Introduction
Phenomenology arose as a critique of an ‘objective’ approach to the world. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, tried to deal with both everyday and scientific assumptions about the world that have been taken for granted. He aimed at first-hand examination and accurate description of lived experience – of structures of consciousness with their correlated phenomena. Since sciences explain the world in an objectivist way, phenomenology can help us to see the world from a different point of view.
Recently, the phenomenological way of thinking has made its way into the philosophy of sport and is becoming increasingly used. While analytical philosophers of sport usually cover topics that concern the concept of sport and its various aspects, phenomenologists draw attention to the athletes and to a wider scope of examining their participation in sport. Phenomenology also brings new concepts, such as, for example, intentionality, consciousness, perception, time, space, authenticity, movement, skilful coping and the body, that have been neglected or underestimated in the analytical tradition.
What is phenomenology?
Phenomenology is a philosophical movement founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl at the beginning of twentieth century, which describes phenomena and their appearing to a subject. It is important to emphasise that phenomenology is not one theory, however, but a group of theories that arose partly through reflection on and improvement of the ideas of its predecessors, and the development of their theories so as to change not only the theories but also the phenomenological method itself.
Thus, the ‘phenomenological method’ differs with respect to the great authors of phenomenology, such ‘continental’ philosophers as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jan Patočka and others. However, the unifying idea as suggested by Husserl – ‘Back to the things themselves!’ (Husserl 2001: 168) – can speak for all of them, despite its being often misunderstood. For the father of phenomenology, Husserl, ‘things’ means ‘things as experienced’ – that is, they are appearances (to a subject), such that there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ behind these appearances.
The word ‘phenomenon’ demands some explanation, since it sometimes causes misunderstanding. The word itself comes from the Ancient Greek word phainomenon, which translates as ‘appearance’. Sometimes scholars in the social sciences have understood phenomenology to mean the scholarly description of concrete appearances. Yet phenomenology is interested in phenomena (appearances) as empirical phenomena only to the extent that they are correlations of the structures of our experience. This approach stems from the idea that an appearance always appears to some subject. What phenomenology is especially interested in are ‘deep phenomena’ (Patočka 1996: 46) or the ‘phenomenological conception of phenomenon’ (Heidegger 2001: 31), which are not self-evident appearances but, at first, rather concealed modes of being that shape our existence and that need to be brought to light.
The main contribution of phenomenology, therefore, lies in an examination and description of the structures of human experiencing, together with the things experienced that are their correlates. In other words, in phenomenology, we look at (and describe) what we normally look through. Instead of looking through our humanness at the world, we look at our humanness, to try to give an account of what we are, how we experience and the nature of this experiencing. Thus:
When we do phenomenology, we are not simply participating in the world, dealing with things in our normal everyday way – rather we are taking a step back in order to contemplate what it is to be a participant in the world, and how things present themselves to us.
(Sokolowski 2000: 48)
The claim is that understanding the way that we experience is what gives us the basic ground for all of our knowledge.
Phenomenological research proceeds primarily by an examination of one’s own being; that is, the being of the phenomenologist. The aim of the phenomenologist’s examination of his own being is not to describe the uniqueness of himself as a particular human being but, rather, to arrive at a description of a universal human mode of being (existence), from which stems the connection of phenomenology to the philosophy of existence and existentialism, which serves as a gateway to describing the modes of appearing of things. This ‘subjective’ approach is inevitable, since it is my own experiencing with which I am most familiar, which makes it a primary resource for phenomenological investigations.
Thus, with respect to the description of the human being, phenomenology does not offer a description of a person’s unique traits. It is not a particular ‘me’ that is examined but, rather, the aim is to attempt a universal first-person account of being human. Phenomenology investigates subjectivity but it is not a form of solipsism or subjectivism. It investigates the first-person perspective but its results are not particular-personal but universal-personal. So, even though phenomenology emphasises subjective experience, it is not concerned with personal experience as such – it looks for what is true of every human being’s experience. It tries to make general statements, not individual or particular observations, nor collections of or ‘syntheses’ of individual subjective reports.
