xiii In play, we do not express ourselves, but rather the game itself "presents itself."

xvi As in play, it rests on a common willingness of the participants in conversation to lend themselves to the emergence of something else, the Sache or subject matter which comes to presence and presentation in conversation.

p.24 common sense... for Bergson... "while the other senses relate us to things, 'good sense' governs our relations with persons" (p. 85). It is a kind of genius for practical life, but less a gift than the constant task of "renewed adaptation to new situations," a work of adapting general principles to reality, through which justice is realized, a "tactfulness in practical truth," a "rightness of judgment, that stems from correctness of soul" (p. 88).

p.29 judgment requires a principle to guide its application.

p.106 for the player play is not serious: that is why he plays.

p.107 Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play... seriousness in playing is necessary to make the play wholly play.

p.107 The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches presentation (Darstellung) through the players.

p.108 If we examine how the word "play" is used and concentrate on its so-called metaphorical senses... In each case what is intended is to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end. Correlatively, the word "Spiel" originally meant "dance,"... The movement of playing has no goal that brings it to an end; rather, it renews itself in constant repetition. The movement backward and forward is obviously so central to the definition of play that it makes no difference who or what performs this movement... It is the game that is played - it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play is the occurrence of movement as such... Hence the mode of being of play is not such that, for the game to be played, there must be a subject who is behaving playfully. Rather, the primordial sense of playing is the medial one. Thus we say that something is "playing" (spielt) somewhere or at some time, that something is going on (im Spiele ist) or that something is happening (sich abspielt).

p.109 we can say that man too plays.

p.110 It is true that the contestant does not consider himself to be playing. But through the contest arises the tense to-and-fro movement from which the victor emerges, and thus the whole becomes a game. The movement to-and-fro obviously belongs so essentially to the game that there is an ultimate sense in which you cannot have a game by yourself. In order for there to be a game, there always has to be, not necessarily literally another player, but something else with which the player plays and which automatically responds to his move with a countermove. Thus the cat at play chooses the ball of wool because it responds to play, and ball games will be with us forever because the ball is freely mobile in every direction, appearing to do surprising things of its own accord.

p.110-111 we say of someone that he plays with possibilities or with plans... One can play only with serious possibilities.... Whoever "tries" is in fact the one who is tried... What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself.

p.112 playing is always a playing of something. Every game presents the man who plays it with a task... such tasks are playful ones because the purpose of the game is not really solving the task, but ordering and shaping the movement of the game itself.

p.112 First and foremost, play is self-presentation.

p.113-114 play does not have its being in the player's consciousness or attitude, but on the contrary play draws him into its dominion and fills him with its spirit. The player experiences the game as a reality that surpasses him.

p.116 play itself is a transformation of such a kind that the identity of the player does not continue to exist for anybody. Everybody asks instead what is supposed to be represented, what is "meant." The players (or playwright) no longer exist, only what they are playing.

p.117 In being presented in play, what is emerges. It produces and brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn. [JLJ - italics mine]

p.117 "Reality" always stands in a horizon of desired or feared or, at any rate, still undecided future possibilities... The undecidedness of the future permits such a superfluity of expectations that reality necessarily lags behind them.

p.118 In recognition what we know emerges, as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known as something.

p.121 Play is structure... But structure is also play, because... it achieves its full being only each time it is played.

p.138 The world that appears in the play of presentation does not stand like a copy next to the real world, but is that world in the heightened truth of its being.

p.187 Only if all these movements comprising the art of conversation - argument, question and answer, objection and refutation, which are undertaken in regard to a text as an inner dialogue of the soul seeking understanding - are in vain is the inquiry detoured.

p.209 freedom involves power, germinal power. Without the latter the former disappears, both in world events and in the sphere of ideas. At every moment something new can begin

p.209 Beside freedom stands necessity. It consists in what has already been formed and cannot be destroyed, which is the basis of all new activity. What has already come into being coheres with what is coming into being.

p.210 All power exists only in its expression. Expression is not only the manifestation of power but its reality... power is more than its expression. It possesses potentiality also - i.e., it is not only the cause of a particular effect but the capacity, wherever it is to be used, to have that effect. Thus its mode of being is different from that of an effect. It has the mode of "suspension" (Anstellen) - a word that suggests itself because it expresses precisely the independent existence of power as against the indefiniteness of whatever it may express itself in. It follows that power cannot be known or measured in terms of its expressions, but only experienced as an indwelling. The observation of an effect always shows only the cause, and not the power, if the power is an inner surplus over and above the cause of a given effect.

p.211 Necessity... is "the basis of all new activity," as Ranke says

p.211-212 Power is real always only as an interplay of powers

p.212 In the continuity of events there must be the something that emerges as a goal giving an orientation to the whole.

p.218 For Droysen... "Powers grow with work." The moral power of the individual becomes a historical power insofar as it is at work on the great common goals. [JLJ - uncited reference to note 42 of Droysen, Historik, the moral potencies... develop, grow and rise only in the united work of men]

p.229 Dilthey insists that all "psychological life" is subject to the force of circumstances. There is no such thing as the originating power of individuality. It becomes what it is by carrying itself out.

