First ecosophical question:
What are the implications of the norm on ecosophical joy in my specific sport practice?
Loland implicitly argues in favour of an autotelic conception of sport: sport as a playful end in itself. In this vein sport is an activity for its own sake, in the sense of Naess’s notion of “dwelling in situations of intrinsic value” (cited in Loland 1996, p. 86). However, for many 21st century people, sport is not a non-serious, gratuitous, ludic, playful recreational activity or just an appropriate health enhancing technique. For the truly dedicated practitioner sport is rather a truth- or knowledge-seeking lifestyle with an added, supra-playful value.
Sport philosopher Heather Reid—in her younger days a promising cyclist, aiming for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles—is one the major proponents of the idea that sport is more than just un- committal fun and innocent play. “What my own study of these phenomena reveals is that sport’s social and educational benefits derive not from its playful character, but from its philosophical origins as a knowledge-seeking activity” (2009 p. 40). Sport is (also) a means to an end. It is as large as life.
Now, as a middle-aged college professor who never did stand upon that Olympic podium, I can nevertheless say that sport brought me a long way towards being the kind of self I hoped would win a medal. Looking back at my early athletic career through the lens of my academic training, I now see the connections to Platonic ideals, Aristotelian virtue-ethics, and Stoic self-creation. I can say I was a philosophical athlete before I understood Plato, or the Greek conceptions of excellence, education, and happiness…. By taking a philosophical approach to sport, athletes of all ages, shapes, and sizes can reclaim the educational value of athletics as it was championed in ancient Greece by such great thinkers as Plato, the wrestler (2002, p. xii- xiii).
The longing for philosophical athletism may be the reason why so many dedicated non-professional and non-elite practitioners of endurance sport still work out six times a week—or more.
Now, for the sake of the argument, imagine being a dedicated rider and runner rather than an occasional weekend-warrior or a jogger (Cf. Hochstetler & Hopsicker 2012). Since you are doing fairly, but not extremely well in both disciplines, and because you do not like to ride in a ‘peloton’, you specialize yourself in the duathlon,74 or run-bike-run. There a non-drafting rules on the bike-leg, which
means that you have to push the pedals without the aerodynamic profit of riding in a highly organised, perfectly stream-lined (but because of the increased risk of crash quite dangerous) pack.
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During a local race there usually are about 150 competitors. At the Powerman Zofingen, the yearly long distance world championship in Switzerland there may be up to 500 du-athletes, however.75 Of
course there is an environmental impact, but this seems rather low profile. Unlike during elite bicycle races there is no preceding sponsor caravan during a duathlon. There are also no polluting cars with team managers and spare materials allowed during the race; riders have to fix their own flats. Other than in elite cycle races, du-athletes are supposed not to litter. Racers have to leave their waste (banana peels, empty drink bottles, packaging) in designated areas. There is a time-penalty in case of violation. Generally the tarmac doesn’t suffer from the race. During the off-road mountain-bike version in the muddy autumn and winter-season there is some ecological pressure: worn tracks and probably of few broken twigs, but this will probably not be excessive.
As an individual competitor you might lower the environmental impact even more by travelling to the races by bicycle, train or by sharing a car. There may be a reasonable chance that you are a vegetarian, or only eat organic meat once or twice a week. But you have to admit,you do have more bikes—maybe up to six or seven—than you really need. And of course you do own more than just one pair of running shoes, say four. This overt materialism lessens your ecosophical joy, when you are honest with yourself. So far for the shallower ecosophical considerations on the run-bike-run. Now for something somewhat deeper. You will probably run and bike on different tracks (tarmac, dirt-roads, off the beaten tracks) under different conditions (sun, rain, wind, snow, uphill, downhill) at different speed and length (from a short recovery run to a 300 k bike race), during training sessions and race events. So you are doing quite well on Loland’s ecosophical joy variety-scale, originally intended for sprint distances, but very suitable for outdoor endurance sports. You have to admit, however, you are probably rather limited in your bio-motor-abilities as a long distance rider and runner.76 Frankly, you are more of a
mono-maniac that simply pushes on. Thus not celebrating life in full motor variety. This is not very ecosophical. (But then again, what is the problem for the environment as such?)
