Educational Philosophy and Theory

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A critical philosophy of sport: Some applications

Andrew Gibbons

To cite this article: Andrew Gibbons (2020) A critical philosophy of sport: Some applications,
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52:8, 811-815, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1664279
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Published online: 17 Sep 2019.

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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
2020, VOL. 52, NO. 8, 811–815
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1664279

EDITORIAL

A critical philosophy of sport: Some applications

In his editorial on the philosophy of sport Peters makes a case for a critical philosophy of sport.
This editorial response takes up that baton, in exploring a few possible contexts and applica-
tions. The response begins with a concern for the reification of particular philosophical qualities
or traditions in what could be called a conservative philosophy of sport, before exploring some
alternative possibilities for a critical philosophy of sport.

Performance anxiety and the philosophy of sport

Some philosophers of sport lament that the ‘great philosophers’ overlooked, and overlook, sport
(see Peters, this issue). In this sense, the philosophy of sport questions its own authenticity in
relation to received traditions, and at the same time, seeks to establish itself in the tradition of
the great philosophers. A critical philosophy of sport is interested in the lack of great interest
from any philosophers of note, but not in the sense of an anxiety with regards the status of the
philosophy of sport and the philosophers of sport. The interest here is in the overlooking itself
and what this means for sport, and for sportspeople. This critical philosophy might also be inter-
ested in what philosophers who had nothing to say about sport can still have something to say
about sport … interested in affect, subjectivity, immanence, Chaosmosis, dissensus, hospitality …
and (and as) sport.
In the exercise of establishing a philosophical authenticity, some abiding philosophical ideas
can be observed in some of the traditions of the philosophy of sport. Tracing the roots of an
American philosophy of sport, Stoll (2017) identifies a 19th century emergence of academic inter-
est in the enhanced performance of mind and body. Education had a particular role to play in
the emergence of this philosophy of sport – for instance in perceptions that physical activity was
not of importance in its own right, but rather it was a mechanism for enhancing the exercise of
the mind. From this perspective, the philosophy of sport would be in some way obliged to the
philosophy of education. For the philosophy of sport, the task of being taken seriously and gain-
ing momentum might continue to be a concern if it’s history remains indebted to didactic and
machinic educational traditions – those concerned with the efficient production of a civilised,
healthy and hygienic society of normalised individuals. The task for the philosophy of sport
might then be seen as clearly distinguishing itself from education, or at least from the philoso-
phy of education of the times. This is not to suggest that a philosophy of sport should not set
goals in relation to the emergence of its seemingly particular approaches to the development of
the subject in education and in philosophy of education. The rise of (for instance) coaching and
game theory in the educational discourses and in pedagogical practices could be regarded as a
qualified success for the philosophy of sport. Coaching and game theory could be seen as quali-
fied successes because of the tendency to lose a lot of their creative essence when assimilated
into the highly institutionalised education systems and classroom practices – contexts where per-
formativity does not mean enriching the nature and experience of the performance.
In exploring the possibilities for a critical philosophy of sport the problem of educational cap-
ture is a central concern. Educational capture, or more specifically, institutional capture of ideas

ß 2019 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

812 EDITORIAL

as educational ideas to deploy in educational systems, are evident in the tendency to take an
idea from, for instance, design practices, and insert it into ‘school’ as an educational practice.
The problem here is not how a philosophy of sport produces new dimensions and possibilities
for thought and for practice in education, but rather how educational institutions adapt these
and all reforms within the educational projects of Progress (see Cuban, 1992; Ranciere, 1991).
The philosophy of sport ‘needs’, to this extent, a critical tradition that observes and challenges
the nature, purpose, and outcomes of these educational projects.
A philosophy of sport is interested in “human interaction with play, game, and sport” (Stoll,
2017, p. 1032). A critical philosophy of sport is interested in what it means to be interested in
these interactions, within wider and deeper social, technological, economic, and political con-
texts, and what these interactions mean as technologies of the self. A philosophy of sport might
be seen as taking a view that sport is supposed to be good for us in terms of identity, morality,
and general physical wellbeing, and so the philosophical task is to lubricate the machineries of
sport in order to make sport better and hence make better identities, moralities and bodies. A
critical philosophy of sport wanders more into the production of morality in a sporting world –
and this includes the limits of that morality as well as what is beyond. This wandering includes a
concern with the production of particular histories of sport. What does it mean to turn to Egypt,
Mesopotamia and Greece in order to define and analyse sport? What are the historians searching
for in their archaeology of sport?

