Bodily Democracy

Towards a Philosophy of Sport for All

Henning Eichberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317988137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Sport has gained increasing importance for welfare society. In this process, however, the term of 'sport' has become less and less clear. Larger parts of what nowadays is called 'sport for all' are non-competitive and derived from traditions of gymnastics, dance, festivity, games, outdoor activities, and physical training rather than from classical modern elite sports. This requires new philosophical approaches, as the philosophy of sport, so far, has been dominated by topics of elite sports.

Based on Scandinavian experiences, the book presents studies about festivities of sport, outdoor activities, song and movement, and play and game. The engagement of elderly people challenges sports. Games get political significance in international cooperation, for peace culture and as means against poverty (in Africa). The empirical studies result in philosophical analyses on the recognition of folk practice in education and on relations between identity and recognition.

The study of 'sport for all' opens up for new ways of phenomenological knowledge, moving bottom-up from sport to the philosophy of "the individual", of event, of nature, and of human energy. Popular sports give inspiration to a philosophy of practice as well as to a phenomenological understanding of 'the people', of civil society and the 'demos' of democracy – as folk in movement.

This book was published as a special issue in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

1. FROM BODY CULTURE TO PHILOSOPHY: THINKING BOTTOM-UP – AN INTRODUCTION

Once upon a time, there was a professor of philosophy who warned his auditorium against starting as students of philosophy here and now. ‘If you really want to do philosophy, don’t enter this field at the beginning of your studies!’ With this serious advice, Albert Menne opened his philosophical lectures at the University of Hamburg, in the mid-1960s:

If you begin by philosophy, you’ll tread into a dead-end road, which is the history of philosophy, and you lose your way in an endless labyrinth of systems and meanings. This will hinder you in meeting real philosophy. If you really want to arrive in philosophy, start by empirical studies of one or other type, no matter what. After this, you will have questions and will thus be prepared for philosophy.

As a newly started student, I did not follow his irritating advice at that time. I enjoyed hearing Menne, a philosopher of formal logic, teaching the clearness of Schopenhauer, pouring scorn on the system-building of Hegel, demonstrating the complex enigmas of Russell and Whitehead … And yet, there was deeper wisdom in his ‘rejection’. This is what I learned when focusing my studies on the history of technology, later on turning to sociology and anthropology, and including some psychological and pedagogical studies, most of this in the fields of sport and body culture. After all that, I returned to philosophy, again. The present book will show some of this passage.

Sport for All: The Other Sport

Let us start with the empirical field of sport. Sport has gained increasing importance for welfare society, both for the general understanding of the ‘good life’ and for specific political measures.

In the process of welfare-building, however, the term ‘sport’ has become less and less clear. The limits of ‘sport’ with respect to other forms of movement, fitness activities and physical training have become blurred. Larger parts of what nowadays is called ‘sport for all’ are non-competitive and are derived from traditions of gymnastics, dance, festivity, outdoor activities, rambling and games, rather than from classical modern sports. At the same time, the world of ‘sport’ has become more divided. This is especially the case between the great show of elite achievements on one side, health sports on the other and popular sports, play and games as a third. From this, there arise philosophical questions as to what sport means for human bodily and social life.

The philosophy of sport has, however, kept a strange distance from this complex empirical reality. Sport philosophy remained to a large extent captured by the ideas of competitive elite sport. This corresponded to a certain picture of sport in the media, but not to the manifold reality of sporting activities in contemporary civil society. The question of human excellence, of elite performance, of the extraordinary achievement that fascinated those working in the philosophy of sport, is one thing; sport as common people’s practice is another. On closer observation, the broad body culture in later modern welfare societies offers up surprising material for a phenomenology of sport. A philosophy of ‘sport for all’ can at the same time enable the observer to reflect deeper on the complex relations between philosophy and practice more generally.

The turn from sport of the few to body cultural practice of the popular masses can thus help the philosophy of sport to overcome its traditionally narrow focus on the mythology of achievement and the normative moral philosophy of fairness. There is much more material for philosophy in sports.

A condition for this opening up is the acceptance that sport is not ‘one’. Sport for all, broad sport or people’s sport – both in old play and games and in modern welfare society – is also more than merely the basis of the pyramid on which modern competitive sport has been constructed. It requires quite another type of philosophy.

Body Culture: An Inductive Approach to Philosophy

Philosophical method has a rich tradition of moving high in the celestial altitude of abstractions, linked down to phenomena now and then, and this mainly by the history of the ‘great philosophers’. That is what Albert Menne tried to warn against. In a similar way, the traditional philosophy of sport felt at home in Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic idealism, drawing lines top-down to ‘Olympic education’, fairness, the critique of doping and so on.

The studies presented here show another way. They proceed bottom-up from empirical cultural studies of human action.¹ Through the phenomena of human practice – movement in nature, play and games, training, song, laughter and so on – one meets contradictions. Contradictions in human practice require dialectical methods of analysis, which are here – in order to avoid dichotomous constructions – turned towards trialectical ways of attention. From phenomena and contradictions, the enquiry steps further to the philosophy of patterns in human life.

The primacy of bodily practice connects the following studies with the materialistic tradition of philosophy, especially with the critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The approach is also related to the body-first anthropology of phenomenology, especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The power-critical perspective of Michel Foucault is nearby. The focus on inter-bodily relations connects the studies with Martin Buber’s dialogical principle: primacy of relation and meeting.

But as I already said, the way to these philosophies does not come top-down, but passes through phenomenological experience.

