The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Werner Herzog (1974)
Touchline philosophy it may be, but our sporting conversation is preoccupied with question of rightness and wrongness, of beauty and ugliness - the core concerns of ethics and aesthetics. For the Ancient Greeks, the relationship between sport and philosophy was obvious. The basis of a classical education was the alphabet plus swimming. Plato was an accomplished wrestler.
While, as Steven Connor argues, the canon of modern Western philosophy has had its share of sporting thinkers - Jacques Derrida was a goalkeeper, AJ Ayer a decent middle-order batsman – the intellectual encounter has been lacklustre. Sartre wrote on skiing, Wittgenstein mused on games, but after that the line-up is rather bare.
One asks: what does a beautiful goal tells us about beauty? The other asks: what it is for a goal to be beautiful? Why do human beings seem to need games that consist of invented obstacles? Think about how time and space are experienced in the sporting arena; what it is to move and how it moves us. Gliding sports—skate and snowboarding, wind and wave-surfing—are games that resist conventional forms of scoring; their relationships to nature and to gravity are less about overcoming and dominating and more about working with them.
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littlepotato said:
omg. can’t wait to cry tears of joy with you over the saints in big sur. who dat echoing over the pacific, yo. whales that want to stand up and get crunk.
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