Who Plays the Game?

From the Embodied Dimension of Spielen to the Normative Variety of Skills

Abstract

Who Plays the Game? From the Embodied Dimension of Spielen to the Normative Variety of Skills

This essay examines the polysemy of ‘spielen’ in order to redirect the metaphorical talk of games as a critical tool against individualism, intellectualism, internalism, and representationalism in Modern philosophy. First, we revisit how neopragmatists have used chess to explain the public dimension of meaning. Though fruitful, we argue that this metaphor still bears intellectualist, elitists, and, more pressingly, overly mentalist assumptions. In the second section, we thus suggest football as a more accurate game-metaphor to express human know-how. For us, football better exhibits an enactive approach to cognition: rules acquire meaning by embodied acts, favouring improvisation and collective dynamics. Football thus shows ‘spielen’ as a self-regulated activity that emerges out of interaction with other embodied agents, institutions, and a rich environment. The third section draws on our metaphor to explore a threefold normative dimension of ‘spielen’ (biological, social, and moral), thus arguing for its better suitability to exemplify the organic, collective, and embedded realms that constitute embodied cognition.