Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it. On the other hand, causation cannot find a place in narrative. We have not told a story when we show that persons do whatever they do because they were caused to do it—by their genes, their social circumstances, or the influence of the gods.

The meaning of a finite speaker’s discourse lies in what precedes its utterance, what is already the case and therefore is the case whether or not it is spoken. The meaning of an infinite speaker’s discourse lies in what comes of its utterance—that is, whatever is the case because it is spoken.

Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which speech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.

Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.

Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision.

The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden.

Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature—the degree to which nature’s indifferent spontaneity seems to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control.

Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We do not therefore consume it, or exhaust it We simply rearrange our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity. That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste.

Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature—but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.

It is a consequence of this contradiction that the more waste a society produces, the more unveiling that waste is, and thus the more vigorously must a society deny that it produces any waste at all; the more it must dispose, or hide, or ignore, its detritus.

European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust in their way; they made them superfluous by way of some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies.

When society is unveiled, when we see that it is whatever we want it to be, that it is a species of culture with nothing necessary in it, by no means a phenomenon of nature or a manifestation of instinct, nature is no longer shaped and fitted into one or another set of societal goals. Unveiled, we stand before a nature whose only face is its hidden self-origination: its genius.

What Copernicus dispelled, however, were not myths but other explanations.

It is as though the story is itself seeking the occasion for its recurrence, making use of us as its agents. We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves; it is rather the stories that have found us for themselves.

Once I hear the story I enter into its own dimensionality. I inhabit its space at its time. I do not therefore understand the story in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms of the story.

Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known there is nothing more to say. History is therefore to be obediently lived out according to the ideology.

the metaphysicians have found the meaning of their myths and announced those meanings without their narrative resonance. The myths themselves are now regarded as falsehoods or curiosities, and are therefore to be disregarded, if not forbidden.