Hans-Georg Gadamer discusses the play “of art,” as in the creative process that a child would have and its relationship to art. Beginning with thoughts of how studies of animal behavior find similarities between human kind and animal kind. He wonders if “what we claim to be the exercise of free and conscious human choice cannot be much better understood in terms of animal behavior and its controlling instincts.”
Fortunately Gadamer is able to make some distinctions between the play of animals and that of humans by evaluating the rules that humans form to govern their play. Also there is the seriousness of play which is found in “the most serious kinds of human activity: in ritual, in the administration of justice, in social behavior in general.” This is a demonstration of how play can transcend creativity and can surpass the instinctive playful actions of animals in that human play becomes in itself a creation. Not just in the sense of producing something but that which is produced becomes a unique and separate object which is in itself an expression.
Gadamer states that art “is not simply what it is, but rather something that it is not.” Art is not just a product, but possesses the character of play. As play becomes an extension of one’s abundance of life it is interwoven into all aspects of life from seriousness to bliss and art as an expression of play then transcends all other aspects of life.
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