Taking aim at some epistemological problems

Anxieties around the taking seriously of an academic and philosophical tradition are exacer-
bated in a competitive knowledge economy. The idea of competition is essential here. The
seemingly unquestionable status of the idea of competition and in particular of the idea of
winning pervades many dimensions of life. To challenge the idea of not having a loser in com-
petition, particularly in sports-minded communities and nations, is practically heretical.
Challenging conceptualisations of the winner-loser model is like challenging the ideas of prop-
erty, privacy, and individualism. All of these ideas contribute to a particular way of thinking
about being and about knowledge. Higher education and research organisations present
important symptoms of these ways of thinking - rankings systems, and awards systems and
the tendency of the relatively new, yet burgeoning, marketing departments of universities in
their fixation on rankings and awards in order to build and promote an apparently competitive,
winning, educational brand.
As an epistemological problem, and a problem of epistemological chauvinism (see Young,
2002), the way that competition, winning, and losing, are constructed as sporting metanarratives
doesn’t appear to be suffering much of a postmodern crisis. Children’s sports fields, popular cul-
ture, and academic regulation, all reify this organisation of relationships as if they contained
monolithic truths essential to the survival of the human race. And humanisms, they certainly are.
One task for a critical philosophy of sport is an ethics of competition that takes seriously the
epistemological chauvinisms that make it possible to think about winners and losers, competi-
tion and rivalry, in particular ways. In sport, the relationship between competitors and the com-
petition is intriguing and, here, productive. A study of the competitive mind-set in a critical
philosophy of sport has something to offer the study of education (and arguably more so than
game theory and coaching). For one very specific micro-example, the way that teachers under-
stand the individualisation of children’s work into schemes of better and worse, more successful
and less successful. There’s a competitive gene drilled into their thinking that suggests that it’s
not possible for everyone to get the same grade and that if everyone gets the same grade some
injustice will have been done, that the grade can be scientifically and empirically measured in
terms of individual inputs, and that the grade is essential to the safety of ‘our’ society.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 813

While there’s a lot to look for in Spinoza to attend to this problem, I’d actually like to turn to
The Boss. In his introduction to Born to Run in live shows, Bruce Springsteen has uttered:
‘nobody wins unless everybody wins’ (see for instance Taylor, 2010). This is a phrase that, enter-
tained in a critical philosophy of sport, offers something quite significant to the study of sport
that then offers something to the study of competition across the dimensions of human and
more than human interactions – can sport challenge the way winning is understood? And, put
another way, if the losing team recognises that ‘we all win if you win’, what is also possible? If
sport and competition can break out of a zero-sum mentality, what is possible for education?
Neither sport nor education as massive economies will break out of their source code without
a critical philosophical attending to the role of these economies on the lived experiences of
sports. These economies have a shared trajectory … the knowledge economy before it was the
knowledge economy:
Athletics in the USA began as early as 1852 as student-run activities, but it wasn’t long until colleges and
universities realized the problems and potentials of such programs. It was argued that students did not
have the capacity to manage such programs and universities needed to manage competition to control
corruption. Perhaps it was for such ideal purposes, but Smith … argued it was more to control and capture
the amount of cash the ticket sales were bringing in (Stoll, 2017, p. 1034).

While for Stoll the institutional capture evidenced in the marketization of college sports is a
problem for the academic trajectory and integrity of the philosophy of sport (on account of the
growth of sporting programmes independent of academic disciplines), for the critical philosophy
of sport the concern is that of the wider and deeper entrepreneurial source code emerging in
educational administrations.

On honour and the fix

That entrepreneurial code could be seen to conflict with a sporting code of honour. In sports,
under what conditions can we observe a winner to be a good winner, and a loser to be a good
loser? And, to what end are winners and losers guided by an idea of being good? What then
happens when the winners and losers are no longer ‘good’ in their losing and their winning
– will do anything to win the game/war (sport have some association with a preparation for war,
see Stoll, 2017) and will, for instance, perpetually dispute the reality of the outcome.
Justice is an enduring myth for sport. In his analysis of wrestling Barthes (1972) recognises a
particular approach to the spectacle as parody of competition. Wrestling might not be consid-
ered competitive at all because the winner is, as every wrestling spectator already knows (and
really does not need reminding), predetermined. Barthes takes on the critiques of wrestling, in
defending the characters and the crowd, and in terms of the story of justice. This scripted com-
petition brings the loser into a different kind of relationship with the game. The loser cannot
lose, as long as the match goes according to plan – the plan being to present stories of justice
to be mocked and celebrated. Wrestling is juxtaposed to boxing … one is a proper sport and
the other is an act. That is until ‘the fix’ is on. Betting and professional sport are still dealing
with each other. For cricket fans, every time their favourite player spills a seemingly easy catch,
or makes an odd decision, can they stop themselves from wondering whether the fix is on?
While on the one hand there is an issue with the deception of the fix for the unhappy punter
whose wager was never a real punt, on the other there is the problem for all fans of wondering
whether what they are observing is real.
In that world of professional sport (and its association with betting and fantasy leagues), not
much is left unscripted … professional sports are wrestling with wrestling. The crowd/audience
can no longer be entirely satisfied that it is watching an unscripted competition. The spectacular
sport has had to catch up with the spectacle of wrestling in terms of the ceremony of a profes-
sional sporting event – and not just the interminably long opening ceremonies for world games.
814 EDITORIAL

