Agathos: An International Review of the Humanities and Social Sciences (May 2013)
GAME AS AN INEXPRESSIBLE SOURCE OF PHILOSOPHY: A NOT TOO SERIOUS TRIFLE?
Abstract
Our intention is to present the chosen philosophical viewpoints (Kant, Husserl, Lévinas, Heidegger) as illustrating the presumption that rational, philosophical narratives are a kind of a game with an inexpressible kernel of philosophy. Referring to an antique idea, presupposition will be reconstructed from the Heraclitean aphorism: “All things are ruled by lightening” – inspiring a meditation on things present in the horizontal perspective but ruled by, grasped by this meditation, stitching this perspective together, the thunderbolt – a sign from the vertical order. So, we will look at the chosen philosophies from the point of view of grasping that light, of being revealed through them – as if emanating from the darkness of an unknowable incitement that provokes this light. In Kant’s critical analysis we pay attention to the unknowable root of two trunks of learning, in Lévinas’ philosophy – related to the difference of the lightening, the difference of the Other, in Husserl’s phenomenology – to the impulse ruling the development of modern philosophical systems, and in Heidegger’s considerations – to the acts of Being directing the history of European metaphysics.