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Towards a Sustainable Philosophy of Endurance Sport pp 171–194Cite as

Epilogue: Turning in the Widening Gyre

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Part of the book series: Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy ((LOET,volume 37))

Abstract

After pondering over the practical feasability of this ‘idealistic’ study in sustainable endurance and positioning it in the current philosophy of sport, I will reflect on a life virtuously lived in endurance, especially of the cycling kind. Starting off with challenging gravity and the first glorious unaided pedal strokes in the parental backyard. The first time with no hands. Followed up by widening circles: conquering villages, boroughs, provinces, countries, continents. And then in retrograde order back to the home base again, cultivating the garden, in search of destiny and origin by means of oriented repetition. On city bikes, racing bikes, time trail machines, mountain bikes and trekking bikes. Paved and unpaved. Alone or in a small group. Commuting, travelling, racing, climbing, gasping. Or just riding. Trying to find an own pace, and understanding that the good ascetic life comes with un-motorized reflexive-reflective moving around. To bring the motto of The Rider to memory: “Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me” (Krabbé T, The rider. Bloomsbury, London, 1978/2016, p. 1).

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle I no longer despair for the future of the human race.(H.G. Wells). Cited in Ilundáin-Agurruza and Austin (2010, p. 1).

Cycling is like church—many attend but few understand.(Jim Burlant). Cited in Ilundáin-Agurruza and Austin (2010, p. 7).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Yeats was a ‘protestant agnostic’, who as a public figure and politician often stood up against the Irish catholic clergy. As a poet his overall spiritual attitude best can be coined as idiosyncratic. “Yeats often used Christian themes in his poetry, but that was not the only religion that influenced his work. In the famous poem ‘The Second Coming,’ Yeats clearly references the Christian ideas of the second coming of Jesus Christ. The language of this poem could be interpreted as a reference to the Christian Armageddon. Yeats’s personal beliefs extended well beyond Christianity, however. He held to a complicated view of history and religion’s place within it. As an Irish native, he was fond of the folklore and mysticism of his Celtic heritage. Religious references in ‘The Second Coming’ have to do with the idea that the time of a Christian domination of history in Europe was coming to an end. Yeats was living in the aftermath of World War I and the Irish War of Independence. Both reflected Yeats’ impressions of the world coming to an end” (Ridder 2014).

  2. 2.

    There is arguably also a strain of problem-shooting pragmatism in Bostrom’s thinking. On his website he states that: “(t)he search for crucial considerations relates to what I call ‘macrostrategy’: the quest to uncover links between long-term outcomes for humanity and present-day actions. How profound and inescapable is our cluelessness about such matters? And among the available bets, which one has the highest expected value?” (https://nickbostrom.com/#bio). In the end, however, Bostrom seeks salvation in high tech human enhancement rather than considering a profound mitigation of human behaviour as such. His line of reasoning is linear and progressive rather than winding and ascetic.

  3. 3.

    Savulescu argues that parents should be able to “select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information” (2001, p. 413). This comes down to choosing for the absence of genetic disease, but also for non-medical traits such as sex and intelligence.

  4. 4.

    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate. (Plurality must never be posited without necessity). The wrongly to Occam attributed phrase entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity) actually comes from the Irish Franciscan scholastic philosopher Johannes Poncius (John Punch), who described the principle as a ‘common axiom’ (axioma vulgare) of the Scholastics (Cfr. Crombie 1959). In its current usage Occam’s razor refers to the logic-rhetoric principle of not introducing unnecessary ‘things’ to explain a specific phenomenon. Bostrom and Savulescu, however, argue that humanity cannot be saved without introducing new (homeo-)technology. By doing so, they introduce the ‘myth of progress’, the idea that society inevitably tends towards the introduction of new and ever more sophisticated technologies. Reverting to Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit (1966), I still contend that the idea of an appropriate withdrawal with conventional means would be the most elegant solution to overcome the stalemate between human expansionism and the limited resilience of planet earth.

  5. 5.

    Which are two sides of the same coin, I argue.

  6. 6.

    Also Elon Musk’s idea of the future colonization of Mars suffers from the myth of progress and the idea that the forthcoming anthropocenic catastrophe only can be solved by a technological fix. “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great—and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars” (SpaceX). Why not concentrate on planet earth first and considering the idea of appropriate withdrawal? Why not first try drive and fly less and cycling more, emitting less carbon, burning more fat, and using only ecosophically sound technology instead of colonizing space? It may be exciting to be among the stars, but life is only possible on a planet.

  7. 7.

    Which, as argued in Chap. 2, is best defined in a ‘Spinozistic’ way as dynamic, ever ‘naturing’, and meanwhile highly usurped and manipulated by Homo sapiens. Protagoras’s dictum that man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not, comes with a huge responsibility, I argue. Man, the former runner, runs nature, hopefully increasingly in a homeo-technical, if not an appropriately withdrawing manner.