Consider, for example, one of the Heideggerian characteristics of human existence or ‘existentiale’– ‘understanding’ (Heidegger 2001). We humans are always in some situation and always have some understanding of it, whatever it may be, no matter whether we are a European man or an American Indian woman. Whatever our differences as empirical human beings, all of us share this essential feature of human beings: that we humans understand. This does not have to be any particular or deep kind of understanding but just an everyday kind of understanding (that we all have) that I more or less know who I am and what to do in my everyday existence (practical understanding). It is not possible to imagine a human being who is without some kind of understanding. If I do not understand some particular thing, this is possible only within an already existing more-or-less deep understanding. ‘Understanding’ is part of what makes us human. And this is a feature that distinguishes human beings from other entities, such as instruments, objects, or animals. Phenomenology is interested in such modes and structures of the being of entities, and not in the particular qualities of the particular entities themselves, nor in the unique way in which I understand a specific thing.1
The kind of truth that comes out of phenomenological analysis is apodictic; that is, necessary truth, truth that could not be otherwise. The truths that phenomenology arrives at may look trivial and basic – and maybe they are. But this does not mean that they are useless and do not require articulation. On the contrary, we often lack an understanding of these basic truths or do not take these basic insights seriously enough, which may compromise our understanding of ourselves and other things. This is why phenomenology is so important. Nevertheless, anyone’s conclusions are open to criticism and, like anyone else, Husserl or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty could be wrong in some or all of their views – indeed, they criticize each other. However, if and where they may be wrong, this must be demonstrated with respect to our experiencing. Since such accounts are presented as universal, this ensures that they are testable against each individual’s personal experience. That is to say, when presented with some account of how a thing is presented to us in experience, we can each of us ask ourselves: ‘Does this insight resonate with my experience?’ In this way, such accounts are meant to refer to the experience of each and all of us as humans. If the given account by a particular philosopher does not resonate with our experience, it is open to us to reject it, and up to us to provide a better account, which itself will be testable against the experience of all of us as human beings.
Although phenomenology concentrates on human experience, it is obviously not possible to neglect phenomena that appear to the subject. Consequently, the correlation between the experiencing subject and the phenomenon is of special importance. A phenomenological phenomenon is ‘the experiencing together with the experienced’. Thus phenomenology discusses the disclosure of things in the world and describes how the experiencing subject perceives things, how identities are constituted, how we humans are in the world and how we understand the world.
Some phenomenologists, especially those in the Husserlian tradition, also focus on the essences (essential structures) of various phenomena. Phenomenology does not explore these in an empirical way (that is, reaching a universal through what we have already experienced as such and which has not been falsified so far) but in an eidetic way. This means that, while phenomenology never abandons appearances on the empirical level, it does not rely solely on them. Rather, it aims to uncover their eidos (a form, a structure, that is necessary to them) by creative imaginative variation (by ‘eidetic’ variation) – and thus its results are ‘eidetic universals’ (Sokolowski 2000: 179).
We try to move beyond empirical to eidetic universals, to necessities and not just regularities. In order to do so, we move from perception into the realm of imagination … We try to push the boundaries, to expand the envelope of the thing in question … However, if we run into features that we cannot remove without destroying the thing, we realize that these features are eidetically necessary to it.
(Sokolowski 2000: 178–9)
What we discover in this way is not a figment of our imagination but a necessary feature that can be found in the empirical world and confirmed by common sense. However, this is not an approach unique to phenomenology but, rather, is an approach used generally in philosophy for exploring and clarifying concepts – a kind of a conceptual analysis (Zahavi 2003: 38ff.). While this investigation of phenomena does not exhaust phenomenology, it is important to mention it here, since it is the source from which empirical research that calls itself ‘phenomenological’ often stems (for example, empirical phenomenology, or interpretative phenomenological analysis, which collect such empirical data and that are sometimes mixed with phenomenology – see later section ‘Phenomenology and sport sciences’). This enterprise goes back to Husserl and his eidetic analyses, rather than to the later phenomenologists, who did not examine phenomena correlative to human experiencing in such detail as did Husserl.
