“The inspiration for the whole work can perhaps be found in Heraclitus’s fragment which declares that aion, which Fink renders as Weltlauf, ‘course of the world’, is ‘like a child playing a game’ (i.e. p. 51). The game, or play – Spiel – is the theme throughout this work, though regularly related back to the world, and the human-world relation. As he states, “Our question concerning play is led by a fundamental philosophical problem. This problem is the relation between the human being and the world” (p. 80).”
“Fink’s mode of operating in this work is to think about the question of play in relation to myth, ritual and philosophy. Along the way, he discusses sport, cults, theatre and theology, among other themes. He makes a clear case that play has been neglected as a philosophical topic, and seen as trivial. He insists on its fundamental nature and its parallel importance to other topics: “Play has an extraordinary status in its being an existential basic phenomenon, just as primordial as mortality, love, work, and struggle” (p. 204).”
“He suggests that it has tended to be devalued by the tradition as mimesis, as imitation or copy. Fink thus thinks about play from multiple perspectives, from the play of children to the play of the world, which he characterizes as ‘a game without a player’ (p. 206).”
“To understand play we must understand the world, and to understand the world as play we gain insight into the world. Play, despite its importance, is subordinate to that wider philosophical project. Fink accepts that the history of Western metaphysics has long treated the problem of the world, but he makes the argument that this has been in a way that pluralizes it, “a title for realms of Being, for dimensions of different things” (p. 192).”
“Fink is attempting to grasp a broader question, which he claims has been lost by these previous approaches. He is interested in the phenomena of being-worldly, the situation of being-in-the-world. This opens up questions of the totality, das All, of universality, Allgemeinheit (p. 194).”
“But this does not mean that the world is simply “an external framework around things, not a container in which they occur – like potatoes in a sack or jewels in a safe” (p. 196).”
“This is an argument which he shares with Husserl and Heidegger, and has important resonances for how we understand the world in relation to space and time, and as a challenge to Cartesian-Newtonian systems”
“Fink contends that
The human being’s position in the world is not an objective location in a space understood as a homogeneous system of positions, is not an extent of time in a constant manifold of extensions, is neither specifiable by the proximity to certain things nor by a fixed distance from a highest being, and thus does not signify any location in a hierarchy or graded architecture of all things (p. 61).”
“Fink proposes four ways of thinking the concept of worldliness: first as a characteristic of all beings and events, their intraworldliness; worldly in the second sense is the “prevailing of the world itself”, the totality of being as such; third as an essential, fundamental comportment of the human being, in their existence, in which their worldliness is more than other things; and finally as the mortal aspect of human life, compared to the eternal, the sensual, not the spiritual (pp. 198-200).”
“In the third of these Fink makes a distinction which draws on Heidegger’s 1929-30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, suggesting that the human is more worldly than a stone, tree or animal. Fink attended this course, and encouraged Heidegger to publish it. The resulting volume, shortly after Fink’s death, was dedicated to him by Heidegger.”
“Play does not relate to all of these ways of thinking the world in the same way, and he explicitly rules out the second as being akin to human play (p. 202). But the first, third and fourth are ones to which the problem of play gives particular access. It is therefore the rationale for the detailed treatment which Fink provides.”
“Compared to Husserl and Heidegger, Fink is a much more readable writer, and the translators have done an excellent job of rendering his words into fluid English prose.”
“His 1954 course outline on ‘The Philosophical-Pedagogical Problem of Play’ offered a useful insight into the genesis of his ideas, while some of the later texts are recapitulations of the themes.”
“Fink’s works have been discussed by a wide range of people, including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, David Farrell Krell and Françoise Dastur. His influence on Greek-French philosopher Kostas Axelos is incalculable, especially in Axelos’s own masterwork Le jeu du monde [the play, or game of the world].”
“Axelos had Play as Symbol of the World translated for his Arguments series in France in 1966, along with two other works by Fink. Through Axelos, Fink would become important to Henri Lefebvre, whose own reflections on the world took a more explicitly political turn.”
“Fink is a crucial thinker in the question of the process of becoming world, the term mondialisation which Lefebvre and Axelos distinguish from the Anglophone ‘globalisation’.”
“The translators rightly note that “the writings collected here constitute the most intensive and comprehensive philosophical engagement with play in the twentieth century” (p. 1).”