  8. 8.

    Up to 5 or 6 times on a racing-bike, I would say.

  9. 9.

    As already mentioned in footnote 3 the Cervélo P5X costs approx. 15,000 euro’s. However, one can buy a reasonable city bike for 400 euro’s and a racing bike for 600 euro’s. Also bikes need to be maintained, of course, but they do not need fuel and there is no road tax for bicycles.

  10. 10.

    There is a significant rise of so-called ‘e-bikes’ (electric bike) over the last years. In 2016 there were sold 271,000 of these (Thole 2017).

  11. 11.

    From personal experience I notice, however, that there is hardly a rise in young people when it comes to cycling for vacation. The audience of the cycling bus that brings me back home from Southern-France, Northern-Spain or middle Italy each year is rather middle-aged, if not pensionado. Young people increasingly opt for cheap flight-tickets to exotic destinations. In this respect they do not differ from the average environmental philosopher, however, who often also flies all over the world to discuss his or her sustainability message with peers. As we all know, preaching is far more popular than practicing.

  12. 12.

    A ‘Polder’ is land reclaimed from the sea or the river. The ‘polder model’ model of consensus decision-making, based on the acclaimed Dutch version of consensus based economic and social policy making. It also can be described as ‘a pragmatic recognition of pluriformity’ and ‘cooperation despite differences’. In this sense The Netherlands is a Jamesian country: ‘truth’ has cash value, is revealed in its consequences, and is considered a matter of temporary and flexible consensus.

  13. 13.

    Keulartz argues that boundary objects (‘grensobjecten’) enable coequal coexistence of conflicting beliefs without the necessity of consensus or compromise. They can have different meanings for different communities, but they are still sufficiently robust to have a meaning that overcomes locality (2005, p. 22). The same goes for endurance sportspeople, I argue.

  14. 14.

    “Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time. By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all. And indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the very Being of one’s own Dasein is an issue” (p. 284).

  15. 15.

    This is the point where trans-humanism goes astray, I argue. A life without an end is meaningless.

  16. 16.

    Academically starting off with the first issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Sport in the poionistic metabletic year 1974.

  17. 17.

    On the other hand, I argue, it is also possible to compete during training sessions, such as the among cyclists well-known phenomenom of sprinting for place-name signs, but also comparing efforts on specific stretches on the STRAVA website.

  18. 18.

    In the narrow internalist perspective a bicycle race is inefficient, since it usually ends at the beginning, and one can furthermore think of more efficient (motorised) means to get around. To recall Bernard Suits’s often cited definition of game-playing: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]” (1978/2005, pp. 54–55).

  19. 19.

    Both are also former presidents of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, which makes their line of reasoning an argument of authority, I would say.

  20. 20.

    Inserting ‘doping’ in the search engine of the websites of the journals resulted respectively in 83 and 129 hits on 18 April 2018.

  21. 21.

    23 Hits in The Journal for the Philosophy of Sport and 38 in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy on April 18 2018. Knowing that Sport, Ethics and Philosophy only exists as of 2007, this imposes the hypothesis that this journal is more susceptible for the thick take on sport.

  22. 22.

    Which makes riding in a group more ecosophical, since it combines the hilarious joy of sensing speed with a wider scope.

  23. 23.

    Memory is a poor counsellor. I found out later that this was one of those typically grey Dutch days.

  24. 24.

    I apparently did not notice that the wear and tear already was beginning to show (Cfr. the metabletic Chap. 4).

  25. 25.

    Dutch bikes often do not have hand-brakes, since these are not necessary in an on average flat country.

  26. 26.

    Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the Alps were fearsome, a place that you had to avoid. The Mont Blanc was popularly called the ‘montagne maudite’. In Romanticism, an Alpine trip becomes a sort of obligatory pilgrimage for every self-respecting writer or intellectual (Lemaire, 2002, p. 87).

  27. 27.

    I already described this race through the eyes of pro-racer Lucy Gossage in the previous Chapter. I probably even suffered more than she did.

  28. 28.

    Qoud non. Daring downhill mountainbikers do, after being dropped off by a helicopter.

  29. 29.

    Since this is not very likely in times of rapid global warming: there are also plans for a tunnel or a bridge from Russia to Alaska.

  30. 30.

    This similes Van den Berg’s critique of spinalism. Other than Van den Berg, however, Lemaire sympathizes with Rousseau.

  31. 31.

    Many people can no longer indicate a specific country or capital on a map, but they know how many flight hours it takes to get there.

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  1. Institute for Science in Society, Faculty of Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Ron Welters

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Welters, R. (2019). Epilogue: Turning in the Widening Gyre. 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_8

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