Recently, phenomenology has also been taken up by some analytical philosophers, who have used some of its ideas to bring new light into discussions within the analytical tradition. Phenomenology has proven useful, for example, in the philosophy of cognitive science (see Dreyfus and Hall 1982). Similarly, Shaun Gallagher (2005) has used ideas from phenomenology for his theory of embodied cognition, describing body awareness, self-consciousness, perception and social cognition. Further, with respect to social cognition, he has developed themes such as direct perception within an intersubjective context (Gallagher 2008), empathy (Gallagher 2012) and many others. While drawing mainly on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, he also interprets and reinterprets their ideas through his own approach, while also developing further their distinctions, such as Merleau-Ponty’s notions of body image and body schema (Gallagher 2005).
Some phenomenological concepts of major importance for sport
The first phenomenologically oriented essays in philosophy of sport can be traced back to the early days of philosophy of sport, to the early 1970s, but the phenomenological perspective has only begun to make a deeper impact on the philosophy of sport from the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this section, I introduce some of the most important phenomenological themes and works within philosophy of sport – and I restrict myself to examples of literature that are to be found on the international scene; that is, to books and articles in major journals of philosophy of sport in the English language.
The book often taken as the first work related to sport that was written within the field of phenomenology and the philosophy of existence, is Man, Sport and Existence by Howard Slusher (1967). Even though using some ideas from the philosophy of existence, this book does not fully engage with the phenomenological tradition and nowhere sets out or discusses the central concepts of the central phenomenologists, despite infrequent and cursory references to philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, and so on. Slusher himself refuses the title of ‘existentialist’ for his work. He says in his preface that the book is ‘one man’s interpretation of sport’ (Slusher 1967: xvi) and the index does not even include the word ‘phenomenology’. In any case, this book might be understood as a forerunner of phenomenological thinking within the philosophy of sport, introducing some important ideas with respect to sport, such as the body, death, anxiety.
The first book within English-language philosophy of sport devoted purely to the introduction of the phenomenological method, Phenomenological Approaches to Sport, was published in 2012, based on a special issue of the journal Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, edited by Martínková and Parry (2011b). The book presents various examples of phenomenology with respect to sport, revealing its nature and meanings in ways that have not been developed in the analytical philosophy (of sport) and that go beyond the reach of sciences. The book includes papers that present and discuss ideas of the most important phenomenologists, examines some of their central concepts and applies them to particular issues in sport. Some of the papers from this issue are discussed in the following section, in which I present some phenomenological themes that are especially appropriate to the philosophy of sport.
Skilful coping
The theme most relevant to the concerns of the phenomenology to sport is skilful coping, which is closely linked to the theme of habit. Analyses of habit are already described by Husserl but they have not been acknowledged much so far, since they are mostly discussed in his posthumously published texts (see Moran 2011). Presently, the discussions of skilful coping most often come from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (2001: section 14ff.) within the analyses of our common everyday practical understanding (readiness-at-hand, Zuhandenheit) and being of things that are understood in this way – as an instrument (das Zeug), demonstrated with the famous example of hammering. Later, it is discussed by Merleau-Ponty (1945) within his analyses of motility and motor intentionality. Heidegger’s analyses are further developed especially by Dreyfus (2004), who explains how skilful coping develops from the novice to a virtuoso, but also discusses this theme within the context of more complex analyses of the human being. Skilful coping can be described as fluent and proficient dealing with various everyday tasks, without focusing on the process but just relying on the body and instruments. On the contrary, learning or re-learning a skill usually demands a focus.
