the purpose of playing

The furore over Dhoni’s recalling of Bell in the Trent Bridge Test match, and the increasingly distasteful posturing on issues of fair play by both sides might prompt a reconsideration of what sport is for. Is there a philosophy of sport, and if so, what is it? The concept of play, central to Enlightenment aesthetics, privileges notions of freedom and disinterestedness at the cost of material interests or practical ends. In constituting a field of pleasurable activity, whether in literature and the other arts, or in games and athletic pursuits, play is thought to be exempt from the conditions ordinarily attaching to social practice. Theoretically, it is pursued in and for itself: the artwork, the literary text, the game, are held to be their own ends, and to incorporate their own satisfactions. Post-Enlightenment social and aesthetic theory therefore lays particular emphasis upon the self-separation and autonomy of the realm of play and its manifestations in art and culture. Most importantly, it contrasts players with workers. This opposition creates a problem for philosophies of sport in modern capitalist societies, where professional sportspersons are clearly workers earning money for their skills. And gymnastic training was not an end in itself for Plato, who viewed children’s games as formative in both mental and physical terms, and sought to absorb them into the educational curriculum, the paideia.

Like other forms of cultural mimesis, such as literature, games obviously produce the illusion (from Latin illusio, mockery or deceit, derived from illudere, i.e. in ludere, in play) of an autonomous, sovereign field of activity not answerable to the demands of everyday life. Yet at the same time, such pastimes are determined by the nature and exigencies of our human existence, so in fact they are not free at all. Even Bakhtin’s notion of carnival founds itself upon the apparent freedom and privilege of non-official licentiousness, of subversive laughter, parody, and corporeal excess, while it recognizes the extent to which such subversion is permitted, and ultimately contained, by ‘official’ discourse.

We tend to use culture in order to try out – as it were, to test – the laws and values by which we wish to live. (This sounds a bit like a circular argument, though – for isn’t culture itself the field in which value operates?) Just as literature explores questions of suffering, desire, fear and happiness, so too games could be seen as presenting us with questions relating to justice, fairness, rivalry, endurance and sustained endeavour. In effect they inhabit the sphere of ethics and law, while at the same time they raise issues of freedom and control. In doing so, moreover, they question the mind-body dichotomy on which many assumptions of cultural value are founded. Jeremy Bentham famously wrote in The Rationale of Reward that ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’. His Utilitarian disciple John Stuart Mill rejected this eminently reasonable sentiment, arguing that pleasure and/or value should be computed qualitatively, not quantitatively, so that music and poetry can be judged to provide higher pleasures, while games-playing provides inferior ones. This premise is linked to the deep-seated prejudice, in Western culture, against the body and its pleasures: although it is by no means the case that all games are bodily pursuits.

Just as a philosophy of play threatens to swamp and appropriate the entire field of culture, so too a theory of games is potentially too large to be limited to activities technically defined as sports. At the same time, the actual field of sporting practice constantly limits and redefines the theoretical freedom or, conversely, the rule-bound character, of the ‘game’. The game is bound by its own rules, upon which its success and pleasure depend. These can be broken, but they cannot be discarded without breaking up the game itself. Yet at certain times, the game may gesture towards the ‘saving’ illusion that winning and losing, and their palpable material consequences, are less important than the spirit of ‘play’ and its freedom from material interests, its ethical absolutism, and its desire for self-perpetuation. This is what it means to be in play, which, if one accepts the Latin sense of illusio, is simply a deceit of sorts. It would, I think, be a mistake to assert that a philosophy of sport involves the practice of ethics, the understanding of law, the knowledge of freedom. Rather, it involves the examination of ethics, law and freedom as hypotheses merely, as possibilities upon which we may or may not act.