View transcript: Man is Only Fully Human when he Plays

Man Is Only Fully Human When He Plays

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Gambling, music, mind games (= ENTERTAINMENT) are an essential element of human nutrition / That’s how Immanuel Kant describes it in his CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT / THE FREE PLAY OF EMOTIONS does not contribute to the mind’s enlightenment / Yet it sustains the body necessary for enlightenment to thrive / Professor Oskar Negt reports - -

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MAN IS ONLY FULLY HUMAN WHEN HE PLAYS / Immanuel Kant about GOOD ENTERTAINMENT

Alexander Kluge

Yesterday, we found a passage in the “Critique of Judgment,” where Kant ponders the fact that apparently, there are intellectual pleasures that are very important for the human mind. He says they are healthy, they are necessary. But they might not sit well with pure reason because they don’t contribute to the acquisition of knowledge. These pleasures are gambling, music, and mind games. What he calls “sound play,” that’s …

Oskar Negt

Music.

Kluge

Musical comedies. He always talks about those two together – he talks about “sound plays,” they have music and they make you laugh. He must have seen musical comedies that he enjoyed. And the mind is certainly engaged, he says, but there is no purpose to it. Although he doesn’t mean that in a negative way. He says the fact that it doesn’t have a purpose is actually a virtue.

Negt

No, no. The playful engagement with different subjects allows our intellect to access a dimension that is not contained in the traditional distinction of desire, knowledge, and other faculties. It’s a pleasurable play of the mind. That includes risks taken at a casino where people place bets and might win or lose …

Kluge

He plays pool himself.

Negt

During the Russian occupation, he got along extremely well with the fun-loving officers, and he was …

Kluge

That was during the Seven-Years War, when Königsberg was occupied. To King Frederick’s horror, the people of Königsberg did not simply capitulate, they cooperated.

Negt

Immediately they sent Tsarina Elizabeth symbols of their humility. Kant wrote to her with a request for an academic position. Frederick II never went back to Königsberg. He was so upset at the …

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Oskar Negt, philosopher

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Königsberg

Kluge

… that Prussia’s place of coronation would defect to the enemy so easily.

Negt

And with the officers, the Russian officers came an entirely new way of life into town, including drinking and games and gambling, of course.

Kluge

He found all that very intriguing. Small sums …

Negt

I don’t know if he gambled himself. But I do know for example that he was a good and well-known pool player.

Kluge

And to paraphrase, he says essentially: People are not going to give up their quest for happiness, which reaches beyond their intellectual work, beyond their moral principles. But if I am lucky, like Hans in Luck, and I exchange goods – that is something I can build on, something I can use to achieve a kind of balance.

Negt

Yes, and Schiller picks up on his notion that the aesthetic state is always tied to a balance of the faculties: the faculty of knowledge, the faculty of desire, the faculty of duty. Pleasure is caused by …

Kluge

… the rapid change between different emotions …

Negt

… and their harmonious balance.

Kluge

In a way, it is the artistry of emotions.

Negt

And of course this plays a major role in the “Critique of Pure Reason” as well: Imagination. Imagination as an authentic, independent, original human force. The playful engagement with thoughts and feelings. In music, that’s … that’s why he says that the mind is not turned off. But it’s not intellectual labor in the strict sense.

Kluge

Not even in the case of mind games. When discourses circulate at a dinner party. When humor enters the conversation. That’s not something reason will approve of, he says. Because the more non-sensical a joke is, the better it gets.

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“The more non-sensical a joke is, the better it gets - - “

Negt

That contradicts the logic of reason, or at least in the narrow sense in which it is often understood. But Kant actually has a rather broad concept of reason, which can ultimately benefit from this kind of discourse.

Kluge

To rephrase, Kant is interested in the following question: What are the things you can never talk people out of? These issues may be rather playful, but they are also important – and it is essential, he says, essential for our well-being that they develop parallel to paid labor, to the labor of desire, to the labor of knowledge. It is what establishes the atmosphere. Does that make sense? The cocoon …

Negt

Like I said, Schiller gets to the heart of it when he says: Man is only fully human when he plays. And he only plays where he is fully human. That’s very Kantian.

Kluge

And it’s not the kind of play we are thinking about when we talk about children’s play. It’s not the notion: One day, we’ll be grown-ups. It’s very serious. It’s the kind of activity I engage in when I have escaped social norms for a moment.

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THINKING as TESTING!