Since skilful coping is such an important topic in the philosophy of sport, it has been discussed in several articles. Skilful coping, exemplified with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, soccer and baseball, has been analysed by Hogeveen (2011), who differentiates between Husserl’s descriptions of how things appear to consciousness and Heidegger’s highlighting of the primary understanding that arises within our common absorbed dealing and coping with things – which is of practical concern, without reflection upon things and without much self-awareness. However, Heidegger only presupposed the role of the body in this regard – and this is what Merleau-Ponty focused on. The body understands what is to be achieved and can do so through habits. In Merleau-Ponty’s (2004: 169) words: ‘We say that the body has understood and habit has been cultivated when it has absorbed a new meaning, and assimilated a fresh core of significance’.
Skill acquisition is also explained by Standahl and Moe (2011), who describe the Merleau-Pontian distinction between background capacities and foreground attention and who differentiate between everyday coping skills, when movements are performed at the margins of awareness, being a background for other activities and skills of athletes, where the focus on movements is at the centre of awareness. Aggerholm, Jespersen and Ronglan (2011) put skilful movement into a wider perspective, highlighting its context as an intersubjective encounter (in a game of football), with the complex example of the feint and discussing deception and creativity within it.
Some authors in philosophy of sport use both analytical and phenomenological perspectives. For example, Moe (2005) uses the philosophy of Searle and Dreyfus to show the limits of classical cognitivism (the information-processing approach) in explaining intentional movements in sport, and suggests an approach through understanding embodiment and its background knowledge.
Phenomenology, with its critique of the ‘objective’ scientific approach and its questioning of the nature of first-person human experience, opened a new way of examining human embodiment. To illustrate this new approach, two German words are sometimes used: Körper and Leib (Husserl 1952). The word Körper depicts the body as an object. The word Leib, often translated as ‘the lived body’, stands for embodiment as experienced from within human existence. However, Körper and Leib are not contradictory concepts. Rather, Körper is correlative to Leib as the perceivable body; that is, the body conceived in terms of how we perceive it.
The lived body is a complex and fleeting phenomenon, enabling many different conceptions, such as those described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945, 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre (1943), Michel Henry (2000) and others. In short, the lived body can be described as ‘my’ own body (the inverted commas around the word ‘my’ mean that my body is not always in my ‘hands’, because I am also partly in the ‘hands’ of the body). The lived body is at the centre of human existence, for it is only through the body that human existence is situated and open to the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, our existence happens between ‘a double horizon’ (background) of the body and the world (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 117) as well as ‘a double horizon’ of the past and the future (ibid: 277). These double horizons of body and world, past and future, enable a specifically human space and time, which, however, is not empty, but inhabited and filled with personal projects. The body enables an individual perspective of the world, an orientation within it, a perception of things in it, movement within it, and action within it – doing things, accomplishing various tasks and dealing with other people.
In his later work, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of ‘the Flesh’ (la chair), that expresses the complex intertwining of the experiencing body and things in the world (the sensate and the sensible), which are not to be thought of as separate (Merleau-Ponty 1964).
A phenomenological understanding of the body is finding its way to various disciplines – it has made an important contribution to the philosophy of health, enriching the medical paradigm with new insights (for example, Toombs 2001), as well to education (for example, Kelan 2009), and it also has potential for the philosophy of sport. Within philosophy of sport, the body has not as yet become a key theme, as it has in phenomenology itself (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Most work has been devoted to trying to grasp what has been written in phenomenological philosophy, especially by Merleau-Ponty, and applying it to sport, rather than trying to develop existing theories further.
Embodiment is discussed by Meier (1975, 1988). Both of these papers differentiate between the Cartesian dualism of the body and mind and the concept of the body as developed by Merleau-Ponty. While accusing contemporary philosophy of sport of being replete with restatements of Cartesian dualism, he acknowledges the potential of a phenomenological approach to the body as a fruitful direction for the philosophy of sport. Meier’s 1988 paper is included in the collection Philosophic Inquiry in Sport (1988), edited by Morgan and Meier, which includes a section on ‘sport and embodiment’, including several papers based in phenomenology. Apart from Meier’s paper, there are original papers by Sartre (1988) and Marcel (1988) and a paper by Schrag (1988), who describes the lived body on the basis of Sartre, Marcel and Merleau-Ponty, differentiating it from a scientific understanding of the body as an object. Later, Breivik (2008) investigates our bodily existence in general and relates it to sport (especially football), through selected phenomenological concepts of Heidegger (the importance of practical understanding), Merleau-Ponty (bodily intentionality), Todes (the human intentional body in the spatiotemporal field) and O’Shaughnessy (proprioception), and discusses their contribution to embodiment.
