A Kantian Theory of Sport

Abstract

This essay develops a Kantian theory of sport which addresses: (1) Kant’s categories of aesthetic judgment (2) a comparable analysis applied to athletic volition; (3) aesthetic cognition and experience and athletic volition and experience; (4) ‘free’ and ‘attached’ beauty; (5) Kant’s theory of teleological judgment; (6) the moral concept of a ‘kingdom of ends’ and sportsmanship; (7) the beautiful and the sublime in sport-experience; (8) respect and religious emotion in sport-experience; (9) the Kantian system and philosophical anthropology; and (10) sport and self-knowledge.

Keywords:

• sport
• Kant
• aesthetics
• philosophy
• phenomenology
• self-knowledge
• sportsmanship

Notes

1. The idea of a Kantian theory of sport is suggested by Randolph Feezell’s Sport, Play and Ethical Reflection (University of Illinois, 2006), though Feezell mentions Kant only tangentially. Kant’s concept of the sublime is discussed by Dimitris Platchias, ‘Sport is Art’, European Journal of Sport Science 3: 4, 1–17 and Carl Thomen, ‘Sublime Kinetic Melody: Kelly Slater and the Extreme Spectator’, Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 4: 3 (2010), 319–31. Most discussions of Kant and sport focus on his ethics, e.g. Robert Osterhoudt, ‘In Praise of Harmony: The Kantian Imperative and Hegelian Sittlichkeit as the Principle and Substance of Moral Conduct in Sport’, in Sport and the Body, 2nd ed., eds. E. Gerber and W. Morgan (Lea and Febiger, 1979), 279–89, William J. Brown, ‘Personal Best’, JPS 22: 1 (1995), 1–10, Jeffrey Fry, ‘Coaching a Kingdom of Ends’, JPS 27: 1 (2000), 51–62.

2. While I use the terms ‘sport’ and ‘athletics’ more or less synonymously, athletics is generally reserved for competitive sport in which winning gains the prize. The theory of sport offered here includes the idea of performance to a standard as an internal goal. Thus whereas mountain-climbing, hang-gliding and running count as sports, snorkeling and strolling do not; clearly, there are boundary types, snorkeling perhaps being one. By ‘athletic volitional experience’ I mean simply the sportsperson’s effort to achieve an athletic end and experience of that effort. Admittedly, Kant’s focus is on aesthetic judgment, not on experience; but his treatment of the aesthetic enters into experience, insofar as he includes treatment of aesthetic pleasure and emotion.

3. ‘The satisfaction that determines the judgment of taste is without any interest’. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge University, 2000), 90. The modality of quality is treated in CPJ, sections #1–5, 89–96, the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ in CPJ #1–22, 89–127. For introductions, see e.g. Stephan Koerner, Kant (Penguin, 1955), esp. 183–9, Paul Guyer, Kant (Routledge, 2006), 307–57; for a thorough analysis, see e.g. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge University Press, 1979).

4. ‘The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction’ CPJ, 96. The category of quantity is treated in #6–9, 96–104.

5. Cf. Plato’s Symposium, esp. 201c–12b. For discussion of Plato and Kant, see Mihaela Fistioc, The Beautiful Shape of the Good (Routledge, 2002), 97f.

6. The projected shared taste introduces the idea of an ideal community of aesthetic appreciators, i.e. an inter-subjective criterion of judgment.

7. ‘Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end, ‘ CPJ, 126

8. See Fistioc, op. cit., esp. 124–7.

9. CPJ, 126.

10. See CPJ #18–22, 121–4 and Koerner, op. cit., 187–8.

11. These are of course not quotations from Kant, but the analogues of his analysis of aesthetic judgment corresponding to athletic volitional experience.

12. See Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (Beacon Press, 1955), esp. 1–27, though cf. also Guttmann’s trenchant criticism, From Ritual to Record (Columbia, 1978), 7. Feezell also develops a play theory approach, op. cit., esp. 3–31.

13. Compare quantity in aesthetic judgment, note #4 above. On sport as the pursuit of excellence, see Paul Weiss’s seminal Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), esp. 3–36.

