Phenomenology in the bleachers: Heidegger and the truth of sport

ABSTRACT

Phenomenologies of sport predominantly focus on an analysis of the experience of participating in sport, either as a part of a team or individually. In this essay, the author argues that a vital avenue for the phenomenology of sport has not been adequately explored, that is, an analysis of the experience of the spectator. Taking up Heidegger’s phenomenological method as outlined in Being and Time, the author argues that Heidegger’s notions of the they-self, idle talk, and falling prey offer critical insights into why sports-talk among fans comes to focus on truth and blame. The object of the phenomenology of sport is thus suggested to be not limited solely to the field of play but is also, as the title suggests, in the bleachers as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Phenomenology
• Heidegger
• they-self
• idle talk
• authenticity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My argument focuses solely on the Heidegger of Being and Time and the account of phenomenology presented therein. I am ignoring, in other words, all the novel arguments and neologisms that would come to be in the turn to language of the ‘late Heidegger’, even the specific portions of that later oeuvre where Heidegger repudiates arguments from Being and Time. A great deal can obviously be said about the value of my argument once this transition from one Heidegger to another is taken into consideration. I leave that work to scholars of greater ability than myself. What I imagine this bracketing (pun intended) of the later Heidegger to accomplish is securing one statement of the phenomenological method as a building block to be used in a bricolage of sorts. I believe the remainder of my argument is in keeping with this perspective, but I welcome criticisms that might try to prove the contrary.

2. And this insight, drawn forth by following the parameters of Heidegger’s phenomenology, can also yield important insights into the athlete’s experience of sport as well. An intriguing question, suggested to me in a helpful comment from Paul Gaffney, is whether or not the spectator’s experience must have less ontological priority than the athlete’s. In many methodological perspectives within the philosophy of sport, the answer to this question is obvious: the practice on the field must take ontological priority. Yet, within the framework of early Heidegger the question becomes more, forgive me, ambiguous. For the object under examination is not the nature of sport or even the experience of sport, but the manner in which sport either uncovers or covers over the truth of Being. In this way, the stark divide between the athlete’s experience and the experience of the spectator seems to become blurred – for we can discover important aspects of the truth of Being by engaging in a phenomenological examination of either perspective. Thus, the only way to claim ontological priority for one perspective over the other seems to be insisting, and this insistence would take a great deal of arguing to establish, that the athlete’s experience offers more truth to be drawn than the experience of the spectator. Indeed, what might be needed is a redefinition of ‘sport’ within the phrase ‘phenomenology of sport’. For what I think, we would have to mean by ‘sport’ under this particular phenomenology method is, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein, the ‘whole hurly-burly’ of sport, a holistic view of the entire economy of physical action and detached observation that marks sport in the information age.

3. It is beyond the scope of my current argument, but as a theologian by training, I think it is important to note here that in this way the drive for a faux sense of purposiveness rather than embracing the authenticity or Dasein’s historicity within sports-talk imitates the drive toward ontotheology. One wonders if the cure, so to speak, for sports-talk will be something akin to Heidegger’s later project of ‘overcoming metaphysics’.