p.237 significance is experienced only in our stepping outside the "pursuit of goals."

p.279 A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text.

p.281 The hermeneutical task becomes of itself a questioning of things

p.282 a person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something. That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text's alterity.

p.303 When we try to understand a text... we try to understand how what he is saying could be right. If we want to understand, we will try to make his arguments even stronger. This happens even in conversation

p.310 The essence of the question is to open up possibilities and keep them open.

p.318 understanding is always interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding. In accordance with this insight, interpretive language and concepts were recognized as belonging to the inner structure of understanding. This moves the whole problem of language from its peripheral and incidental position into the center of philosophy.

p.325 An active being, rather, is concerned with what is not always the same but can also be different. In it he can discover the point at which he has to act. The purpose of his knowledge is to govern his action.

p.325 Both [JLJ - moral knowledge and the knowledge of the craftsman] are practical knowledge - i.e., their purpose is to determine and guide action. Consequently, they must include the application of knowledge to the particular task.

p.364-365 Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive... Insight is something we come to.

p.365 The experienced man knows that all foresight is limited and all plans uncertain... Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then - as of all desire to know - is to know what is.

p.370 We cannot have experiences without asking questions. [JLJ - I wonder if this is true? Doh, I guess it is...]

p.371 The essence of the question is to have sense. Now sense involves a sense of direction. Hence the sense of a question is the only direction from which the answer can be given if it is to make sense. A question places what is questioned in a particular perspective. When a question arises, it breaks open the being of the object, as it were.

p.371 In order to be able to ask [a question], one must want to know, and that means knowing that one does not know. In the [Platonic dialog being discussed], there is a profound recognition of the priority of the question in all knowledge and discourse that really reveals something of an object. Discourse that is intended to reveal something requires that that thing be broken open by the question.
 For this reason, dialectic proceeds by way of question and answer or, rather, the path of all knowledge leads through the question.

p.372 the question has to be posed

p.373 Deciding the question is the path to knowledge... Knowledge always means, precisely, considering opposites. Its superiority over preconceived opinion consists in the fact that it is able to conceive of possibilities as possibilities. Knowledge is dialectical from the ground up. Only a person who has questions can have knowledge

p.374 All questioning and desire to know presuppose a knowledge that one does not know; so much so, indeed, that a particular lack of knowledge leads to a particular question.

p.375 To conduct a dialogue requires first of all that the partners do not talk at cross purposes. Hence it necessarily has the structure of question and answer. The first condition of the art of conversation is ensuring that the other person is with us. We know this only too well from the reiterated 'yes' of the interlocutors in the Platonic dialogues... To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented. It requires that one does not try to argue the other person down but that one really considers the weight of the other's opinion.

p.376 The speaker (der Redende) is put to the question (zur Rede gestellt) until the truth of what is under discussion (wovon der Rede ist) finally emerges... What emerges in its truth is the logos, which is neither mine nor yours and hence so far transcends the interlocutors' subjective opinions that even the person leading the conversation knows that he does not know.

p.377 conversation... is always fundamentally realized in question and answer... The primacy of dialogue, the relation of question and answer, can be seen in even so extreme a case as that of Hegel's dialectic as a philosophic method.

p.383 The close relation between questioning and understanding is what gives hermeneutic experience its true dimension... this is the real and fundamental nature of a question: namely to make things indeterminate. Questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a thing... a person who thinks must ask himself questions... Questioning opens up possibilities of meaning, and thus what is meaningful passes into one's own thinking on the subject... To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.

p.385 It is true that a text does not speak to us in the same way as does a Thou. We who are attempting to understand must ourselves make it speak.

p.401 We say that we "conduct" a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it... No one knows in advance what will "come out" of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us... a conversation has a spirit of its own, and... the language in which it is conducted... allows something to "emerge" which henceforth exists.

p.402 Where there is understanding, there is not translation but speech.

p.415 To interpret means precisely to bring one's own preconceptions into play so that the text's meaning can really be made to speak for us... The text is made to speak through interpretation... interpretation must find the right language if it really wants to make the text speak. There cannot, therefore, be any single interpretation that is correct "in itself," precisely because every interpretation is concerned with the text itself... Interpretation... is the act of understanding itself

p.416 interpretive concepts... it is their nature to disappear behind what they bring to speech in interpretation. Paradoxically, an interpretation is right when it is capable of disappearing in this way. And at the same time it must be expressed as something that is supposed to disappear. The possibility of understanding is dependent on the possibility of this kind of mediating interpretation.

p.478 Whether a given traditionary text is a poem or tells us of a great event, in each case what is transmitted re-emerges into existence just as it presents itself... as in genuine dialogue, something emerges that is contained in neither of the partners by himself.

p.503 the truth of what presents itself in play is properly neither "believed" nor "not believed" outside the play situation.

p.594 Anyone who finds himself in a situation of genuine choice needs a standard of excellence to guide reflection in coming to a decision... What one considers the right decision determines the guiding standard itself