More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There are many games we enter not expecting to win, but in which we nonetheless compete for the highest possible ranking.
The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
self-veiling is a contradictory act—a free suspension of our freedom. I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself.
“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre).
(The term “abstract” is used here according to Hegel’s familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “concrete.”)
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.
Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition. Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.
“Life itself appears only as a means to life” (Marx).
The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free.
Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.
To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does. Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation.
Most consumer products are “styled” inasmuch as they actually standardize the activity or the taste of the consumer. In a perfect contradiction we are urged to buy a “styled” artifact because others are also buying it—that is, we are asked to express our genius by giving up our genius.
When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree.
When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there—but so do we. Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are.
Weapons are the equipment of finite games designed in such a way that they do not maximize the play but eliminate it. Weapons are meant not to win contests but to end them. Killers are not victors; they are unopposed competitors, players without a game, living contradictions.
Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a garden’s existence, but only a phase of it. As any gardener knows, the vitality of a garden does not end with a harvest. It simply takes another form. Gardens do not “die” in the winter but quietly prepare for another season.
“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust).
Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.
Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste. If waste is the result of our indifference to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a species of culture.
