The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.2 (2003) 92-107

Athletics, Embodiment, and the Appropriation of the Self

Leslie A. Howe
University of Saskatchewan

We are all familiar with the claim that sports "build character." It was a favored dictum of the gym teachers who terrorized innumerable childhoods, and it has reappeared as a central slogan of broadcasters and other purveyors of sports product. "It's more than a game" is the message posted on the walls of sporting facilities and training centers throughout Canada, and though the jaded among us might sometimes think to add "yes, it's also money, power, and sex," the intended meaning, of course, is that sport molds participants' lives and characters in lasting and beneficial ways. What, then, is the value of athletics?

I want to look at this question with a long-range eye to its moral value, but I am not here interested in the more obviously ethical questions, such as fairness and cheating. Rather, I want to look at some of the issues that lie at the ontological lip of the ethical: What does athletics have to do with who and what we are, we who act and choose? Is athletic activity of value in the development of authentic selfhood, or not? A number of authors have considered elements of the picture I wish to construct and I shall draw on their contributions as I attempt to provide an answer to this question.

At the outset, I should state that the concept of optimal selfhood that I am working toward in this paper is one that bears many points of contact with traditional Western conceptions of the autonomous, self-individuated self, and yet one that rejects many aspects of this ideal, especially its goal of a supra-somatic, psychically isolated, triumphantly conquering, and other-negating mind. A mind is not a self, but I take a self to be the project of an embodied and purposive consciousness. As such, bodily motion (of the sort manifested in, among other things, athletic [End Page 92] activities) becomes a vital element in the development and happy acknowledgment of the self.

I will be working with even more traditional conceptions of sport and athletics. There is good reason for this: these are the sports we play and pay others to play for us. There are alternate conceptions of sport, ones that reconstruct and reinvent the conceptions of "team" and "competition" that our Western industrialized culture presently favors. I should point out that even many of the sports that currently find (admittedly minority) favor at the present time do not take as their central impetus the "crush-all-opposition" attitude of, say, professional football (thus, e.g., rock climbing, paddling, etc., might be viewed as having more to do with ideals of personal and environmental discovery). Even with some intensely competitive sports, where the goal is ultimately to win, it would be a mistake to view the athletic endeavor as exclusively agonistic. Take as an example rowing. The only way to defeat one's opponent, to (at its extreme) "row through" them, is for the entire crew to "swing" together, to exactly mesh their own bodily movements with each other and with the boat, an achievement that requires both a fine awareness of one's own body and a receptivity and accommodation to the movements of the crew and the shell itself: to row as one. In short, "sport" is a fluid concept, and in the following discussion I do not suppose that the development of self through athletic activity is in any way tied to specific game structures or (necessarily) the controlled release of interpersonal aggression. A lonely swim across an isolated lake is as good an example as game seven of the Stanley Cup final.

Thus, the core of my explication is not competition per se (though the competitive environment is one highly conducive to both the benefits for selfhood I describe and its impediments) but the experience of reaching the self out beyond its apparent boundaries that sport provides (as do...