Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

We can only be somewhere by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number.

This is why every new participant in a culture both enters into an existing context and simultaneously changes that context.

A culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries. But it is a strategy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.

For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries. To keep its definitions clear a state must stimulate danger to itself. Under the constant danger of war the people of a state are far more attentive and obedient to the finite structures of their society: “just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace” (Hegel).

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If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation.

The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. “Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object” (Rousseau).