Sport, Philosophy, and Good Lives

2. Sport, Vulnerability, and Unhappiness

Sport, Vulnerability, and Unhappiness i. Pursuing Happiness The discussion of sport and play raises larger questions about sport and happiness, about the relation between sporting activities and good lives, and about sport and larger philosophies of life, such as hedonism. As I argued in the previous chapter, engaging in playful sporting activities can be a significant source of attitudinal pleasure. On the other hand, participating in sporting activities may involve failure and loss. Sport may promote unhappiness. Consider another important approach to life in light of the recognition that our happiness is fragile and we need some fundamental way to deal with what life throws at us. The Stoic begins with the notion that human beings are vulnerable and then develops a view of persons and their world to respond to such liabilities, with an eye toward advice about how to live well despite life’s seemingly inevitable pitfalls. Some things are within our control; others are not. If we seek to make our happiness depend on things out of our control, on the satisfaction of desires that depend on the contingencies of the world, we will inevitably be dissatisfied—unhappy. The response? We should adapt.¹ Instead of attempting to make the world conform to our desires, we should reshape our internal economy; we should, in particular, remake our judgments and attitudes, and “master our 2 30 Sport and Good Lives desires,” in the words of a contemporary scholar of desire.² We should make our desires conform to the world, or to those aspects of reality that we cannot change. Attend to what we can control. We should attempt to be a certain kind of invulnerable human being: a virtuous person, the Stoic sage. The strategy of adaptation has a long and storied tradition in both Western and non-Western philosophy. It is said that Siddhartha Gautama left the sheltered world of palace life at age twentynine and first confronted inevitable and deeply disturbing facts about human existence: sickness, old age, and death. According to the young man who became the Enlightened One, the Buddha, life is characterized by suffering, by some disjointedness essentially related to our natures as creatures of desire, whose cravings and attachments leave us perpetually out of whack. His response? Adapt. Live in such a way that we undermine our cravings and attachments and live more satisfactorily by transforming ourselves psychologically and morally. In mentioning Stoicism and Buddhism, I am merely gesturing rather loosely to a strategy that may be found in certain forms in other philosophies of life or religions, including Epicureanism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Christianity.³ I am most interested in the general strategy and how it might be brought into relation with sports participation. It is interesting that passages in certain Stoic texts explicitly mention athletics (or what we would call sport), as if it might be important to show how a Stoic approach to happiness and the good life would apply to a significant aspect of ancient life. Given the importance of sport in modern life, it might be interesting to reflect on sports involvement, in all its forms, against the background of broader concerns about the good life judged from a number of different perspectives. Let’s distinguish two broad strategies used in pursuing happiness. Borrowing language from Steven Luper’s valuable study, Invulnerability : On Securing Happiness, let’s distinguish a strategy called “optimizing” and the adaptive strategy I have just sketched.4 The Sport, Vulnerability, and Unhappiness 31 optimizing strategy should be immediately recognizable to the affluent and needy alike. We are bombarded with images of the “good life” in which desires for wealth and celebrity are satisfied in the lives of those lucky people we read about or watch on television. Why not have it all? We could call them maximizers, satisficers, or simply “desire satisfiers.” Given the desires we have, a good life is one in which we satisfy as many as we can in an efficient manner. On the other hand, given the pitfalls of life, adapters are more impressed by the way the world refuses to give us what we often value and want and how unhappy we make ourselves by resisting things over which we have little or no control. Of course, there is also the issue of whether what we in fact want and value is what we should want if we are pursuing happiness.5 Here is how Luper summarizes the different...