| dc.description.abstract | The investigation discussed herein aims to defend the notion of play as a model and medial term of philosophical understanding, which is understood not only as a result of a “rational interpretation”, but of an “living experience”, acquired in the midst of the life-world. In this inquiry into play, the basic remaining question is whether self-constitution and self-regulation – dynamics of the phenomenon of play – can be understood in “correspondence” with an original and prevalent onto-cosmological play. In this investigative path, the main theoretical references will be, in a predominantly cosmological way, the philosophies of Heraclitus, Friedrich Nietzsche and Eugen Fink; and, in a predominantly ontological way, the approaches of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. As a preparatory path, we present in the first chapter the place of the play in the Greek world through agon and mimesis, remembering that these early conceptions ended up determining the way in which the game was received throughout the philosophical tradition. Also in the first chapter, we introduce Immanuel Kant’s “anthropological” interpretation that points out the human as a “co-player of the world”, a conception that guided Friedrich Schiller and his interpretation of aesthetic and ludic subjectivity as fundamental to the formation (Bildung) of our humanity. In the second chapter, we introduce the ludic/agonistic perspective present in Nietzsche’s thought, which repositioned ludus as reflecting an impulsive and irrational “world play” (Weltspiel), in which being is in correspondence to becoming. Also in the second chapter, we point to two paths that were consolidated in post-Nietzschean thought: one that resumes, from Nietzsche and Heraclitus, the cosmological perspective of a “world play”, and another that privileges the idea of ludus as reflecting a “play of being”. The third chapter initially introduces the Heideggerian interpretation of human existence (Dasein) that, in a condition of "being played" (geworfen) by Being, finds itself moved by a "disposition" (Stimmung) of play that enables it to understanding (Verstehen) and to "world formation" (Weltbildung). Such perspective reflects the hermeneutic proposal developed by Gadamer, who pointed out the "art of play" as a model for the "hermeneutic understanding" structured in its relation to "life-world" (Lebenswelt) and historical temporality. This last chapter is concluded with Fink's onto-cosmological approach, for whom playing constitutes a symbol and "cosmic metaphor" able to mediate the understanding of the emergence and disappearance of beings – and of the human itself – in the space and time of the world. For Fink, philosophizing enables us to "come out of ourselves" through which we self-understand our roles (Rollen) in the midst of the finite and intramundane space of play (Spielraum). | en |