Authenticity is a term most often associated with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and his classic work Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] (2001). This term characterizes the overall mode of our understanding, which conditions the way we live our lives. According to Heidegger (2001: 146), we can understand our own existence as well as things in the world in either an authentic or an inauthentic mode.
Inauthentic understanding means following the dominant norms of a social group, often without much thought. Heidegger (2001: section 38) calls this ‘falling’ – being attracted towards things and tasks in the world, while being unaware of our ‘selves’ – of who we are. This is an understanding into which one is socialised through living in a society, which one accepts. Heidegger (2001: section 25ff.) calls this mode of understanding ‘das Man’ (translated as ‘the they’ in English) – and it means understanding and living as ‘they’ usually understand and live.
On the other hand, authentic understanding, according to Heidegger (2001: 129) means understanding the self on the basis of who I am as a human being. This should not be confused with ‘my own unique perspective’ but, rather, it describes a genuine self-understanding, based on an understanding of what a human being is. Only a considered understanding of my ‘existence’ will enable an explicit understanding of human being, that will in turn enable a conception of who I originally2 am as a human being. This, in turn, enables an adequate understanding of things and beings in the world. Understanding authentically means not being fooled by various human interpretations (including one’s own ‘socialised’ interpretations of oneself). This is especially important with respect to one’s finitude, understanding of which is crucial for our understanding of our own being (Heidegger 2007: 162).
Authentic understanding leads to a more ‘human’ existence, since it arises from the very human source of my own being – it helps one to focus on what is meaningful in his or her life. This is important for all spheres of one’s life, including sport. With a more adequate understanding of the self comes more adequate sport practice. An understanding of the human being can also help us to design individual sports in a better way – so that sports are designed so as to support our humanness, rather than being designed to feed our curiosity (to see new records, etc.), to seek worldly ends, etc. (Martínková 2013). This resonates with idea of Olympism and de Coubertin’s (2000: 163) conviction that self-knowledge is the ‘be-all and end-all of physical culture’. Phenomenology can help a great deal in this respect.
Within philosophy of sport, authenticity is addressed by Standish (1998), within the context of skilful coping and the tendency of sport to ‘a particular kind of everydayness’ (ibid: 268). There is, however, a chance to find ‘the palest shadow of the ultimate finality’ (ibid. 268) through sport failures or in dangerous sports. Authenticity is also presented by Jirásek (2007), who, within a wider take on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, focuses especially on an authentic experience and its manifestation in various kinds of movement activities. Breivik (2010) discusses Heideggerian concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity with respect to skydiving. He describes the disruption of the everyday world that happens during one’s first jump, leading to anxiety and awareness of death and to a glimpse of authenticity and then he describes how, on becoming proficient, the skydiver gradually inhabits the world of skydiving. This is a neat description of our tendency to be ‘falling’ into the world – following skydivers’ aims, dealing with the usual equipment and fulfilling routine tasks, and forgetting about our own self. This nicely describes the tendency to be inauthentic, even in a context such as skydiving, in which most participants probably believe that their skydiving is the most authentic part of their existence.
From its beginnings, time has been one of the key themes in phenomenology and it has contributed significantly to our understanding of the concept of time. Time is usually conceived as linear, objective, homogeneous and measurable, characterized by an axis divided into past, present and future – the present is seen as a point between the past and the future. And so time is characterized as an axis that can be divided into a myriad of moments or units of the same duration, each following successively. Time conceived as such refers back to Aristotle and was further developed with the rise of science.
