Page - 146 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

147 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom The boy follows a big bubble he has just blown, floating through the air for the few seconds it is meant to last. The child follows the bubble so intensely that the attentive gaze of its eyes mingles with the fragile “sphere” dancing in the air. For a moment, it is absorbed by this microspace, it actually lives in the bubble. Bubble and child become a “breathed commune.” (Sloterdijk 2011, 16–20)13 Creation as Beginning: Natality The strange coincidence of acting and ‘being acted’ we are coming across here is the anthropological structure of play Nietzsche is looking for. The remarkable consequence of this is that humanity, in the end and at the apo- gee of its possibilities, should become like a child – a central theme that runs through the veins of almost all of Nietzsche’s works. “Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the play [Spiel] of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.” (Nietzsche 1969, 55) We can observe that the child brings aspects of the camel and the lion to- gether. For the child as for the lion, the world is no longer given as a burden; but neither is it an external object to be appropriated, as the camel shows. We create worlds beyond any givenness, as a new beginning that never stops beginning, and in the same movement these worlds create us through the space we live from… and thus are dependent on. It is important to real- ize that Nietzsche shifts from a discussion of the world to a discussion of a world, that is, of a plurality of worlds created by man. Every human spirit “wins its own world,” in every time and place, always anew. Nietzsche’s notion of play concurs with a theory of imaginaries, so it appears. The stage of the human “spirit” as the playing child resonates in the vo- cabulary of Arendt’s The Human Condition as action.14 For her, action is the essence of the political as a particular feature of the human condition, as opposed to labor and work. Political action and speech always form a new beginning, and they open up the space of plurality: the “space of appear- ance” that the public realm is. Not surprisingly, Arendt baptizes this space of action as natality and plurality. In a reciprocal event of creation, both man and the world are formed and transformed, are born and reborn [natus] here (Arendt 1958, 175–247, especially chapters 28–29). 13 Sloterdijk bases his miniature on a painting by G.H. Every Millais, dating from 1886. 14 Arendt’s use of the concept of action does not follow its standard meaning of ‘doing’, ‘making’, or ‘work’. Indeed, the normal distinc- tion between actor and act is chal- lenged in her use of ‘action’. Action refers to a gesture of tem- porarily abandoning one’s control in the appearance to the other in the public space; it is of the order of exposure to the unknown, of a risk, a venture, or in Kierkegaardian terms (Arendt was greatly inspired by Kierkegaard’s philosophical/reli- gious vocabulary), a ‘leap’.