception of style dependent on the particular human
capacity called seeing: “Humans have the capacity to see much more than to
hear, and his intelligence, style and composition will function accordingly.”
(Herder : , my translation) The style (just like the game) is thus
absent as an empirical fact though it can be ‘seen.’


. Hermeneutics and Play

The aforementioned qualities of play, such as non–foundedness or em-
pirical absence, make it particularly attractive for hermeneutic theory. A
‘hermeneutics of play’ begins at the moment when theories of interpreta-
tion abandon their romantic conception of Einfühlung (valid at least since
Herder) as a dominant criterion of interpretation and refuse any belief in
the validity of subjective feeling. Dilthey has played a central role here.
For Schleiermacher subjectivity was still a positive fact that needed to be
recovered as we should “determine the individual elements of a sentence
from its context in such a way that there is no doubt that we have grasped
the sentence in the way its author thought it.” (Schleiermacher : ) At
the same time, Schleiermacher did recognize the gamelike character of all
those textual elements which cannot be traced back to a will (and which
are thus unconscious or merely a matter of contingency): “Elements that
cannot be traced to a dominating act of the will must stem from free play.”
(Schleiermacher : , my translation)
   In the eyes of Schleiermacher the hermeneutic circle is a destructive
power unable to provide any theoretical foundation of a philosophy of
interpretation; Schleiermacher remained convinced that it can be overcome
through the establishment of a fundamental standard code (Kanon): “In
order to understand the first thing precisely one must have already taken
up the whole. Not, of course, to the extent that it is the same as the totality
of particulars, but as a skeleton.” (Schleiermacher : ) Schleiermacher
desires a technical method able to grasp (nachbilden) the creative process
   Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


of the author who first saw the whole and then went on to an elaboration
of the details: “For in every larger complex the author as well saw the
whole before he progressed to the particular.” (Schleiermacher : )
Schleiermacher’s predecessor Friedrich Ast, on the other hand, did not try to
‘tame’ the circle. Ast is the first philosopher for whom the circle represents
a positive possibility of understanding, thus making ‘play,’ at least indirectly,
an essential component of the process of interpretation. Ast affirms that
a theoretical ‘solution’ (Lösung) for the circle requires a ‘going through’ it,
as he describes in his Grundlinien der Grammatik: “The further I progress
with the understanding (Auffassung) of the particular, the more obvious and
living becomes the spirit, the idea of the whole, that I had grasped already
in each particularity, unfolds itself in front of me.” (quoted from Wach
: , my translation) Ast’s procedure is not an interpretative method
proceeding from the general to the individual or from the individual to
the general. On the contrary, by proceeding ‘individually,’ one improves
one’s understanding of the general. Ast suggests that the general and the
individual should be perceived simultaneously.
    Strictly speaking, Ast is not the only person at his time to suggest a
kind of ‘going through’ the circle. Wilhelm von Humboldt also points to a
gamelike quality produced by the circle and to which he refers as ‘lightness’
(Leichtigkeit): “To make real and complete observations, to abstract in the
purest fashion from them the characteristic essence that is only partially
apparent in the enunciations, to go back and forth with ease between
observation and concept in order to revise one through the other.” (quoted
from Wach : , my translation) The constant shifting (back and forth,
hin und her) of the interpretative point of view from the individual to the
general is not grounded on fixed rules.
    The hermeneutic circle and its gamelike input receive a still more
positive treatment by Schleiermacher’s student August Boeckh by whom
Dilthey was profoundly influenced. While Boeckh refuses to believe in a
final ‘solution’ of the circle, he does not simply leave it aside either. Boeckh’s
Encyclopädie und Methodenlehre der philosophischen Wissenschaften () is a
comprehensive work on the science of interpretation and an entire chap-
ter is devoted to the Theorie der Hermeneutik. Here Boeckh discovers the
hermeneutic circle as an instance attempting to coordinate grammatical
(general) and subjective (individual) forms of interpretation: “The linguistic
explanation based on the objective, general point of view we call grammati-
cal interpretation, the one which is based on subjectivity we call individual
interpretation.” (Boeckh : , my translation) It is interesting to look
closer at the theoretical development of circularity as a typical gamelike
model within the history of hermeneutics. Boeckh quickly discovers that
the shift from the individual to the general entails methodological prob-
                                                       Hermeneutics of Play   