However, the phenomenological conception of time is rooted in human experiencing (that is, our consciousness of time) and objective time is explained as derived from this ‘experienced’ time (for example, Heidegger 2001: section 78ff.).
For Husserl (1973: section 31) each new ‘now’ is a result of an original, primal impression, while from moment to moment its content, unchanged, slides into the past and is retained. However, what changes is its ‘mode of givenness’, since each new now succeeds it and pushes it away. The now is thus experienced as not being isolated from the past and the future. Each now slips into the past, being retained, and this is how we are conscious of the past, while each now is also open to what is coming, and this is how we are conscious of the future. For example, while writing this text, I experience it in the modes of the now (what I am writing right now), which is slipping into the past (retention), and which is directed to the future (protention). After having finished the whole paper, all of this is retained and if I want I can recall (re-present) the text in my actual now (the present). Without retention I could not remember anything. Husserl’s analysis of time deeply influenced Heidegger (whose salient title is Being and Time), Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, among others.
While objective time constitutes and regulates the practice of most existing sports, the contribution of phenomenology lies in showing how time is experienced by athletes, which can help us to understand the practice of athletes in a more adequate way. This theme has been developed by Morgan (1976a), who discusses the futural modality of training and sport, following on Heidegger’s highlighting of analysis of time, especially as it explains the future, since our understanding of our ‘being-towards-death’ and therefore of our present mortality are important for authentic existence. He distinguishes the inauthentic, instrumental, open-ended, futural orientation of training, in which an athlete forgets about himself, with sport that manifests a distinctive (non-everyday) projection of the future – which is closed rather than opened. Morgan refers to ‘an opening of possibilities and a staking of the limits in which and by which these possibilities are to be realized’ (ibid: 423) and which ‘offers no guarantee of a future reckoning or rectification’ (ibid: 425). This manifests the athlete’s future as finite, and that determines how the athlete grasps his/her possibilities. In his later paper, Morgan (1978) explores more deeply the concept of lived time within training, emphasizing training as planned activity, characterized by its linear direction towards a determined end. Martínková and Parry (2011c) contrast two conceptions of time within sport – time as linear and as experienced – and discuss the problems that athletes experience through constraints arising from the various ways of employment of linear time in sport (linear time having various functions in constitutive and regulative rules).
Movement
Movement is an important theme in the philosophy of Jan Patočka. According to Patočka, our ‘original’3 understanding arises from the experience of the self as a primordial dynamism – a dynamism thrusting itself into the world. I ‘originally’ understand myself as an experiencing being – as living my own life, giving meaning to entities and dealing with them. Patočka conceives the human being as this movement, which can be seen as a novel expression of Heidegger’s account of temporality (Patočka 1998: 132, 155). When Patočka says that the human being is movement, he is making an ontological point. This characteristic of the human being demands the usage of a dynamic terminology, such as life, existence, performance, energy, flowing stream and current, rather than a static one, such as substance, object, and so on.
Within this dynamism, Patočka (1992: 231ff.) distinguishes ‘overall human movement’ and ‘partial and individual movements’. The overall life movement gives meaning and direction to every partial movement that the human being makes. Importantly, movement is visible only in relation to something static. According to Patočka, this ‘something static’ is not some immobile basis of the human being (such as Aristotelian substance) but, rather, something that the human being ‘refers’ to – a referent. ‘Referent’ means the horizon for all the partial movements of the human being; it is that to which movement relates and which itself is immobile (Patočka 1998: 149). Thus, though the human being is movement (a kin-anthropos, see Martínková 2011), not everything moves. In his work, Patočka shows three different referents with respect to the essential possibilities of human existence that can be realized. On the basis of these referents, he distinguishes three movements of human existence – the movement of acceptance, the movement of defence and the movement of truth (Patočka 1992, 1996). ‘The movement of acceptance’ is the foundational layer – the movement of growing into the world. This movement gradually changes into ‘the movement of defence’, which characterizes the area of everydayness, in which the human being is dispersed in his/her individual projects that sustain his/her existence. Finally, ‘the movement of truth’, means the transcendence of everydayness to a more authentic existence. These three movements differ from each other in terms of their overall meaning for the human being. Each of them then grounds all partial (concrete) movements of the human being (Patočka 1992, 231ff.).
