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ABSTRACT
As sports fans, we often experience what seem to be strong garden-variety emotions—everything from joy and euphoria to anger, dread and despair. In self-description, in physiology and even in phenomenology, these reactions to sporting events present themselves as genuine emotions. But we don’t act on these ‘sporting emotions’ in the ways one might expect. This is because these reactions are not genuine emotions. Or so I argue. Johan Huizinga suggested that play has a pretend ‘set aside’ ‘extra-ordinary’ character. And Kendall Walton has argued that make-believe is involved in our emotional responses to fiction, as well as to sport. Here I articulate and extend the idea that sporting emotions centrally involve pretense and make-believe in ways that can meet some forceful objections. These extensions draw on a ‘double-consciousness’ I claim to find in the pretense of play. I end by saying why the proper characterization of our sporting emotions is important.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Many of my Brady-hating friends also cite the fact that Brady has benefited from extraordinary luck, from favorable calls (e.g., the tuck rule), and from deflationary mischief and other possible rules violations. They also don’t like his politics. But these reasons seem post facto to me: they pile onto the fact that Brady is already disliked for other reasons. After all, I agree with my friends about the cheating and the politics, but, as I say, I rather like Tom Brady.
2. As I think about it, though, Mikeala Shiffrin has many victories ahead of her; and there are sound utilitarian grounds (of the type that move me) for wishing some mediocre also-ran from some small country, such as that veteran skier from Lithuania, had won instead.
3. These are nicely described and situated in Bryant (Citation2018).
4. Although this double-consciousness (and so, pretense) requires significant cognitive sophistication, it’s not just humans that have this capacity. Any dog owner knows this. But for more evidence, see the website for the National Institute for Play.
5. See Walton (Citation1990, Citation2015b).
6. See Walton (Citation2015a).
7. My use of ‘partisan’ and ‘personal’ here is entirely stipulative. Neither word nor any other words seem ideal for pinning down one as opposed to the other side of the distinction I want.
8. In distinguishing between aesthetic and garden-variety aspects of our emotional response, I’m influenced by a similar distinction Peter Kivy draws regarding our response to music. See Kivy (Citation2002), especially chs. 3–7. For a good discussion of the connection between what I call partisan and aesthetic aspects of fan response, see Mumford (Citation2013).
9. See Walton (Citation1990, Citation2015b).
10. There are, of course, worries about Walton’s account of fiction. And there are also alternative solutions to the paradox of fictional emotions, the most popular being to reject the second proposition of our conflicting triad – that is, to drop the cognitivist requirement that Lane believe in the existence and danger of Jaws in order to fear it. See Davies (Citation2009) and Walton (Citation2015b) for illuminating discussion.
11. This is Walton’s suggestion in 2015b, though it’s a substantive claim that make-believe involves the distinct activity of mental simulation.
12. Recall the puzzling triad from our fiction example: Lane fears Jaws; if Lane fears Jaws, then Lane believes Jaws exists; and Lane does not believe that Jaws exists. Because sporting individuals exist, and spectators believe that they do, there’s no plausible analog to the third proposition to generate this puzzle for our sporting examples.
13. In Stear (Citation2017).
14. At the end of his article, Stear suggests that we can explain emotional volatility generally in terms of the context-sensitivity of our motivational attitudes: these ebb and flow, according to Stear, depending upon the variable ‘breadth’ of our self-conception, and the changing narratives we spin as part of it. In the end, I think Stear’s account is no simpler than Walton’s and it doesn’t do justice to the double-consciousness I claim to be bound up in our sporting emotions. But I can’t pursue Stear’s alternative account here.
15. I regard these as ‘extensions’ because, as far as I can tell, they are compatible with Walton’s core view. Walton would probably endorse the first since he deploys a notion of de se imagination in his own account (see, 1990, p. 29 ff.). I don’t know about ontological bifurcation, though.
16. If this is right, then watching sport is a sort of self-involving make-believe activity of which video-gaming is, arguably, a more interactive variety.
17. My project here is to flesh out the double consciousness of play by describing our imaginings ‘from the inside’. To provide a full account of sporting make-believe – for example, to fully situate it within a semantics for our language – we would have to sort through these different metaphysical options.
18. But seriously: are Mr. James and LeBron identical or not? That’s difficult to answer since in the pretense the sport-world is distinct from the actual world, and this allows them to host different denizens. But suppose we think of Mr. James and LeBron (à la Lewis) as world-bound individuals. Are they then counterparts of one another? (Put aside the worry that ‘LeBron’ is presumably ‘gappy’ and so would correspond, in this framework, to a set of individuals.) I claim that our imaginings don’t provide an answer that is independent of conversational context, nor do they need to. But defending this claim is a task for another day.
19. See Russell (Citation2014) for a nuanced and insightful treatment of this worry.
20. I thank participants at the 2017 meeting of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, where I first presented this material. I thank Paul Gaffney and Nathan Wildman for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.