lems: “Different kinds of exegesis presuppose real knowledge though this
knowledge can only be extracted from the exegesis of the whole mate-
rial.” (Boeckh : , my translation) At first sight a solution of the circle
seems to be close: “Grammatical exegesis will detect the sense of the words
by submitting it to different individual and real conditions. This provides
a foundation for the remaining kinds of exegesis.” (Boeckh : , my
translation) The foundation of any interpretative activity is represented by
grammar, that is, by rules. However, what happens if a grammatical phe-
nomenon is general and at the same time individual? The link between
circular structures and style becomes obvious once again, since, accord-
ing to Boeckh, hermeneutics is confronted with such a situation especially
when it comes to stylistic questions. Style is a general phenomenon (in the
form of the style of an epoch, for example), but at the same time it is an
individual act of creation. Boeckh admits that the circle “cannot be avoided
in all cases and in no cases can it be avoided completely” because sometimes
“the same object is simultaneously the only foundation of the grammatical
and the individual interpretation [. . . ] and the task becomes unsolvable.”
(Boeckh : , my translation) When it comes to style, neither empirical
nor abstract techniques bring us any further.
    For Schleiermacher, on the other hand, style is the solution: “The whole
must be called the complete understanding of style.” (Schleiermacher :
, my translation) Still Schleiermacher sees that style is opposed to any
structuring by means of techniques: “Grammatically no individuality can
be conceptualized but it needs to be intuited. Technically, too. There is
no concept of a style.” (Schleiermacher : , my translation) As soon
as we try to understand a style we need to be aware of “our own way of
perceiving things” (“die eigentümliche Art den Gegenstand aufzufassen”).


. Games and Structures

The game manifests itself in the form of an ‘absent’ concept that can only
be seen. It coincides very much with Umberto Eco’s interpretation of the
‘structure’ as an always ‘absent structure’ which “does not exist as such but
is a product of my operations oriented in a certain direction.” (Eco : ,
my translation) Eco places the structure into an “original place, which is the
one where the being, putting on a mask, reveals itself in determining itself
in structural events, but fleeing every structuralization.” (Eco : , my
translation) Interestingly enough, Eco likens this ‘absent structure’ also to a
game: “What every research on the structure of communication illuminates
is thus not an underlying structure but the absence of a structure. It is the
field of a continuous ‘game’.” (Eco : xxii, my translation)
      Thorsten Botz–Bornstein


    Linguistic philosophy has often pointed out that the game and the struc-
ture possess similar formal qualities. In his essay La structure comme jeu,
Émile Benveniste concentrates on the rule–dependent and autonomous
components of the game and the structure, and finds a confirmation of
the purely formal character of the game in the fact that the game, like the
structure, “must always unfold within limits and strict conditions and it con-
stitutes a closed totality.” (Benveniste : , my translation) On the other
hand, distinctions between static and dynamic structures, or closed and open
structures bring early thoughts on structures very close to hermeneutics.
As far back as , Radcliffe–Brown commented on the double character
of the structure by distinguishing between a static and a dynamic structure:

      This important distinction, between structure as an actually existing concrete reality,
      to be directly observed, and structural form, as what the field–worker describes,
      may be made clearer perhaps by a consideration of the continuity of a social
      structure through a time, a continuity which is not static like that of a building, but
      a dynamic continuity, like that of the organic structure of a living body. (Radcliffe–
      Brown : )

    Radcliffe–Brown’s musings on dynamic tensions within structures come
close to Dilthey’s original definition of Struktur. Dilthey defined the ‘struc-
tural context’ (Strukturzusammenhang) as a quality flowing out of the riddle
(Rätsel). More precisely, it flows out of the hermeneutic relationship be-
tween the individual and its general environment: “Only because life is
structurally coherent [. . . ] do we have coherence. This coherence is per-
ceived by means of a comprehensive category, which is making a statement
about reality: the relationship between the part and the whole.” (Dilthey
: ) Furthermore, for Dilthey, “the mutual dependence of general
knowledge from particular knowledge [. . . ] represents most generally the
foundation of its structure.” (Dilthey : )
    In games, the explanandum is its own explanans, which creates difficul-
ties for any research in the humanities. We might call the structures of
these games ‘open structures,’ as does T.K. Seung, in his book Structural-
ism and Hermeneutics (). Seung develops the distinction between open
and closed structures, which he also calls ‘thematic structures’ and ‘formal
structures’ arguing that the formal conception of the structure (used, for ex-
ample, in structuralism) is by nature antagonistic towards any consideration
of a ‘thematic,’ dynamic content: “A thematic development is a dynamic
progression requiring an open system. A purely structural approach, on
the other hand, which produces a static structural symmetry or asymmetry

    . A bibliography listing works related to the similarity of the structure and the game can be
found in Ducrot : part .
                                                             Hermeneutics of Play   


devoid of any thematic content, requires a closed system rather than an
open one.” (Seung : ) As an alternative, Seung suggests rediscovering
the self–sufficient character of structures and to define them as games:
“Every structure is its own reason. Instead of being an explanandum, every
structure is meant as an explanans.” (Seung : ) This is what has been
anticipated by the hermeneutics of play tradition.


. Conclusion

This article has shown that what can be called a ‘hermeneutic condition of
understanding’ is determined by a fundamental doubt about texts, about
being, about the human self and life as long as they are referred to as
manifestations of a presence or as essences. In this sense, hermeneutic atti-
tudes reminiscent of games can be detected in many areas of philosophical
thought. The hermeneutic skepticism about everything which is real, as
such or simply not played, is not merely methodological, which prevents it
from reverting to purely technical solutions. The circular structure of un-
derstanding permits the establishment of no clear signifiant, but the game
of interpretation produces an endless chain leading from one signifier to
the next without ever imitating a divine logos.

                                                                 botz.t@gust.edu.kw


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