My threadjacking attempt to play the Vonnegutian Martian anthropologist fell flat yesterday,* so I want to atone for the sin by seriously raising the question of why we watch sports.
There are three kinds of answers to the question I can think of: (1) a Witggensteinian deconstruction of the question, (2) a phenomenological/aesthetic answer, and (3) a moral answer. I'm sure there are more than I can think of, and also that these can be extended in interesting ways. So comments are welcome.
(1) Wittgensteinian (possibly MacIntyrian) Answer-
If construed broadly enough, the question is infelicitous. Since part of what it is to be human is to delight in playing and watching games, the question amounts to asking why one should be human. And this makes no sense. First, it's not a choice. Second, "Why?" questions are only felicitous with respect to a normative/teleological background shared by the asker and answerer. If the claim that games are an essential part of human nature strikes you as untrue, go read Bernard Suits The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, a book Simon Blackburn rightly called a masterpiece (brief review by Mark Silcox here). Note that if Suits is correct that "game" can be defined as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” then the "Why?" question is even more pointless.
(2) Phenomenological/Aesthetic Answer-
Philip Walsh wrote me a cool e-mail that he gave me permission to exerpt. I don't think I could put it any better than this, and when he ties it to dance at the end I had a kind of aha moment.
I guess we both find one another's disposition re sports baffling. You can't imagine someone enjoying something that is so pointless, and I can't imagine someone who doesn't enjoy sport. Perhaps the difference is our respective experiences playing sports? I have always loved playing sports. Soccer, basketball, tennis, and golf are my favorites. I've reflected on why I love sport through the lens of my training in phenomenology. I think I get so much pleasure from executing skillful movement, well, skillfully. Skillful bodily activities are activities comprised of certain movements that can be done more or less well. Not all skillful bodily activities are sports. Running, swimming, jumping, and throwing aren't sports until you embed them in a game structure. "Pure" sports, in my view (and nothing hinges on my use of "pure"--but I think it works), are those in which the very precise kinds of skillful bodily movements that are necessary for excellence in the sport are inextricable from the game structure. Basketball, for example, certainly involves running and jumping, but there are so many other dimensions to the game. Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player in the world right now at all of 5'7" and about 150 pounds, because there are so many other ways for him to be better than his peers than just pure speed or strength. So, for me, track and swimming are the most boring sports because there is so little that can happen. They are all pretty equal physical specimens, and the difference between them comes down to so little. (Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are great examples. Phelps has disproportionately short legs, a huge wingspan, huge feet and hands; Bolt is taller than practically all other sprinters, yet can pump his legs faster than the shorter guys, which isn't supposed to be possible.)
To get back to the part about the value of sport, I suppose its just the pure aesthetic pleasure I get from excellence in skillful movement. I really like dancing too. Of course, there are other factors like the thrill of competition and winning and so forth, and I'm sure there are lots of arguments about the social function of sport, and I'd have to think about all of that a lot more! As for watching sport, I just get a lot of pleasure seeing someone do something that I've practice and tried to do in an amazing way. I think there's a lot of beauty there. Perhaps there are some embodied empathic resonance mechanisms at work.
Q.E.D.
(3) Ethico-Moral Answer
I might be getting this wrong, since I'm not a sports fan. But it seems to me that sporting events are ceremonies of fairness in a badly corrupted world.
I don't have anything particularly wise to say about corruption. Please listen to the song at right.
Incidentally, I take that this is the deeper meaning of Ted George's claim that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for big oil. There's this kind of perception that they just have the bankroll to put together a winning team. But then it becomes a work like everything else, undermining the moral point of sports.**
These seem to me to be the main good responses to the question, but I'm sure that I'm missing something.
[Notes:
*I think that my phenomenology while writing those comments was that they would be funny in a self-deprecating way, but they came across as condescending and snobbish. I don' t know what they really are. Kant is right that we don't know if we have a good will, and Dennett is right that these kinds of things are often completely indeterminate. I have a nasty cold and am desperately trying to meet a paper deadline, and so might have just been being a grumpy a-hole. Who's to say? The sickness/deadline thing is not an excuse, just an explanation.
It's very weird phenomenologically when you first realize you are sick. It rarely lands fully formed like Athena from Zeus' pate. You usually realize that you haven't been feeling well. But then that means you felt badly but didn't realize that you felt badly. That's strange. Does the toothpaste make the orange juice taste differently, or does it just make you not like the taste of orange juice?
**Howard Cosell once said that professional wrestling was real and everything else was a work. This is because the promotion will lose money if they don't push performers who draw the most heat from the crowds. So the "real" competition among the performers is to get the most heat. It's epistemically weird though, because one can root for the performer playing a heal while rooting for the character s/he's playing to lose the match.]
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