Abstract
After discussing the environmental effects of sport practices and putting a metabletic view on sport to the test, I now will turn to philosophy of sport as an academic discipline. Like other branches of applied philosophy, such as animal ethics and environmental philosophy, it started off in the early seventies of the previous century. Currently, it seems locked in a binary view. On the one hand narrow internalists, or formalists, argue that sports are uniquely constituted by their rules. This point of view can be referred to as the autotelic stance. Herein sport is considered an end in itself, constitued by rules and (eventually) shared conventions on how to play or race well. Broad internalists, or interpretivists, on the other hand, contend that sport is more than just a gratuitous and playful end in itself. In this line of reasoning sport also can be a means toward other ends: national pride, prize money, a ruthless quest for records, challenging the existing order or advancing international peace. This is the heterotelic view.
In this chapter I will revitalise the reflection on sport as a dimension of the human condition by attempting to move beyond the binary opposition of internalism and externalism. I will do so by focussing on the potentially positive aspects of the concept of agon, a term which denotes struggle or contest. As an ‘agonal’ or competitive social practice, sport turns out to be a means to an end, in the sense that it surpasses the concept of sport as self-referential play: seeking knowledge, understanding the human condition, and cultivating virtue. I argue that this agonistic heterotelic view seems the better option.
In order to strengthen my claims I will uptake, broaden and deepen Peter Sloterdijk’s ascetology already introduced in previous chapters. The bottom line of his call for a change for the better is that we have to become aware of the fact that our ‘ascetic planet’ is inhabited by individuals who are constantly and relentlessly training themselves. This may be self-focused, but it may also have a broader scope: we train ourselves to become better humans, contributing to a just and sustainable society. Paradoxically, however, this will only work when we become aware of our exercises as forms of life that engage the whole practicing person.
A broad internal hermeneutic interpretation and furthering of endurance sport, especially cycling, can enrich our understanding of this sports activity as a form of asceticism. By following and furthering this ascetological imperative we can elaborate a view on cycling as an upwardly oriented ‘spiral’ that can contribute not only to self-knowledge and self-improvement on the individual level (metanoia), but also to an ‘ecosophical renaissance’ on the collective level.
By producing new configurations between contemplation and fitness, the current ‘renaissance’ enables new festivals on the mountain of improbabilities(Peter Sloterdijk 2009/2013, p. 155).
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Notes
- 1.
See for a detailed account of the genesis of sport philosophy Lunt and Dyreson (2014, p. 30).
- 2.
A noun etymologically referring to playful or ‘ludic’ physical activity distracting from serious human duties, but as of the nineteenth century also referring to “competitive physical activities” (Fry 2014, p. 371).
- 3.
The rather confusing use of ‘sport’ and ‘games’ is a conceptual obscurity which still slumbers in the philosophy of sport, and which to some extent has to be attributed to the different connotations of play, games and sport in different languages. In North America sport is usually strongly connected with professionalism, a strong sense competiveness and commercialism, whilst in Europe traditionally rather is associated with ‘gentle(wo)manlike’ amateurism, literally: the love for sport. This subtle difference still is silently echoed in many sport philosophical publications.
- 4.
Cfr. footnote 148 for a refinement of this generalisation.
- 5.
Note that this initial definition is not about sport per se, but (just) about playing (physical) games.
- 6.
Rather than an accidental requirement to be able to move the pieces on the chessboard. The end-result of a game of chess is not determined by the physical quality of the moves but by their strategic result. A trembling hesitating hand that results in check-mate is better than a powerful and determined move that leads to the loss of an advancing pawn.
- 7.
For a more detailed account, which also discusses conventionalism with its anti-formalism and its focus on the (tacit) ethos of games, cfr. Lopez Frias (2014), who argues that William J. Morgan’s deep conventionalism “could be defined as an internalist type of conventionalism.... For Morgan, deep conventions constitute sports’ normative inner nature. These conventions have been historically constructed and accepted by practice communities through careful deliberation. On the other hand, coordinating conventions are arbitrary agreements that serve to solve practical problems (they could be grounded in elements, external to sports, for instance, economic interests” (2014, p. 363).
- 8.
Analytic philosophy (AP) geographically is said to refer to the Anglo-American world, whereas continental philosophy (CP) usually is associated with mainland Europe. “But this distinction is very limited if not inaccurate. Both CP and AP emerged out of the same philosophical tradition as the work of Kant, Bernard Bolzano and Franz Brentano. All three were from the European continent. Furthermore, there are quite a few philosophers living in mainland Europe who are mostly concerned with AP, as there are a number of philosophers in North American universities who are mainly concerned with CP. So, in the modern world, geography indicates little about philosophical preferences. (…) AP has shared the problem-oriented and scientific-empirical outlook of the natural sciences, that is, its focus is to search for knowledge and truth in a rationalistic framework where a problem becomes divided and reduced into its smaller parts, analysed and explained in terms of logic or by the laws of nature. On the other hand, CP has been concerned with the understanding what appears to be meaningful for a person in the sense that it has tried to comprehend life as it is lived from the first person point of view” (Fusche Moe 2014, p. 53).
- 9.
I will use ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘interpretivism’ as synonyms.