Who Are ‘All’ the People? Another Philosophy of Democracy

On the way from the phenomenology of sport for all towards philosophy, the question arises who these ‘all’ of ‘sport for all’ are. ‘All’ the people of sport for all are not ‘all’ in a quantitative sense. It will never be possible to unite the quantitative ‘all’ of a given population in sport. And the intention in itself would have terrifying, totalitarian traits.

Sport for all has, instead, to be thought into the context of a philosophy of democracy. If democracy is understood as a set of cultivated relations to otherness, i.e. as a culture of difference (in German, Streitkultur), the question arises how the people of democracy, demos, are related to the people of popular sport and civil society.²

This way of asking who the ‘all’ of ‘sport for all’ refers to challenges certain mainstream theories of democracy, which take their starting point in institutions and ideas. How people think ideas and how they organise themselves is a sort of superstructure. What people do is the basis of their social life.

Also here, a bottom-up approach is necessary. Democratic life is based on how people play together, learn from each other, sing together, laugh (not at least at authorities), hold festivity, move in green nature and so on.

Democracy is not non-bodily as some authors have theorised it. They have set speech, language, word, ideas and institutions in the centre.³ In Nordic understanding, democracy is related to self-determination, recognition and togetherness; culture of conflict and the relation to ‘the other’ is a criterion. All this has bodily dimensions. Here, philosophy of the body meets philosophy of democracy.

From Phenomena to Philosophy

Thus there is also some knowledge, which should not be expected from this volume: Neither is it about how to organise sport in a democratic way (though telling about the associational principle, the cooperative working place and the critique of exclusivity as represented by the Olympic committee and its oligarchy may give some hints). Nor does it try to explicate which sport(s) would be more or less useful for living democracy. Nor does it propagate healthy sport, fair sport or some other normative concept, which should be imposed upon the people.

Instead, I try to develop a bottom-up mode from empirical body culture to philosophy. Part I moves from networks of movement culture to conflicting social philosophies. Sport in connection with popular movements points towards a philosophy of moving people. The special Danish case of sport in People’s Academies leads towards a philosophy of experiential bodily education. Sport in the workplace raises questions about corporation and cooperation. And the offer of fitness in the market makes us reflect critically about ‘individualisation’.

Part II of the volume draws lines from popular practice to the philosophical dimensions of body culture. Outdoor activities help to understand natures in plural. Sport for all is not only disciplinary work: it is festivity and leads towards a phenomenology of the event. There is a connection between song and movement that gives inspiration to a phenomenology of human ‘energy’. Games raise questions of an educational philosophy of play. Sport and games create different situations of laughter, which makes us reflect upon a phenomenology of the imperfect human being. Games of pull and tug deliver a case for a philosophy of the playing you. And life-cycle sports confront us with the diversity of ageing.

Part III presents two cases from international sport exchange. Inter-ethnic football in the Balkans tells about how sport can work on traumatic experiences—on reconciliation and diversity. And Danish-African cooperation expounds some problems of how to understand ‘development’ and the ‘functions’ of Sport.

Part IV builds some bridges from the bodily practice of sport for all to living democracy. Dualistic terminologies as ‘soma’ versus ‘body’ call the diversity of body semantics to our attention. When asking for the ethics of sport, we meet more and other than ‘fairness’, and we land between public, civil and private logics. Educational aspects of sport for all point towards the recognition of non-formal popular practice. And finally, some lines are drawn towards a philosophy of sport for all, which contributes to inter-humanism and bodily democracy – and which reflects itself critically as a differential phenomenology.

The empirical material presented is mostly taken from Scandinavian experiences, especially from Denmark. This challenges the mainstream of international research. Body research in general is, so far, very one-sidedly Anglo-Saxon, with some input from French and German sources. Scandinavia has normally remained beyond widespread attention and recognition, though the Nordic region delivers special and living contributions to this field. The hope is that this imbalance can be revised. The Nordic nations are well known for their stabile democracies, their welfare systems and their broad sport activity. If there is any relation between these structural elements, a closer study could gain, for instance, a deeper understanding of the movement aspect of sport and body. The significance of movement is mostly underrated in mainstream research where the body is understood as a more or less static unit, mostly viewed under medical, sexual and gender aspects. A focus on the moving body is, however, necessary if philosophy is to bridge across to democracy. Democratic life cannot be described without social movements, and these are linked to emotional and bodily movements. The specific Nordic tradition of sport having developed in the form of popular movements or in connection with social movements – though differing from country to country – may contribute to this understanding.

The Danish and Nordic topics in this collection are described in the context of international studies, which will be published in two further volumes, both in Danish. The one concerns relations of the body-cultural basis: Movement Cultures – Body Anthropological Studies (Eichberg 2010), including studies about Libya, Indonesia, Greenland, Brittany, Afro-America and Latin America. The other focuses on relations in the political superstructure: Comparative Sports Policy – National and International (Eichberg and Ibsen 2010), including studies about Denmark, Norway, Scotland and the European Union.

A Guide to the Volume and Some Thanks

The chapters of this volume have distinct origins. They can be read for themselves, as rather autonomous intellectual enquiries. Therefore there will be some overlaps where the same phenomenon or figure of thought can appear in different chapters, though seen from different perspectives. Taken together, the chapters make up a patchwork of multidimensional interpretations, trying to approach bodily democracy on different paths.

The studies are based on three decades of work and debate inside IdrætsForsk, the Danish Institute of Sport Researc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors' Introduction
• 1. From body culture to philosophy: thinking bottom-up - an introduction
• Part I: From networks of movement culture to conflicting social philosophies
• Part II: From popular practice to the phenomenology of body cultures
• Part III: From international practice to people-to-people dimensions
• Part IV: From bodily practice to living democracy
• Index