每次重读James P. Carse的《Finite and Infinite Games》总能有产生新的灵感，摘选一些要点作记录。
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Chapter 1 There Are at Least Two Kinds of Games
1
THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
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If a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won.
We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.
There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play.
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
3
Just as it is essential for a finite game to have a definitive ending, it must also have a precise beginning. Therefore, we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries to which, of course, all players must agree. But players must agree to the establishment of spatial and numerical boundaries as well. That is, the game must be played within a marked area, and with specified players.
Persons are selected for finite play. It is the case that we cannot play if we must play, but it is also the case that we cannot play alone. Thus, in every case, we must find an opponent, and in most cases teammates, who are willing to join in play with us. Not everyone who wishes to do so may play for, or against, the New York Yankees. Neither may they be electricians or agronomists by individual choice, without the approval of their potential colleagues and competitors.
Because finite players cannot select themselves for play, there is never a time when they cannot be removed from the game, or when the other contestants cannot refuse to play with them.The license never belongs to the licensed, nor the commission to the officer.
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Only one person or team can win a finite game, but the other contestants may well be ranked at the conclusion of play.
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In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical to a finite game: Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play. Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.
Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play.
There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game.
While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.
For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite game has been played, or even can be played, since duration can be measured only externally to that which endures. It is also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played, though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite game.
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Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.
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If finite games must be externally bounded by time, space, and number, they must also have internal limitations on what the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play.
The rules will be different for each finite game. It is, in fact, by knowing what the rules are that we know what the game is.
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A point of great consequence to all finite play follows from this: The agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules.
Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.
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If the rules of a finite game are unique to that game it is evident that the rules may not change in the course of play else a different game is being played.
It is on this point that we find the most critical distinction between finite and infinite play: The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play.The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome -- that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others.
The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.
For this reason the rules of an infinite game have a different status from those of a finite game. They are like the grammar of a living language, where those of a finite game are like the rules of debate. In the former case we observe rules as a way of continuing discourse with each other; in the latter we observe rules as a way of bringing the speech of another person to an end.
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Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
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Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.
The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it.The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.
What makes this an issue is not the morality of masking ourselves. It is rather that self-veiling is a contradictory act -- a free suspension of our freedom . I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself. I may have convinced myself I am Ophelia. But credibility will never suffice to undo the contradictoriness of self-veiling. "To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe" (Sartre).
If no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling, and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with us.
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Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players.They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully. (The term "abstract" is used here according to Hegel's familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being "concrete.")They freely use masks in their social engagements, but not without acknowledging to themselves and others that they are masked. For that reason they regard each participant in finite play as that person playing and not as a role played by someone.
Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions.
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.
By relating to others as they move out of their own freedom and not out of the abstract requirements of a role, infinite players are concrete persons engaged with concrete persons. For that reason an infinite game cannot be abstracted, for it is not a part of the whole presenting itself as the whole, but the whole that knows it is the whole. We cannot say a person played this infinite game or that, as though the rules are independent of the concrete circumstances of play. It can be said only that these persons played with each other and in such a way that what they began cannot be finished.
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Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical. Although script and plot do not seem to be written in advance, we are always able to look back at the path followed to victory and say of the winners that they certainly knew how to act and what to say.
Inasmuch as infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making all scripts useless, we shall refer to infinite play as dramatic.
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The theatricality of finite play has to do with the fact that there is an outcome.
The fact that a finite game is provisionally dramatic means that it is the intention of each player to eliminate its drama by making a preferred end inevitable. It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning. A true Master Player plays as though the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.
17 [[备注]] 这段重要
A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.
Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.
The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one's own personal past.
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.
Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.
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What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public; they are for others to notice.
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It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.
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One can be dead in life, or one can be alive in death.
What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.
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Perhaps a more common example of such life-or-death forms of bondage is found in those persons who resort to expensive medical strategies to be cured of life-threatening illness. They, too, seem to be giving life away in order to win it back. So also are those who observe special diets or patterns of life designed to prolong their youth and to postpone aging and death indefinitely; they hate their life in this world now in order that they may have it later. And just as with slaves, the life they receive is given to them by others: doctors, yogis, or their anonymous admirers.
There is a contradiction here: If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play.Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived. "Life itself appears only as a means to life" (Marx).
This is a contradiction common to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself.
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"The information that my soul is to last forever could then be of no more personal concern to me than the news that my appendix is to be preserved eternally in a bottle" (Flew). More often what one intends to preserve is a public personage, a permanently veiled selfhood.
Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.
23
Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability.
The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter. It is not a laughter at others who have come to an unexpected end, having thought they were going somewhere else. It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered that the end we thought we were coming to has unexpectedly opened. We laugh not at what has surprisingly come to be impossible for others, but over what has surprisingly come to be possible with others.
24
Infinite play is inherently paradoxical, just as finite play is inherently contradictory.
Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals.
The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.
25
When a person is known by title, the attention is on a completed past, on a game already concluded, and not therefore to be played again. A title effectively takes a person out of play.
When a person is known only by name, the attention of others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. That I cannot now predict your future is exactly what makes mine unpredictable. Our futures 26enter into each other. What is your future, and mine, becomes ours. We prepare each other for surprise.
Titles are abstractions; names are always concrete.
26
Titles are theatrical. Each title has a specified ceremonial form of address and behavior.
The title determines not only who may speak to you, but also how they may speak to you, and about what they may speak to you. The title is a recognition of areas in which the titled person is no longer in competition.
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The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition, and to conform to their will-in the arena in which the title was won.
The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever element can move another is the more powerful. If no one else ever strove to be a Boddhisattva or the Baton Twirling Champion of the State of Indiana, those titles would be powerless -- no one would defer to them.
Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others? Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed-until the designated period of time has run out.
To speak meaningfully of a person's power is to speak of what that person has already completed in one or another closed field.To see power is to look backward in time.Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful.
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And yet, the theatrical nature of power seems to be consistent with the principle arrived at earlier: Whoever must play cannot play. The intuitive idea in that principle is that no one can engage us competitively unless we fully cooperate, unless we join the game and join it to win. Because power is measurable only in comparative-that is, competitiveterms, it presupposes some kind of cooperation. If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as losers. To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power
29 [[备注]] 这段重要
Power is a feature only of finite games. It is not dramatic but theatrical. How then do infinite players contend with power? Infinite play is always dramatic; its outcome is endlessly open. There is no way of looking back to make a definitive assessment of the power or weakness of earlier play. Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.
We need a term that will stand in contrast to "power" as it acquires its meaning in finite play. Let us say that where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength.
A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen. Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits.
Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.
Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.
30
Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.
Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of the player's voice, but the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reason of their deafness or ignorance.
Evil is not the termination of a finite game. Finite players, even those who play for their own lives, know the stakes of the games they freely choose to play.
Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power.
31
Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.
Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.
Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.
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Chapter 2 No One Can Play a Game Alone
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Chapter 3 I Am the Genius of Myself
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Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising what Nietzsche called the "faculty of oblivion," not as a way of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgotten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten our freedom to play.
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I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness.
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One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful -- because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision.
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Chapter 4 A Finite Game Occurs Within a World
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A FINITE GAME occurs within a world. The fact that it must be limited temporally, numerically, and spatially means that there is something against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite game. Its limits are meaningless unless there is something to be limited, unless there is a larger space, a longer time, a greater number of possible competitors.
A world provides an absolute reference without which the time, place, and participants make no sense. Whatever occurs within a game is relatively intelligible with reference to whatever else has happened inside its boundaries, but it is absolutely intelligible with reference to that world for the sake of which its boundaries exist.
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World exists in the form of audience. A world is not all that is the case, but that which determines all that is the case.
An audience does not receive its identity according to the persons within it, but according to the events it observes. Those who remember that day remember precisely what they were doing in the early afternoon of that day, not because it was the 22d of November, but because it was at that moment that they became audience to the events of that day.
If the boundaries of an audience are irrelevant, what is relevant is the unity of the audience. They must be a singular entity, bound in their desire to see who will win the contest before them. Anyone for whom this desire is not primary is not in the audience for that contest, and is not a person in that world.
The fact that a finite game needs an audience before which it can be played, and the fact that an audience needs to be singularly absorbed in the events before it, show the crucial reciprocity of finite play and the world. Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world. George Eliot's villainous character, Grandcourt, "did not care a languid curse for anyone's admiration; but this state of non-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object-namely, a world of admiring and envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile."
We are players in search of a world as often as we are world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but no world lasts forever.
68 [[备注]] 这段重要
An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.
Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it. They are not concerned to determine when it is over, but only what comes of it.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.
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Chapter 5 Nature Is the Realm of the Unspeakable
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The effort has largely taken the form of theatricalizing our relation to nature. Like any Master Player we have been patiently attentive to the slightest clues in our opponent's behavior -- as a way of preparing ourselves against surprise. Like hunters stalking their prey, we have learned to mimic the movements of nature, waiting for the chance to take hold of them before they get away from us. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" (Bacon). It is as though, by learning its secret script, we have learned to direct its playas well. There is little left to surprise us.
The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding. Since this inherent structure determines the way things change, and is not itself subject to change, we speak of nature being lawful, of repeating itself according to quite predictable patterns.
What we have done by showing that certain events repeat themselves according to known laws is to explain them. Explanation is the mode of discourse in which we show why matters must be as they are. All laws made use of in explanation look backward in time from the, conclusion or the completion of a sequence. It is implicit in all explanatory discourse that just as there is a discoverable necessity in the outcome of past events, there is a discoverable necessity in future events. What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial events and the laws covering their succession. A prediction is but an explanation in advance.
Because of its thorough lawfulness nature has no genius of its own. On the contrary, it is sometimes thought that the grandest discovery of the human genius is the perfect compatibility between the structure of the natural order and the structure of the mind, thereby making a complete understanding of nature possible. "One may say 'the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility' " (Einstein).
71
There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. It is one thing for physics and chemistry to be speaking about nature; it is quite another for physics andchemistry to be the speaking of nature. No chemist would want to say that chemistry is itself chemical, for our speaking cannot be both chemical and about chemistry. If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker. To be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside from the process and comment on it "objectively" and "dispassionately," without anything obstructing our view of these matters. Here lies the irony: By way of this perfectly reasonable claim the gods have stolen back into our struggle with nature. By depriving the gods of their own voices, the gods have taken ours. It is we who speak as supernatural intelligences and powers, masters of the forces of nature.
This irony passes unnoticed only so long as we continue to veil ourselves against what we can otherwise plainly see: nature allows no master over itself. Bacon's principle works both ways. If we must obey to command, then our commanding is only obeying and not commanding at all. There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning" (Heisenberg).
72
Unveiled, aware of the insuperable limitation placed against all our looking, we come back to nature's perfect silence. Now we can see that it is a silence so complete there is no way of knowing what it is silent about-if anything. What we learn from this silence is the unlikeness between nature and whatever we could think or say about it. But this silence has an irony of its own: Far from stupefying us, it provides an indispensable condition to the mind's own originality. By confronting us with radical unlikeness, nature becomes the source of metaphor.
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Chapter 6 We Control Nature for Societal Reasons
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Chapter 7 Myth Provokes Explanation but Accepts None of It
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