The Sporting Exploration of the World; Toward a Fundamental Ontology of the Sporting Human Being

ABSTRACT

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born to move. Furthermore, the homo movens is the homo ludens – an active and playful being that explores the world in different ways and in a variety of environments. The ludic exploration of the world starts with children’s play and goes all the way up to full-blown versions of rule-based sports, then on to various physical activities into old age. My point of departure is Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world which suggests that humans are never isolated individuals but are always in a deep way connected with a ‘world’. The ‘world’ of sport comes in different versions. By use of a phenomenological approach I try to show that the sporting exploration of the world takes place in four ontologically different dimensions or ‘worlds’. Here I distinguish between individual sports, encounter sports, team sports and nature sports, and I argue that the I-Me, I-You, I-Society and I-Nature relations that are exemplified in these four types of sports have different ontological characteristics. While the discussion is inspired by Heidegger’s ideas I argue that the ways of ‘worldmaking’ in sport are more ontologically diverse than Heidegger opened up for. Heidegger described the relation of Dasein to itself and to other human beings and argued that we deal with the environment in a practical and a theoretical mode. I expand on this and present a more coherent picture of four different dimensions in the human being’s sporting exploration of the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy
• fundamental ontology
• Heidegger
• play
• sport

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the philosophy group at Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, as well as the editor and two anonymous reviewers, for helping me to improve this paper in various ways through the final writing process.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The fourfold model was first presented in an article by Breivik (1998) focusing on values in sport. In the present article the same model is used but the focus is now on the ontological exploration of the sporting human being.

2. In Being and Time Heidegger showed how the Dasein is always transcending and thus connected to an environing world. The world is explored with others (Being-With) and in practical as well as theoretical modes. Heidegger furthermore wanted to identify the basic structures (the existentials) of human existence. I think it is just a step from these premises to try to identify the basic structures in Dasein’s way of interacting with the self, the other and nature in playful and sporting modes.

3. Vorhandenheit is standardly translated as ‘presence-at-hand’ and Zuhandenheit as ‘readiness-to-hand’. Here I follow Dreyfus’s (1991) translation with ‘occurrentness’ and ‘availableness’ respectively.

4. The four dimensions also function as a possible basis for classification of sports, even though that has not been my primary goal in this article. Sports can be classified in many ways, often based on superficial criteria, such as summer sports and winter sports, outdoor sports and indoor sports, individual sports and team sports. More interesting is the distinction between purposive and esthetic sports. Better still is Kupfer’s (1988) distinction between Quantitative/linear sports (typically athletics), Qualitative/formal sports (typically gymnastics) and Competitive/overcoming an opponent (typically football, tennis).

5. The element of chance cannot always be minimized and be reckoned with. One may have to fight wind on a golf course, but it is not a part of the sport in its constitutive essence. Here there is a clear difference to nature sports, such as yachting where wind is part of what yachting is all about.

6. Individual sports allow for differences in how performances are organized and evaluated. In athletics the performances are measured objectively. In gymnastics the performances are evaluated by judges according to specific criteria or standards, such as difficulty, elegance, etc. Athletics is thus a purposive sport, gymnastics is an esthetic sport.

7. Howe (2012) uses ‘nature-based sports’ as the umbrella term for all sports that have nature as an essential and non-substitutable component. She then makes a distinction between ‘nature-instrumental sports’ where sport is a necessary instrument for displaying relevant skills and ‘nature-directed sports’ where the direct interaction with a natural feature is essential. Nature-directed sports can be further divided into ‘nature-specific sports’ like climbing, where technical and physical problems dominate the attention and ‘nature-oriented sports’ like hiking, where there is time and possibility to take in the esthetic and other qualities of the landscape. I think on many climbs there are, as Howe suggests, difficult sections that need nature-specific attention and time during belaying or rests where nature-oriented attitudes are possible.

8. An exception here is of course hunting or fishing where nonhuman living beings may be said to have intentions of some sort and act and react to human intervention.

9. Some nature sports present challenges which bring strong feelings, like deep flow. Since the 1970s activities that go under names like ‘action sports’, ‘lifestyle sports’, ‘risk sports’, ‘extreme sports’ have developed into new forms influenced by technological revolutions, internet and media coverage. These sports bring various risks and dangers. As argued by Breivik (2010), a sport like skydiving makes it possible to experience deep flow but also anxiety and confrontation with one’s own finitude and death.