While the ontological concept of movement may seem distant and too wide for the philosophy of sport, it is very important, since it puts the human being in the full perspective of his whole life. Then, if we wish to understand an individual movement (single act) of a specific human being, or the meaning of one’s participation in sport in a more adequate (holistic) way, it helps us to interpret it with respect to this overall movement of human existence – because a single movement or set of movements is always only a part of a wider whole, and separating them from this wider whole brings on some kind of reduction.
Within philosophy of sport, this understanding is developed in the paper ‘Anthropos as Kinanthropos’ (Martínková 2011), which discusses both Heidegger’s and Patočka’s concepts of movement and derives conclusions for a non-reductive understanding of athletes’ movement in sport. Patočka’s understanding of movement is also applied to Olympism by Martínková (2012), describing two possible directions for human development through sport, labelled by Coubertin’s metaphors: fair and temple.
Ethics
Phenomenology is primarily ontology and as such it is a description of the basic structures of experiencing of the human being. However, phenomenology can offer ideas for sport ethics too. There is the potential for ethics in Heidegger’s notion of authenticity. Authentic understanding means an adequate understanding of ourselves, and as such it is a basis for becoming responsible for one’s own life as well as for a more adequate understanding of others. This is important for athletes’ participation in sport itself, as well as for thinking about the logical structure of sports and the possibilities for its change towards a more humane and ethical sport. Further, ethics is explicitly discussed in Sartre – especially in his concept of the human being, which binds together freedom and responsibility (Sartre 1996).
Sartre’s ethics is discussed by Morgan (1976b), who argued that Sartre’s claim that the ego arises only through reflection (existence precedes essence) has important implications for morality, namely, that moral values are rooted in our essential free nature. But since we necessarily live with others, we also need to recognize the freedom of others. Applied to sport, rules both constitute and regulate the activity – but truly to do so, they need to be freely accepted by the athlete. Without this understanding, sports rules tend to be understood as objective laws, which bring about conduct that is not based on free will, which further allows sport to be an instrument for exploitation for one’s own interests – destroying both sport and humanity. Our essential free nature, as developed by Sartre, is also discussed by Culbertson (2011) with respect to transhumanism and the ethics of performance enhancement (especially genetic transfer technology) in sport. However, the ethical aspect of phenomenology has not been much discussed in philosophy nor in philosophy of sport, and so there is potential for further exploration.
Further topics
Of course, there are also other important topics within philosophy of sport that draw on phenomenology. On the most general level, Martínková and Parry (2011a) present key concepts of phenomenology and Müller (2011) gives an overview of selected themes within the development of phenomenology and existentialism and their relation to sport. Regarding various individual themes, Hughson and Inglis (2002: 4ff.) show the difference between the abstract and practical (lived) concepts of space on the basis of (mainly) Merleau-Ponty’s analyses, in order to discuss play (especially with respect to football). Play is also discussed by Vannata (2008) and Zimmermann and Morgan (2011). Here, most authors draw especially on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, while Eugen Fink’s work Spiel als Weltsymbol (1960) is rarely mentioned. Hogen(ová) (2009) addresses athletes’ anorexia by differentiating the Cartesian view of the body from the phenomenological one (especially as discussed by Husserl and Heidegger), introducing various phenomenological concepts, such as, for example, epoche, the Husserlian concept of time, and bodily intentionality. Breivik (2011) discusses risk in nature sports. Morgan (1993) uses phenomenological analysis for discussing sport as a religious experience. Kretchmar (2013) discusses competition within the frame of Husserl’s eidetic analyses, noticing its similarity to conceptual analysis. Another important theme of phenomenology – intersubjectivity – is presented by McLaughlin and Torres (2011). Vannatta (2011) uses Husserl’s philosophy to discuss the relevance of instant replay in football, concluding that ‘perception of movement in lived time is optimally perceived in lived time’ (ibid: 341).