14. Weiss does not seem to me to articulate this distinction sharply, cf. e.g. ‘Many athletic contests … exhibit war’s relentless insistence on victory’, op. cit., 32, also 57, 175 f., vs. ‘Athletics puts primary emphasis not on the ability to subjugate others but … to become excellent in and through the body’, op. cit., 36.

15. Compare the category of relation, and beauty as perceived ‘harmonious wholeness’.

16. Cf. Bernard Suits, ‘What is a game?’ Philosophy of Science 34 (1967), 148–56; also The Grasshopper (Broadview, 2005), 37 f.

17. Compare the category of modality, and the presumption that appreciation of the beautiful necessarily involves pleasure.

18. For Kant, this implies consciousness of the spontaneity of the will (Willkuer) and openness to rational determination through respect for the moral law (Wille). See e.g. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (Harper & Rowe, 1964), 80; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 83; Kant, Doctrine of Virtue, trans. Mary Gregor (Harper & Rowe, 1964), 10, 51–2; Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Hackett, 1980, orig. 1930), 122; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone trans. Theodore Greene and John Silber (Harper and Rowe, 1960), 19; and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Downell (Southern Illinois University, 1978), note 52, 263. However: ‘We have been quite unable to demonstrate freedom as something actual’, Kant, GMM, 116.

19. This distinction may be more convincing in relation to non-violent than to violent, amateur rather than professional sports. Cf. e.g. Carol Oates, On Boxing (Ecco Press, 1994), esp. 166–70 (on Mike Tyson), and Thomas McLaughlin, Give and Go: Basketball as a culture practice (SUNY, 2008), 23–45, esp. 44 and note 21 below.

20. Kant, CPJ, 25–27.

21. Against this, see James Keating, ‘Sportsmanship as a Moral Category’, Ethics 75 (October, 1964), 25–35. Feezell argues convincingly against Keating, op. cit., 85–96; also McLaughlin, op. cit., 25–28, 31–34, 100–8, and William Morgan, Leftish Theories of Sport (Illinois University, 1994), 210–46.

22. Athletic actions are physical actions and symbolic representations, performances carried out for the sake of achieving excellence, rather than merely a determinate end.

23. CPJ, 23; cited in Fistioc, op. cit., 128.

24. See McLaughlin, op. cit., 25–28 and 111–2. These institutions can corrupt a sport, e.g. by allowing innovations which undermine it as a test of skill or encourage vicious behavior.

25. CPJ #16, 114–6.

26. I disagree on this point with Feezell, op. cit., 23–29.

27. Running, jumping, throwing and catching become ‘sport’ only when a standard of achievement is introduced.

28. This discussion relies on Kant’s treatment of teleological judgment, ethical theory and moral psychology.

29. CPJ #65–6, 244–9: ‘One says far too little…if one calls this an analogue of art…perhaps one comes closer if one calls it an analogue of life’, 246; however, ‘The concept of a thing as in itself a natural purpose is…no constitutive concept of understanding or of reason’, 247.

30. See note 18 and DV 7–15, 25–6 and 36–51.

31. See Frithjof Bergmann, On Being Free (University of Notre Dame, 1977), 15–20, 55–77; Feezell, op. cit., 23–29.

32. Including the sense of extending her own capacities through the action. This is relevant to the cultivation of powers which better enable fulfilling moral duties; cf. DV, 40–47, 51–53.

33. For Kant on pleasure, see DV, 7–9, APPV #60, 130–2, #63, 138. Some gratification involves cultivation of talents, and thus natural self-perfection or happiness. Insofar as the cultivation of talent implies self-mastery, it brings about a sense of moral freedom and ‘contentment with one’s own person’, CPrR, 123; cf. also DV, 50, 52, 110–4.

34. Self-knowledge is practical: to know oneself as a moral agent in action – notwithstanding our incapacity to ‘know the human heart’, GMM, 19.

35. CPR, 128–36: God is a postulate of practical reason to bring about the coincidence of morality and happiness; also RLR, 3–6 and Greene lv–lxv, lvi.

36. The athlete and her action are reciprocal end and means, insofar as mastering nature, in particular contrary inclinations, is a form of self-mastery and enhanced freedom. In addition to note 33, see LE, 29, 138–47 and Brown, op. cit., 1–10.

