For the Phenomenology of Play

Abstract

The success of phenomenology in contemporary culture is due above all to the new approach to knowledge that has been proposed, breaking with the traditional objectivism of scientific knowledge and placing the “phenomenon” at the centre of the relationship between the subject and the world. Everyday reality, the language of concrete things, have become fully-fledged targets of philosophical thought. While Eugen Fink, student of Husserl, elects the phenomenon of play as the “symbol of the world”, the original interpretation of man’s relation to the world, in Italy Piero Bertolini redefines the scientific basis of pedagogy according to phenomenological categories and places play among the fundamental fields of experience of education. On one hand overcoming the traditional educational instrumentalisation of play, on the other its sterile reduction to a consumer experience, Bertolini brings play back to its authentic dimension in which risk, error, adventure are constituent parts, the “active ingredients” of his pedagogy.