Phenomenology and sport sciences
We can find the word ‘phenomenology’ used not only in philosophy (of sport) discourse but also within the area of qualitative research in some (sport) sciences, such as, for example, (sport) sociology and psychology (for example, Willig 2008). In this context, phenomenology is understood as a scientific method, calling itself empirical phenomenology, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and so forth. This is understandably a reaction of these researchers to the kind of depersonalized science that is abundant in (sport) research, trying to highlight the individual person (athlete) and this field of research is growing.
The important issue to be noticed is that the connection between philosophical phenomenology and these empirical modifications is not unproblematic. Philosophy and empirical sciences ask different kinds of questions and therefore the methods differ, as well as the outcomes. While, in philosophical phenomenology, the inquiry aims mainly at the description of the structures of how we as human beings experience ourselves and the world, empirical psychology and sociology that claim to be inspired by phenomenology are aimed at particular experiences in the specific understanding of individual people.
Another problem is that some of these same researchers think that they are doing phenomenology simply because their work is supported by reference to some philosophical sources that precede the description of empirical methods. While it is also presently generally agreed among empirical researchers who call themselves phenomenologists that phenomenological philosophy is the primary source of their empirical research (Finlay 2009), there is a problem with the relationship between these two discourses, which are, as previously noted, of a fundamentally different kind. This does not mean, however, that this form of empirical phenomenology in the sport sciences is without merit, but rather that it needs to be applied with thorough knowledge of the method, and in a critically sensitive way. As Zahavi (2010: 14) says: ‘It is important to encourage the exchange between phenomenology and empirical science, but the possibility of a fruitful cooperation between the two should not make us deny their difference’.
Greater clarity would be achieved if empirical researchers stopped using the term ‘phenomenology’ to describe their work, in the style of Marton’s (2004) ‘phenomenography’, or if they made it clear that they are just ‘inspired’ by phenomenology (although here we should still expect some explicit account of what difference it makes to the research methodology adopted). It is rare to find empirical work that genuinely applies phenomenological philosophy, addressing important topics from within their discipline in a philosophical way. One exception is R. D. Laing’s (1960) development of the concept of ‘ontological security’ within psychotherapy – a description of human being that helps to explain certain ‘pathologies’, in a way that would otherwise be impossible.
Conclusion
The main contribution of phenomenology is its view of the human being from the first-person perspective, its emphasis on the character of human experiencing, and its attention to the human situation. Phenomenology thus brings new aspects and topics from human life to the fore. These are, for example, the importance of self-understanding and the meaning of one’s life, the importance of transience and mortality, freedom and responsibility. Also, some topics relevant to sport receive fresh treatment from this new perspective, sometimes producing a new account – such as, for example, in discussions of the human body and movement, action, spatiality, time, skill, and so on.
Within sport philosophy, phenomenology helps us to take a fresh and wider grasp of the human being within sport and enables us to overcome a generally reductive approach. Let me emphasise that this does not mean that we should become subjectivists but, rather, that this is an approach that takes the human being seriously with respect to his/her experiencing and being-in-the-world. A failure to pay attention to human existence in its wholeness is reductive, and such approaches may well prove inadequate and inefficient for analyses that concern the human being in or outside of sport. Within the context of sport, a phenomenological account of human being puts a different emphasis on the athlete. It does not make the mistake of over-emphasizing the performance and its result, but rather it points towards emphasizing the importance of clarity of self-understanding without which meaning and significance recede, and the athlete’s understanding of their participation in sport is diminished.
1 For more on this topic, see Martínková and Parry (2011a).
2 ‘Original’ understanding in this context means the kind of understanding that characterizes the primordial human way of understanding, even though it is first and mostly inexplicit (Patočka 1998).
3 See note 2.
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