Kluge

Humans have the ability to put an idea into the world in a playful manner, and to see what happens to it. They are testing it. You can even run tests based on errors. You will notice once the world’s reaction exposes the error. This capability to send out an idea via echolocation and to learn from whatever echoes back – Kant would not consider that absurd.

Negt

No, not at all. Quite the contrary – especially in this short text, the echolocation method is relevant; that is, the practice of continuing to look for the concrete object, the sensual experience to which I have to apply my imagination and my mind. He also says: The world is practically the epitome of all possible subjects of experience. That means, orientation in the world is tied to materiality. And for Kant, this element of liberating your imagination and your phantasies is a fundamental human need. And not just in regard to excess or delirium, as he says, by the way, but also regarding the need for specific concepts that we cannot clearly define anymore: the need for god, for immortality. Those are concepts or thoughts that cannot be proven, they are not a form of knowledge, and yet they are necessary. A significant part of Kant’s thinking is that he distinguishes what is necessary, what human beings can’t do without. That’s how the “Critique of Pure Reason” begins, it says: This is an area people are not going to stop exploring … metaphysics, the need for metaphysics. But he still argues that there are limits. It’s not a form of knowledge. God is not … the need for God is not proof of his existence. The desire for immortality is not proof that it is possible. But both are still necessary for our life.

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Oskar Negt, philosopher

Kluge

If you had to describe Kant … is he tall or short? He was of rather short stature, from what I know.

Negt

A person of short stature who actually expected for most of his life that he would not live very long. He was sickly …

Kluge

A hypochondriac.

Negt

A total hypochondriac. When he went for a walk with someone, he told them not to speak to him, because he thought that would allow cold air to enter his lungs.

Kluge

And by evening he had developed a cough.

Negt

And the story with the bugs and his servant Lampe.

Kluge

What story about bugs?

Negt

He had bedbugs in his bedroom. And he had come to the conclusion that bedbugs can be fought with darkness – a theory that Lampe vehemently rejected. He said, darkness is precisely what feeds the bugs. So once while Kant was traveling, Lampe cleaned and aired out the bedroom, and by the time Kant returned, the bugs were gone. And Kant was convinced that his theory had been proven.

Kluge

Big eyes?

Negt

I think he was considered a reasonably handsome man, a friendly-looking man. He has always been portrayed as a stooped, almost deformed …

Kluge

But I think that is him at a high age.

Negt

At a high age, but it starts early.

Kluge

But he wasn’t really famous when he was young. He was a Prussian college teacher who only wrote in Latin for a long time. He wasn’t really well-known. Only in his later years he became world-famous.

Negt

He did have quite a reputation as natural scientist. But of course his life work was the “Critique of Pure Reason” in 1781.

Kluge

That’s when the younger generations start flocking to him. Suddenly all the writers and poets and intellectuals are on his side.

Negt

Not at first. That’s … only gradually, the “Critique of Pure Reason,” this enormous work in progress catches on.

Kluge

It’s difficult to read. First you’ve got to read it.

Negt

And difficult to understand. And many take umbrage with it. But over the course of about a decade, it becomes the foundation for many, many intellectuals, including Schelling and Fichte and Hegel and all the others.

Kluge

Do the French Revolutionaries know Kant? Via Schiller’s interpretation.

Negt

Yes … they are more likely to know Schiller. Schiller is an honorary member of the French Revolution.

Kluge

They do get word of Kant’s work in France.

Negt

There’s even a correspondence between Kant and Abbé Sieyès. In the French scholarship on Kant, there have been a number of projects that draw on these letters. And Kant has sometimes been considered a Jacobin. There are connections.

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Oskar Negt, philosopher

Kluge

But he’s not really a Jacobin. Not really. He’s a risk-averse person. He did not break with the authorities. He always said: Obeisance, you have to follow Prussian Law. But not more than that.

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Negt

Well, in his text about religion, relatively late, the late Kant does take on the authorities. That why his work on religion, “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason” was banned. He wrote to his king, the successor of Frederick II: I am not going to publish this work during His Majesty’s lifetime. But he published it immediately after his death.

Kluge

How did he die himself?

Negt

Of old age is the general understanding. You could say that he was not quite of sound mind during his final two years. He was forgetful. But the cause of death has not been documented in detail.

Kluge

It’s tragic that he ….

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MAN IS ONLY FULLY HUMAN WHEN HE PLAYS / Immanuel Kant about GOOD ENTERTAINMENT