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ABSTRACT
Two prevalent assumptions in the philosophy of sport literature are that all sports are games and that all games are contests, meant to determine who is the better at the skills definitive of the sport. If these are correct, it would follow that all sports are contests and that a range of sporting activities, including nature sports, are not in fact sports at all. This paper first confronts the notion that sport and games must seek to resolve skill superiority through consideration of sport activities that have no such aim. The reduction of sport to game is also shown to be untenable and due to misunderstanding the point of sport activities, specifically, why people engage in them. This leads to reconsideration of the dominance of an instrumental conception of sport and the pursuit of excellence as anthropomaximising efficiency. The Norwegian tradition of frilutsliv is explored as a counterpoint to both conventional and nature sport.
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Notes
1. Note, however, that Guttman is here marking out certain kinds of games as sports rather than sports as games.
2. See also, of course, Kretchmar (Citation1975).
3. Suits’ later (Citation1988) exception for judged sports such as figure skating or diving as not games is not relevant for us here, not because it is not the case that not all sports are games, but because this is a bad example. See Meier (Citation1988), who maintains the designation of sports as games, but especially Hurka (Citation2015).
4. I have argued (Howe Citation2008, Citation2018) that there is a kind of competition that may occur in nature sport, namely the sort of conflict within the self that we sometimes call competing with oneself. I do not think that this applies to the current discussion as this is not the sort of competition at issue; Krein is only concerned with garden variety dyadic competition between individual humans and this kind of competition is what the present paper also addresses.
5. Note that this point is only about the witnessing of the activity. I am not arguing that running on an indoor track and fellrunning are not significantly different due to the environmental conditions, just as 100 m is quite different to 10 km, even where both are done on a track. But it is also true that running is running wherever you do it, just as the physical exertions and motions of fencing would be the same whether performed in a competition hall or a private (nonlethal) duel. Speculatively, there may be an historical reason for what I take to be a general reluctance to regard private or unwitnessed activities as sport, and this would be the close association between sport and gambling in the modern era.
6. See also Schneider and Butcher (Citation1997).
7. One possible response to this would be to suggest that the nature sportsperson is engaged in a kind of ‘open game’, with the specific environment acting as a contesting partner. This is a desperate move to save the view. Natural objects do not contest with us; contesting requires consciousness and the intentional pose of voluntary contestation, a willing participation in an activity conceptually devised and recognised, which is not a position that even animals take when we are using them for ‘game’.
8. Suits states that ‘winning can be described only in terms of the game in which it figures, and winning may accordingly be called the lusory goal of a game’ (Citation2014, 39). For Suits, winning cannot simply be the goal of a game because you can only win if there is something else that is the goal; this state of affairs is the prelusory goal (36). Schneider and Butcher (Citation1997) point out that there is no reason for a prelusory goal absent the practice from which it derives its meaning and conclude that this is an unnecessary move. This is partly right, but what Suits is doing here is preventing his definition of a lusory goal becoming tautologous. ‘Winning’ cannot define itself and if the lusory goal is winning then we need to have something else that tells us when this has occurred. But this does not work either, both because only certain practice-defined states of affairs can qualify and because Suits misidentifies the lusory goal, which is the activity or movement itself that makes winning concrete rather than abstract. Thus, the mountain climber’s lusory goal is not just winning at the activity of mountain climbing; it is mountain climbing, which is why she may well climb something other than Everest for fun.
9. I owe the suggestion of this distinction in its application to sport to Steffen Borge; everything else I say here on the subject is my own fault.
10. Taxonomic revision of lepidoptera has been frequent since Linnaeus. See, for example: van Hoose (Citation2018), and de Jong, Vane-Wright, and Ackery (Citation1996).
11. Many outdoor sports have faced this transformation in recent years, snowboarding and climbing, for example. Another case currently playing out is that of stand up paddle boarding (SUP), governance of which is being fought over by the International Surfing Association (ISA) and the International Canoeing Federation (ICF) (Butler Citation2017; Duckworth Citation2017; Mather Citation2017). Whichever federation ultimately triumphs, it may turn out that once SUP becomes a bona fide Olympic sport, most of those paddleboarders wandering around my local river will no longer ‘really’ be paddleboarders. Parkour is now also facing such a, it appears, hostile takeover by the Gymnastics Federation (Bull Citation2018).
12. I can put the preceding point in this way: as impressive, even awe-inspiring, as Olympic level athletic performances are, it does not really matter if a small number of humans can run 100 m faster than 9.58 s (or 10 s). It does matter that so many humans are woefully under exercised and have so little in the way of means to alter their condition–and, moreover, think their attempts to be unimportant compared to those of high-performance competitors.
13. For example, there is a long historical precedent for counting activities such as hunting, fishing, and bullfighting as ‘sport’. This author has strong moral objections to these activities for sporting purposes but those do not alone discount them as sport: immoral sports are still sports.
14. See Howe (Citation2012).
15. See also Eichberg (Citation2009a) for a discussion of some of the different ways we can understand the interrelations between us, nature, and sport, including in this context of differing expressions of friluftsliv.