The sporting media is essential to the spectacle and is central to the professionalization and
institutionalisation of any sport in a national or global psyche. The merits and worth of a spec-
tacle can be measured by the number of cameras deployed in an arena and, increasingly, the
kinds of cameras that are deployed. A high achieving and lucrative sport can justify all kind of
new AI camera innovations in the production of the spectacle. And cameras are no longer suffi-
cient in real time. In the production and commentary booths the action is dissected in real time
with software that creates instant recreation to analyse and to project – to bring the spectacle
into a new microcosm of expert knowledge, prediction and analysis. And, more or less subtly, to
turn the live game into an eGame simulacrum of itself.
It’s not often in the philosophy of sport that the question of the real is a concern. A critical
philosophy of sport might introduce, for instance, Baudrillard, to questions concerning the simu-
lation of the spectacle, and the production of human simulacra acting out the spectacle in ways
that are more thorough in convincing us of the importance of chance. A critical philosophy of
sport offers something more than an instrumental observation of how sport might have gone
wrong in producing the moral citizen – and how the philosophy for sports children (P4SC) might
educate the child in the right way to do sport in the attainment of, or practices of, the good life.
Perhaps, even, a critical philosophy of sport situates the very idea of the good life, and it’s
attending moralities, in the matrix of relationships that produce particular kinds of competitive
mind-sets. The demonising of the opposition through a questioning of their moralities – they are
cheats and we are fair – is a practice that media and social media have turned into a career. The
postmodern sporting star engages in the creation of celebrity, stardom and income not just on
the field but in social media spaces. At times the public read of social media bans on sporting
teams, however those bans are insignificant when contrasted to the volume of posts, follows,
shares and so on that create an internet of sports. That web of social media sporting relation-
ships produces new spectacles to engage with and in, new mediations of justice, and new net-
works, spheres and dimensions of the influence of sport. Social media creates new forms of
remediated sporting heroes, and sporting demons.

Frankenstein and the lethal body

In the move to profit from sports teams and sports people, Stoll (2017) observes a concern for
the future of sport and physical education that had been largely concerned with the relation-
ships between mind and body, development, identity and character as they were replaced with
largely commercial sporting programmes that had little to no connection with scholarship. Those
commercial programmes have become closely aligned with the sports sciences, including the sci-
ences of managing sports. Research ethics committees are inundated with 21st century techno-
logical and biotechnological experimentations aimed at enhancing the competitive edge of a
sporting programme within an institution, franchise, and/or nation. The business of producing
winners in sports is big business that tends to overlook the cost of that business on the athlete
(the recent focus on concussion being an important and growing exception).
In order to critique the sciences of athlete production, we might turn to the story of Viktor
Frankenstein, who, upon perfecting his particular blend of science and alchemy, brings an appar-
ently grotesque figure to life. Upon seeing life in the assortment of body parts, Frankenstein
flees. The super strong and super intelligent being that he leaves in his laboratory is abandoned
(Shelley, 1818/2009). Viktor Frankenstein lacks a critical philosophy through which he can ques-
tion both his production and, more importantly, his very perception, of a monster.
The sports sciences are well funded by sporting organisations and in particular corporations,
to create super beings that are specialised weapons for a particular code. It is not so much that
“ … competition builds character” (Stoll, 2017, p. 1035) but that competition builds bodies.
Technologies of body production are on a Frankenstein-like trajectory in the sports sciences. The
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 815

sports scientist, like Frankenstein, is captivated by the possibility of breaking the known laws of
biological possibility. Unlike Frankenstein, sports scientists are well funded and well supported to
do this – their intellectual property quickly becoming the property of sporting organisations. It is
not too much of a science fiction leap to imagine the creations of sports scientists already run-
ning amok in society, rejected by their owners and managers and by the scientists who created
them once their particular design is no longer a competitive edge. That kind of imagination is a
critical dimension of the critical philosophy of sport.
A critical philosophy of sport then joins with the post philosophical turns in order to amplify
the disruption of Humanism and Modernity. The possibilities for this critical philosophy of sport
is another potential contribution to the imagining and mapping of such chauvinisms, how they
operate, what they make possible, and what they limit. This possibility is not so much directed
to what counts as sport, what roles and contributions sport might have for individuals, commun-
ities, and nations, and so on. While these are not disconnected inquiries for the imagination of a
critical philosophy of sport, they are reiterations of the aforementioned great traditions in spite
of the perceived silence of the great philosophers. However, not all philosophers were silent
on sport …
On sport, Albert Camus is not silent. Camus does not say much about sport, admittedly, but
he does say something, as a lover of football and as a practitioner and scholar of the art of goal-
keeping (White, 2010). In his thinking about football and about goalkeeping Camus recognises
the intensities of sport for life and the organising of lives. Camus on sport is then Camus on soli-
darity, rebellion and the absurd. Camus is not a sports scientist building the quads of a cyclist,
an educational psychologist manipulating the motivations of a child, or an instructional designer
harnessing the perceived power of competition. Camus thinking about sport is Camus thinking
in and through the poetic. Camus’ work then asks critical questions about sport that don’t help
with the absurd (apparently great) philosophical tradition of making ‘Man’; but do enrich a crit-
ical philosophy of sport.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Andrew Gibbons
Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
andrew.gibbons@aut.ac.nz