Sport

• Published in: Rethinking the Western Understanding of the Self pp. 158 - 160
• Main Author: Steinvorth, Ulrich
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: 22.06.2009
• ISBN: 9780521762748; 052175707X; 9780521757072; 052176274X
• DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139175258.023

Hegel wanted to admit only such nonserving activities as enact reason or judgment, recognizing only religion, art, and science. This is probably also true of Weber, but he rightly presumed that human sexual activities often differ enough from animal ones by their inclusion of judgment. Yet there is another class of activities that both have a significance that saves life from Sisyphean absurdity and meet the definition of a value sphere. They require judgment, offer schooling, and can become a profession with perfection standards. These are the activities of sport. They have been performed in many premodern societies, in ancient China, Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mexico, and other ones. They have often been embedded in religious rituals, but today we can see that they aim at an irreducible value not aimed at another sphere. Sport emancipated itself from political and religious dependency only in the nineteenth century, though no less than science and art (and the media and justice enforcement in the serving spheres), it is in great danger of subjection to stronger spheres.Today, sport has become a field for enacting extraordinariness, perhaps the field for extraordinariness par excellence. Like the value of religion, art, science, and eroticism, the value of sport is clear for the adherents and remains closed for the value-blind. It attracts a community who develop standards of excellence that do not depend on the will of the majority but spring from the nature of the sport activity, just as the communities of scientists and artists develop standards of excellence that do not depend on the will of the majority but spring from the nature of science and art.