And, for this matter, a Joke and a Test. A Game that is a Joke that is a Test (even).
There is a strange but simple enough argument for the first "as if":
- 1. Logic can be understood according to the concept of a logical game (rather like how modality can be understood according to the concept of a possible world).
2. The fundamental structure of reality, is identical to the fundamental structure of logic.
C. Therefore, reality is a (logical) game.
... But I don't get the Joke, neither how the Joke is equal to the Game and the Test. The Test, however, can easily be read back into the Game:
So the Test is the Game of right and wrong and all the rest there is of grace and suberogation. Moreover, consciousness is, in a sense, essentially gappy or incomplete. The fact that you are conscious through your senses is the same as the fact that you are not as such conscious past the range of your senses, that there is an automatic gap in perception. That you do not know something, that anything is mysterious ever to you, is essential to what you are, in the sense that we all are like living questions, with the variables being filled in by our thoughts and experiences and so on. So if a test generally is a set of questions, the Test of life is the transcendental interposition of our question-like essence with the nature of the things that exist within and outside of us, so that we can conceive of the things that we do as solutions (or aggravations) of problems that constitute and surround us. The Test is the algebra of destiny, if you will, where algebra in itself is part of our destiny (supposing such a parable makes any damn sense).Tamar Schapiro has extended Rawls's treatment, developing it into a theory of action (Schapiro 2001; she attributes the view to Kant, but again the historical question will not be taken up). On her view, ‘actions’ are just moves in the completely generic practice; that is, ‘action’ is a status within the generic practice in something like the way that ‘move’ is a status within chess. Schapiro does not name the generic practice, but because it will be convenient to have a short way of referring to it, let's call it ‘Intendo’. Intendo is the game you are playing whenever you do anything at all; ‘agent’ is thus the generic role in the generic game (the analog of ‘player,’ in chess or baseball). Practices specify standards and reasons, and so ‘practical reason’ turns out to be a practice status as well. Intendo consequently determines what forms practical reasons can take, and so patterns of practical inference are to be read off of what turns out to be the theory of action. [Elijah Millgram, "Practical Reason and the Structure of Action," sec. 3]
Now maybe the Joke is that it is totally f$%king absurd that reality is a Game and a Test? At first I thought the answer was, "The true name for laughter," or the Form of Laughter (in Plato's sense), or something to do with how jokes depend on something like paradox to work, so that the Joke is the practical paradox of all existence, but I don't know what to make of that description just yet.
EDIT: It might be known also, however, that the Joke has to do with the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" If the world is not necessary, then the world is absurd. But suppose that it was possible for the world to not be. Then no actual thing would be possible, and no possible thing would be actual. Put another way, if everything is contingent, then it is also contingent that everything is contingent, which means: it is possibly necessary! But what is possibly necessary, although not actually necessary in the realm of actuality, is actually necessary in the realm of possibility. So the reason why there is something rather than nothing is that it impossible for there to be nothing: there is always possibility itself. But all possibility is actual possibility, so that possibility in itself is a necessarily actual thing, even. This might be the most evanescent of facts, but it is a fact, a lonely brick against the void of absolute nonexistence perchance. But now there is a possible world where nothing is necessary, and that world is thence absurd; but from the point of view of the Joke, in the aleph-space (of the final infinity, not only his Paradise but the man Cantor's Empyrean), where the transworld function computes reality, the Joke "sees" this absurd world, and in an act of transeternal empathy copies the "feeling" of this absurdity into the Joke's "mind," so that getting the Joke is accompanied by a feeling of infinite absurdity.
EDIT 2: Laughter would, then, for those for whom the Word is the Lord (and not just the transdimensional semiotic function for the Joke), the utmost in piety perhaps. For the Joke is that our world is possibly absurd, but is not actually so. We laugh at the fact that the Lord of the Word created our world so that it is not absurd, knowing, as it were, that the world might have existed in a different Way (on that level). However, the Lord could not have alone made the world actually what it is, on this view of things, but had to work according to the icons of the Game, the Joke, and the Test. The Creator is not quite the demiurge, but neither, as the Father, is He namelessly superior to all other particular things, and He must be friends with the Forms themselves, to do His creative work. (Which Forms? Just the Form of the Good, but this is the Form of the Game, the Joke, and the Test. So God decides to be a Trinity in honor of the Form of the Good, so to say. Really, except by willing it, how could we say of the divine nature that It could exist fully in substance for each of three distinct divine persons?)
Now these Forms are also rather the Songs of Grace (especially, as it were, the Song of the Order). But these are just the musical archetypes of emotions in the autonomy of virtue. So the Song of the Joke is played for eternity, as are the Song of the Game and the Test. But the Song of the Test is the emotion saudade, for this is that most mysterious of all feelings (and even arguably the most mysterious of all things simpliciter, as if knowing the solution to saudade would be itself the heart of reality).