37. Insofar as the development of natural talents is also a moral duty, it is a basis for natural pride and self-respect, and a way of giving ‘good, practical proof’ of making oneself ‘more perfect’; cf. LE, 143–5.

38. Compare Feezell, op. cit., 94–5.

39. Of course, it is only through moral action that the person is rationally fulfilled, and this is constitutive of his moral pleasure, happiness and self-respect.

40. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981), esp. 169–89, and Eugene Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics (University of Chicago, 2006), esp. 164–88.

41. Compare Ted Cohen, ‘Why Beauty is a Symbol of Morality’ in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (University of Chicago, 1982), 221–36.

42. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge University, 1993), esp. 27–47. If Kant believes the comprehension of morality independent of sensible representation is implausible for humans, but art is suited to represent moral conceptions, action, and practical reason, then sport can also serve that function – perhaps more vividly. Similarly the love of sport, which like the love of beauty involves ‘[loving something] without regard to its use’, can also ‘much advance morality, or at least prepare [us] for it’, DV #17, 108, cited by Guyer, op. cit., 33. Analogous arguments also apply to viewing base fine arts and corrupt sports (e.g. ‘professional’ wrestling) or playing with a corrupt attitude: ‘Where the fine arts are not brought into … connection with moral ideals’ they ‘make the spirit dull, the object loathsome, and the mind…dissatisfied and moody’ CPJ #52, 202.

43. An athlete may be driven by wealth (Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire), assertion of self-worth (Harold Abrahams in Chariots of Fire) or simply a violent will to win (Jake Lamotta in Raging Bull). But insofar as these ends dominate, the ludic and artistic element is replaced by work, the joy of sport by lust.

44. ‘Play, not work, is the end of life. To participate in the rites of play is to dwell in the Kingdom of Ends. To participate in work, career, and the making of history is to labor in the Kingdom of Means’, Michael Novak, Joy of Sports (Basic Books, 1976), 40.

45. The Kantian theory arises from a deontological conception of moral duty. It is also possible to characterize the ethic of sport as arising from communal practices. Cf. note 21 and Feezell, op. cit., 83–94.

46. Compare Feezell, ibid., 85–91 and note 21 above.

47. Cf. Brown’s argument that development of natural talents ‘will enhance ourselves as persons…not just enable us to pursue our own happiness more efficiently’, op. cit., 7.

48. See MacIntyre, op. cit., 175–6. Sport is the first setting in which many young people become conscious of (i) competition with equals under rules, (ii) an activity with internal and external ends, and (iii) a pleasure in the activity and desire for recognition which is very different from those they have in relation to schoolwork and its authorities. See Feezell, op. cit., 129, Craig Clifford and Randolph Feezell, Coaching for Character (Human Kinetics, 1997), 9–24, 89–107, Corlett, ‘Virtue Lost: Courage in Sports’, JPS 22 (1996), 45–57, Fry, op. cit., 51–62 and MacLaughlin, op. cit., 31–36, 45.

49. As mentioned in note 19, sportsmanship seems easier to cultivate in non-violent than violent sports. See Jim Parry, ‘Violence and Aggression in Contemporary Sport’, in M. A. Holochak ed., Philosophy of Sport (Pearson, 2002), 250–68, reprinted from Ethics and Sport, eds. M. J. McNamee, S. J. Parry (E. & F. N. Spon, 1998). It also seems easier to cultivate in competitions when teams do not represent communities or nations and the competition seems to mimic war, e.g. the Superbowl, World Cup, and too often, the Olympics).

50. The idea of a moral community is difficult to achieve in most contexts of adult life, dominated by hierarchies of class, race or authority, but sport can provide such settings; see Fred Inglis, The Name of the Game (Heinemann, 1977), 35–39, 51–62.

51. CPJ #24–29, 130–59. The following discussion treats the dynamical sublime.

52. The Kantian sublime consists in the experience of moral self-knowledge and self-respect evoked by the recognition, confronted with the seemingly infinite power of nature, of the transcendence of reason over it. But then we may suppose a pathological sense of the sublime associated with pride and self-love in the transcendence of nature by technical reason or other human efforts, including sports.

53. Sending men to the moon, building the Golden Gate Bridge, the first heart transplant – such heroic efforts partake of the pathological sublime and are occasions for human pride in technical reason and organization, though they may also have a moral dimension. Compare Thomen, in ‘Sublime Kinetic Melody’, 319–30, who argues that the achievements of some extreme athletes partake of the Kantian sublime.