- 10.
In the previous Chapter I already argued that this is a commonplace and a caricature. One could argue that in 1974 the Germans already had a touch of sophisticated poion in their game, albeit rather at a cerebral level than in concrete motor actions.
- 11.
Since the emergence of GPS-tracking many cyclists and runners put the measurable outcome (such as distance, speed, altimeters, produced Watts) of their training sessions on the website STRAVA. This enables them to (virtually) compare performances beyond the limits of a real time race.
- 12.
From a statistical perspective even elite sport is rather about coping with losing than winning, since only one athlete will win the Olympic 100-meter dash, and only one team will win the champions league. A common sense argument which makes slogans as ‘Winning is a mindset’ or ‘90% of winning is mental’ presumptuous if not ridiculous. Cfr. for a critical assessment of the ideology of winning Caddick and Ryall (2012).
- 13.
During the publication of the Grasshopper in 1978 the Olympics officially still were ‘amateur’ only games. There was a discussion, however, on the ‘state-amateurism’ (or hidden professionalism) of the communist and socialist participant countries. At the same time in the Netherlands there were professional cyclists who earned less than the state-guaranteed minimum wages. Still they kept proceeding exhausting themselves to the max. They apparently felt a compelling inner urge to do so. For them a meaningful life apparently was a cycling life. This revaluation of all ludic and supposedly gratuitous values as voluntary obstacles demonstrates the idiosyncratic nature of Suits’s pro-amateur-dichotomy and calls for a revision of the unproblematic conjunction of playfulness, gratuitous and true love of sport, or, literally, amateurism. Cfr. also Loland 1995 for the ambiguous and complicated relation in De Coubertin’s modern Olympic ideology between the importance of winning (citius, altius, fortius!), playing, the wrongly to De Coubertin attributed idea that participating in the Games is more important than winning, and his the holistic idea of a mens fervida in corpore lacertose (an overflowing mind in a muscular body). This complicated vitalistic stance makes Suits’s amateur-professional-dichotomy also historically highly questionable.
- 14.
The following observation makes Suits’s amateur-pro dichotomy even more questionable to me. Even in highly commercialized professional sport events one can easily think of situations in which a sudden glimpse of utter playfulness pops up: a stunning but non-efficient trick by a basketball or soccer-player just for the sheer beauty of it in itself instead of winning at all costs.
- 15.
Heidegger had a habit of converting verbs and adjectives into often dire neologisms (approx. 150 in Being and Time), which in German to some extent is tolerated (at least as so-called Substantivierte Adjektive, or ‘substantived’ adjectives) but in English is not. This difference in linguistic attitude is an interesting specimen of the supposed continental-analytical watershed, I argue. It reflects the broadening perspectives towards the experience of wholeness that is paramount in broad internalism versus the attempt to narrow down concepts of formalism.
- 16.
E.g. Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments.
- 17.
Which, for instance, appears to be the case in Suits’s before-mentioned failure to acknowledge the difference between empirical and conceptual statements (Cfr. Steenbergen 2004, p. 165–166).
- 18.
Which of course is a hint to Kant’s three famous critiques.
- 19.
‘Kynos’ is ‘dog’ in ancient Greek.
- 20.
Sloterdijk is anything but a dystopian or cynical thinker when it comes to technology, as already argued in the introductory Chap. 1, by referring to his concept of human-friendly homeo-technology. The term ‘anthropotechnics’ in the subtitle You Must Change Your Life also refers to this optimistic basic attitude toward technological progress. “Salvation, for Sloterdijk, lies in just the area where Heidegger believed perdition lay: that is, in the realm of technology. Yet technology, for Sloterdijk, seldom has to do with machines. It is mental and spiritual technology that interests him: the techniques with which human beings have historically made themselves secure on the Earth” (Kirsch 2015).
- 21.
A similar pneumatic insight already has been put forward by William James’s by means of his on the benefits of experiencing a ‘second wind’ (1907, p. 7). I will come back to the Sloterdijk-James connection in the next chapter.
- 22.
This resembles Carl ‘Watergate’ Bernstein’s striving for ‘the best attainable version of the truth’.
- 23.
As opposed to the vicious circle, which has negative results, since it unavoidably leads to an infinite regress.
- 24.
A charming, but naïve thought, which has to be refuted for reasons of energetic inefficiency.
- 25.
Except for the childhood phase of learning how to ride a bike through trial and error. Every child remembers the excitement of its first wobbly ride without side wheels. It goes, it goes!
- 26.
In the seventies the Dutch cyclist Joop Zoetemelk wasn’t able to absolve a very elementary obstacle-run during a TV-show, nor was he able to pull himself up just once at the horizontal bar. Still he won the Tour de France in 1980.
- 27.
And actually is. According to the KNWU (Royal Dutch Cycling Union) in the Netherlands approximately 10% of the population can be qualified as a sports-cyclist, while on average every Dutch(wo)men cycles 878 kilometres per year, commuting, holiday-cycling etc. included.
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Welters, R. (2019). Ascetic Practices, Hermeneutical Cycles and Ecosophical Endurance. In: Towards a Sustainable Philosophy of Endurance Sport . Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05294-2_5
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