Amusement and Risk: Enlightenment as a Game in the French and Italian 18th Century

Project manager:: Prof. Dr. Robert Fajen

Enlightenment research has so far paid little attention to the concept of game. Although it is not uncommon to characterize the works of certain authors as „playful“, the adjective is usually used metaphorically and accordingly imprecisely. On the contrary, this research project claims that the concept of game is of fundamental importance for the Enlightenment process. Numerous key questions of the time point to practical or theoretical aspects of the game: those, for example, who think in the ‘long eighteenth century’ about the (un)predictability of chance, who explore the relationship between possibility and probability, stake and risk, freedom and rule, who deal with morally controversial problems such as amusement and waste of time or guilt, trust and deception, those very people also always ponder – whether directly or implicitly – on the nature of playing. In the concept of game, the most diverse areas of knowledge converge: mathematics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, education, politics, economics and art. In this perspective, this concept is a central touchstone, through which alternative methods of observation and explanatory models are tried and tested over the course of the eighteenth century.
The initial hypothesis of the project in thus that without play, the Enlightenment’s new way of thinking would not have been possible. 

The interest of Enlightenment thinkers in game theories did not happen by happenstance. Their age was a highly playful ‘era’. Between the late 17^th and the 18^th century, gambling became a ubiquitous experience in Europe that permeated society as a whole, a social power that was institutionalized and economically exploited. The development of new games and calculation models was accompanied by the development of new ways of living and new forms of representation. Obscure characters such as cheats, gambling addicts, and bad sports became socially acceptable and appropriate topics in literature; ‘Probability’ became a key concept between 1660 and 1800, both in the mathematics of game and in the poetics of the novel (Rüdiger Campe). The meaning of the adjective ‘playful’ is thus very different in this context, that is, much more concrete than what its casual use would imply. Many writers of the Enlightenment construct their works as veritable “play-texts” (Wolfgang Iser), written according to describable rules, as they are combined according to the elementary categories of the game, both in terms of presentation and content (according to Roger Caillois: competition, luck, combinatorics, imitation, frenzy, and uncontrollability). Such texts, for example the Lettres Persanes or Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, are not only entertaining, they also open up a potentially inexhaustible scope for interpretation, which prevents any attempt at final hermeneutic control (Hans-Jost Frey).

By using the concept of play, the gap between the history of form and ideas can be overcome, and it becomes easier to understand how the mercurial, pleasure-oriented culture of the rococo and the radical transformation of thought, knowledge and feeling that occurred in the age of the Enlightenment are connected. The amusement that the game promises by establishing an alternative order is inextricably linked to the risk of seeing things radically differently and of thinking the world anew.

In 2019, in the context of this project, I edited an anthology with Dr. Konstanze Baron, University of Tübingen, entitled Diderot - Le Génie des Lumières. Nature, normes, transgressions. In this volume, my contribution "Adresse et intuition. Diderot ou le génie du bonheur", is dedicated to the link between ingenious and playful action in Diderot's work.