54. MacIntyre, op. cit., esp. 174–89; Feezell, op.cit., esp. 126–42, McLaughlin, op. cit., 23–45, Mike McNamee, Sports Virtues and Vices (Routledge, 2008), esp. 43–68.

55. The athlete engages in self-formative actions, ‘makes himself to be’ a mind-body dedicated to excellent performance. Cf. Weiss, op. cit., esp. 58–72 and ‘It will always be noble work to become a [perfected] body…and move to the position where one makes oneself a man’, 84. His performances also contribute to his concept of self, to the extent that he identifies himself with his sport; cf. MacIntyre, op. cit., esp. 200–9.

56. Compare Inglis, op.cit., 80–89 on the sporting hero, sportsman and gentleman, including the ways in which these concepts and exemplars are co-opted, but concludes: ‘Sport keeps alive a number of concepts which have been central to our morality and without which an already diminished moral vocabulary would properly go bankrupt’, 85.

57. See Handbook of self-actualization, eds. A. Jones and R. Crandal (Select Press, 1991), esp. 127–36, 169–88; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper, 2008), 49–70, 94–116; Terry Orlick, The Pursuit of Excellence, 4th ed. (Human Kinetics, 2008, orig. 1980), 155 f. This experience seems more easily achieved in non-violent sports, but cf. Oates, op. cit., 78–9, on the young Ali.

58. The experience of respect or awe (Achtung) before the moral law unites, in Kant’s moral psychology, with the experience of moral pleasure and self-respect. See GMM, 13–4, 36, CPrR, 74–92, 122–4, 166–8, DV #11–2, 99–102, #14–5, 107–8, LE, 138–47, RLR, 23, 40–49 and Silber on moral feeling, cvi–cxi.

59. See Susan Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow in Sports (Human Kinetics, 1999), esp. 15–31, Michael Murphy and Rhea White, In the Zone (Penguin, 1978), 31–33, 66–74, 124–33.

60. Cf. CPJ #63, 239–41, #67, 249–52.

61. S. Pocock: ‘…a great art, rowing; when you reach perfection you are approaching the divine which is the you in you, the soul’, cited in Benjamin Lowe, The Beauty of Sport (Prentice-Hall, 1977), 179. It is also experienced as a loss of self, ‘a feeling of union with the environment…of close interaction with some Other’, Csikszentmihalyi, op. cit., 63–4.

62. The experience of ‘completeness’ in sport is analogous to a harmonization of moral will and nature, cf. esp. CPR, 128–39: in the Kingdom of God, ‘nature and morality come into a harmony’, 133. In the action-moment of athletic glory there is found an aspect of perfection and intimation of immortality. Stan Smith, The Jordan Rules (Pocket Books, 1993), 312: ‘Jordan, driving to the basket, hung in the air as only he can, switched his ball to his left hand, lowered his shoulder, and scooped the ball in left-handed. The crowd first gasped, for this was art, poetry without words, an instant of eternity, and then exploded’. The fully mystical-theistic experience of sport is admittedly rare. But cf. Murphy and White, op. cit., 27–30, 130–1, Patsy Neal: ‘The athlete goes beyond herself; she transcends the natural … [and] becomes the recipient of power from another source’, 28.

63. If the athletic action-in-the-zone feels like a culmination in which the athlete performs in a manner fulfilling his nature, it combines feelings of the sublime and the beautiful in the subjective perception of one’s own agency as part of a teleological whole together with its intimation of divinity. If it is experienced as being taken up by nature into an action inspired from outside of oneself, it is comparable to grace, which the athlete seems to achieve only by means of mysterious external assistance. This type of hero is not so much a symbol of will and self-mastery (Tiger Woods, Jimmy Connors) as of virtuous nature and something better than nature (Bobby Jones, Peggy Fleming, Arthur Ashe), as the idea of grace connotes natural moral and social excellence, the gentleman, moral aristocrat. (This is not to ignore the potential ideological elements in such sentiments, as in regard to Jones.) The graceful gentleman-athlete does not dwell on his merits, as if to acknowledge it is a kind of gift. (These comments do not imply Kant would countenance the assertion of such things in moral life: ‘the imagined experience of these [works of grace] is a fanatical illusion pertaining entirely to the emotions’, RLR, 182.)

