Abstract
The article belongs to the context of phenomenological ontology and tries to find out, what play/game is and what relationship it has to the nature of being. I understand the question what "play"/"game" ("hra" in the Czech language) is as the question what characterizes the matters referred to spontaneously by this word, and whether it is possible to find one universal meaning present in all these cases.
I answer that such a universal meaning does exist, that a play/game is an "in its meaning autonomous process of being decided about something" (where "being decided" is meant impersonally, with no necessary reference to any conscious subject which decides) and I explain in what sense all the types of instances referred to with the abovementioned Czech word display these features. I further show in what sense the most general or fundamental situation in which we are, i. e. the situation of appearing of anything, displays the features of a game/play - it can be viewed as the always the same, "unescapable" process of being decided about what will be present.
On this ground a theory of being or the world as, ultimately, a play/game can be conceived, which may sound very convincing, if it is presented as a seeing through the illusion that anything determinate can be "self-sufficient" and granted once for ever as the last instance, and if it suggests that to realize the double openness of the determinate (in the sense of depending on something else and being not secured for all the future) equals to realizing that the world is a play/game, in which it is being decided about everything determinate, or about its presence. Nevertheless, in what follows I show that a game/play is only one of the types of situation in which the openness of the particular is manifest in some way. (Other such situations are "way" or being on the way, the movement of integration, the universal flow, and others.) So I ask, what is the ultimate nature of this situation of general openness of everything determinate, which enables it to appear in these different forms, and how these particular forms are constituted.
As an answer, I propose to understand situation as such as a processual belonging-together of certain irreducible moments and I identify the becoming itself, and the poles of the following differences as such moments: the determinate - the indeterminate, the present - the absent, the partial - the whole, done by me - happening by itself, the more suitable - the less suitable (where the determinate is always present as well). A situation acquires primarily one or another general character due to these particular features and their relations stepping into foreground or withdrawing into background.
In the becoming of meaning, it is always being decided not only about the degree of emphasis laying on the individual essential moments, but also whether the becoming of meaning will further display this character and whether there will be any becoming at all. (Therefore the becoming of meaning is not enclosed within any definite limits and consequently, it never is (only) a play/game in the last instance.)