Finally, for the overwhelmingly deep experiential part. What about your aspiration to acquire a full-hearted ecosophical mindset as a du-athlete, which is of paramount importance in Loland’s proposed ecosophy of sport? Do you sympathise with the hypothesis that “[s]ymbiosis maximizes Self- realization potentials under conditions of limited resources”?
What we deal with here is a process in which the apparently contradictory principles of unity and diversity constitute a synthesis or a gestalt in which they interdependent and mutually supporting. The key ideal of Ecosophy T, then, is this: ‘Unity and diversity of life’ (p. 75). Deep and symbiotic thoughts may pop up during an intensive lunch-break-run of an hour or so, or while absolving a long bike ride during the weekend. On your own or in a small silent group you occasionally even may sense (naturing) ‘nature’ and the interdependent diversity of being, unfiltered
75 I will return to this specific (auto-)agonistic event in Chapter 7.
76 Although you recently might be in to all kinds of increasingly popular flexibility enhancing training programs such as yoga, tai chi, core- stability, pilates, etc. This might ecosophically compensate somewhat for your one-sidedness.
and at its purest. When perfectly pedalling or smoothly running without watching your actual speed or heart rate frequency, you finally might even come to understand Martin Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit. This opaque and ominous concept is to be translated as ‘releasement’,77 but it also incorporates
characteristics such as calmness, complacency, resignation or withdrawal.
But even when competing with opponents in a race, there still may be left some idea of sympathy with the richly branched tree of life somewhere deep inside the competing athletes. In Loland’s terminology this deep ecological sensation of experiencing unity in diversity is phrased in the following way: “The immediate joy of the ‘interconnection between all there is’ in competitive moments might be a microcosmos reflecting a macrocosmos in terms of an athlete’s fundamental total view of the world”(p. 85). This probably is what the Dutch cyclist Peter Winnen, twice winner of the Alpe d’Huez, a famous and forbidding climb hors catégorie in the Tour de France, meant when he wrote in a column that though during his winning ascents in 1981 and 1983 he wasn’t able to think coherently anymore, let alone to carefully watch, enjoy and getting overwhelmed by the beautiful surrounding massif of the Grandes Rousses. Nevertheless, later he realised that the heinous Alpe had nestled itself in his body in an unconscious, subliminal way.
This paradoxical experience of feeling scattered, lost and literally speechless but meanwhile also perceiving oneself as an integral part of the greater scheme of being similes what the American sport philosopher David Kilpatrick (2010) has coined as “muscle memory”. The conscious mind cannot tell what the body knows—but still one knows. The Belgian philosopher Marc van den Bossche reasons in a similar vein. Since our body is our primary access to the world, thinking, inexorably, begins with physicality. As a dedicated practitioner, for him endurance sport represents the art of living life fully.78
Especially cycling has special benefits to offer when it comes to this. Pedalling against the wind or up the hill is a philosophical practice that connects him with the concrete world he tries to put into meaningful words. Therefore Van den Bossche proposes the following as his epitaph:“He thought by
vélo” (2005, back cover, my translation).
Wrapping up. What are the implications of the normative focus on ecosophical joy in my specific sport practice? In endurance sport there is a grey zone between utter exhaustion and a touch of the sublime that enables maximal Self-realization under limited but nevertheless stretchable conditions. The better you are trained, the potentially higher the ecosophical stakes. Whatever your result in a race, every time you push your limits there is sustainable growth.
77 For a detailed account of how Gelassenheit got lost in translation—instead of deep ‘releasement’ it became shallow ‘relaxation’—in the context of a discourse on ski-jumping, cf. Kreft (2010).