64. This emotion is analogous to the Kantian feeling of awe and self-respect in moral agency and to the Aristotelian feeling of wonder in synoptic cognition of the world. Cf. GMM, 35–36, CPrR, 91,129–30, 166–7; Metaphysics 981b29, 982b5–7, 983b8–10, 1075a11–25, and Nicomachean Ethics 1100b19–20.

65. ‘It is not quite enough to say . . . boxing and tennis [offer metaphors] of courage, endurance, quickness, grace, viciousness. Both games also enact these values… and hence move from metaphor to immediate experience’. Inglis, op. cit., 71.

66. See e.g. Feezell, op. cit., 137–42, 138; Orlick, op. cit., 231–4; Tim Gallwey, Inner Tennis (Random House, 1976), 3–25, 170–3; Fred Shoemaker, Extraordinary Golf (Putnam’s, 1996), 138–42.

67. Ernst Cassirer in An Essay on Man (Yale, 1944), Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (orig. 1923, 1926, 1929) and Myth of the State (Yale, 1946) and Susanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key (Harvard, 1942) and Feeling and Form (Scribner’s, 1953) develop a Kantian philosophical anthropology. This essay attempts to carry this project into the realm of sport, retaining its ethical center.

68. The basis for such an approach to human self-knowledge is found in the assertion that ‘the reality of the intelligible world is definitely established from a practical point of view’, CPrR, 109; see also Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (St. Martin’s, 1965), 629–44. ‘In the Canon of Pure Reason…Kant clearly understands our empirical capacities to plan for the future, select alternative means to our ends, devise our own conceptions of happiness, and be motivated by moral considerations, to be empirical signs [if not empirical proofs] of our freedom’, Alan Wood, Kant (Blackwell, 2005), 99. It is the task, in part, of the other critiques to supply the conceptual frameworks and principles for understanding human beings that are not provided by the 1^st Critique.

69. This might seem contradicted by his philosophy of history. See Wood, op. cit., 114–27. Kant’s account includes features comparable to Hobbes/Marx – economic production defining the stages of social life, history driven by conflict and ‘self-conceit’ – as well as to Aristotle/Hegel (unconscious teleology of rational nature leading humanity toward knowledge, liberty and peace). Wood: ‘It is far from clear what Kant intended to achieve under these headings, and perhaps even less clear whether he actually achieved it’, 123.

70. GMM: ‘we can never … completely plumb the depths of the secret incentives of our actions’, 19, DV #8, 52–3, RLR, 46.

71. Cf. CPrR, 77, 83, 89–91 on the possibility of the humbling of self-consciousness engendered by recognition the moral law, and moral knowledge of self and other in DV #14–5, 107–8, LE 126–9, 138–47, 207–9.

72. Cf. DV, Introduction #12, 60–1, Part II #36, 127–30, #42–44, 135–8.

73. Analysis of distortions of sport within its institutions (local, corporate or state) is not only consistent with, but contributes to a Kantian account of sport as playful pursuit of excellence within a framework of rules and personal relations. Again, see McLaughlin, op. cit., 95–135, Morgan, op. cit., 129–50 and 210–46.

74. This is not to say that we may not be assigned social roles or live in societies where the capacity for self-respect and moral self-knowledge is crippled or underdeveloped, e.g. deeply racist, tribal, sexist or primitive authoritarian-religious societies.

75. The archaic Greek may have honored manly virtue or womanly dignity in his countryman or even his enemy, but it was perhaps only through the singer’s artful representations of that action, and of the human world as set against the framework of divine agencies, that he was first able to identify the ways of life, and the patterns of moral disposition and conflict, temptations and norms, in which he lived.

76. Thus the first ‘Olympics’ in Book XXIII of the Iliad. But the history also indicates a ritual, cultic origin; see Guttmann, op. cit., 16–36.

77. I would like to thank my colleagues Heath White and Matt Eshleman at UNCW, and John Lemos of Coe College, as well as the editor and two anonymous reviewers from the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, for their very helpful comments regarding an earlier draft of this paper.