In this article, we address the aporia(s) of the Olympic discourse produced by the troubled split between sport and politics. To start our argument, we will show that sporting governing bodies ...continuously insist that they are still on the other side of any kind of politics. Guided by Aristotle, who presented the reciprocity of ethics and politics, we will unveil the fallacy of this discourse. In a short genealogy of the relationship between sport, ethics, and politics, we will highlight the Munich Olympics 1936 and Mexico Olympics 1968, where political engagement of sport was exposed clearly. At the same time, the supposed political neutrality of sport manifested an aristocratic preference for radical right regimes. After that, we will analyse the contemporary relation between sport, ethics, and politics in the light of recent developments, including sport's ambiguous reaction on the Ukraine war. Further argument will be that sport's in- and external politics, supported by sport ethics and the inherited mantra of the split between sport and politics, is more than just a hypocrisy. At the start, modern sport claims autonomy of governance to keep away from state domination, yet this very autonomy also freezes sport's ethical core, forbidding athletes, coaches and others active in sport, to express any political engagement, other than passive acceptance of the regulation by governing sport bodies, as the only politics to be respected without deliberation. In the final part an alternative understanding of the dynamics between politics, the political and sport's ethical core, will be presented to be included in the philosophy of sport and fully developed in following articles.
The Governance of Sport Kreft, Lev
Sport, ethics and philosophy,
01/2017, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Political philosophy is an examination of distribution of power in human communities and institutions. In previous period when identity issues were the most important political approach philosophy of ...sport had to deal mostly with discrimination and much less with the distribution of power in sport governance. Recent scandals revealed that at the top of sport governing bodies. Even more: it exposed the political character of the distribution of unleashed power in sport. That is why it is not enough to punish ad to prevent. It is necessary to change the distribution of power, reform the models of control over political power in sport and to rethink the whole system of governance in sport. The proposal of this paper is just one short step in this direction with two points of departure: a change in initial sport's associational character of aristocratic distribution of power into contemporary state of corporation with managerial distribution of power; and political philosophy's proposals for models of democratic control at the global level.
Sport as a drama Kreft, Lev
Journal of the philosophy of sport,
10/2012, Letnik:
39, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthetics of sport, we ...should not begin with beautiful of 'pure aesthetics' but with the dramatic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the meaning of sport as a drama, we have to discuss different meanings 'drama' has in theory and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life, and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits' definition of game, Gadamer's idea of play, and Lévy-Strauss' account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual.
How to examine arguments for calling football 'a beautiful game?' To begin with, we need to re-examine what went wrong in the first place, when sport was compared with art. Second, we need to ...re-examine David Best's criticism of these initial comparisons (aesthetics understood as philosophy of art, art understood as kingdom of beauty and aesthetic pleasure understood as pure contemplation). His criticism calls for another kind of aesthetics. Fortunately, there already are some well-developed new models. Actually, the idea of philosophical aesthetics embraced by some of the first philosophers of sport and criticized by David Best was at the same time criticized in art and aesthetics. Twentieth-century aesthetic criticisms of aesthetics and avant-garde criticisms of art are the point of departure for contemporary aesthetics of sport. From the point of view of sport's aesthetics, the most promising are new systematic approaches to aesthetics of everyday life.
In my previous texts on aesthetics of sport and of football, the accent was on dramatic aesthetic properties and on everyday aesthetics as a proper framework for the aesthetics of sport in general ...and football in particular. Here, following this starting point, the character of football as a game of social interactions (a feature pointed out by many sociologists) and its character of purposive sport are examined, to find out what could be the most important aesthetic condition for playing the game and being-in-the-game. To get at the core of the aesthetic side of football, the concept of aesthetic imagination is introduced as a necessary condition for playing the game of football, and three aesthetic regimes for creation of possible worlds or symbolic forms such as football are discussed (mimesis, representation and simulation). There are two steps where the aesthetic imagination helps. The first one is at the entrance where we are leaving ordinary everyday life behind, being ready to accept the world of football as an extraordinary possible universe. The other one is there to allow playing the game: incessant movement of two teams and their 22 members together with a ball creates a space in which one (be it an individual member or the team as a whole) cannot move according to rules and purpose of football without plugging in the aesthetic imagination which makes being-in-the-game possible.
The aim of this paper is to defend the position that aesthetics and ethics in sport are not two separate domains or aspects. In sport, the aesthetic and the ethical both arise from sport's ...(aesthetic) attractiveness or from the pleasure sport offers to its activists and consumers. To think about sport philosophically, we should find a link and a principle beyond this division as a source of both the aesthetic and the ethical in sport. The philosophy and philosophical sociology of Jean-Marie Guyau is presented as a response to this problem. Two points of fundamental importance are considered critically here: his criticism of any reductionism, and life or the idea of life as key principle of a philosophical system which puts ethics and aesthetics together.
Athletes Whereabouts Information demands that 'athletes who have been identified by their International Federation or National Anti-Doping Organization for inclusion in a Registered Testing Pool ...shall provide accurate, current location information'. As from 1 January 2009, this means that elite level athletes have to report on their out-of-competition whereabouts 24 h per day and 7 days a week. This kind of total surveillance requires active participation of athletes, starting with their signature allowing anti-doping authorities to reach them anytime and anywhere. This instrument of control has been discussed from moral and legal points of view, especially as potential human rights violation, and with conclusions which either support or criticize the instrument. This article seeks to contribute to another topic: Why did anti-doping control in elite sport develop in such a way that it demands measures which would be unacceptable if introduced by any other state or international authority? There are two main reasons: moralization and the special kind of precariousness of sport work. Moralization can be detected in many areas of social life, as morality's subordination to claims for control and eradication of evil, and its result is subordination of legality to morality: that is what happened in sport, starting from 'war on doping' and 'zero-tolerance' politics which are both typical signs of moralization. Precariousness is a situation in which increasing numbers of workers are engaged in insecure, casualized or irregular labour. Sport professionals found themselves in precarious situation much earlier than all the other professionals because of the nature and limits of their profession. What is special in their working conditions is, however, that they at the same time represent labour force and product, and this product is their own body together with their body's abilities. Anti-doping control starts from their precarious position: they do not have a choice but to accept its demands because their job depends on it. However, they are not only tested as labour force, but also as commodities, as in the quality of food and other goods that have to be clear and healthy. For commodities, of course, human rights do not apply.
The aim of this paper is to explain that it is not useful to grasp all transformations at the University during last decades under terms of the struggle between evil politics and innocent academy, ...because universities were involved in formation and promotion of reforming guidelines, and went through inside ideological split and political fight during this process. Also, it is not appropriate to find neoliberalism an enemy which has to be defied and defeated with resources of the critique of ideology, because this leads into the conflict between ideology (presumably, but not ready coming from the outside world) and science (presumably belonging to universities themselves). Here too, universities were involved in the process, be it in foundations of neoliberalism, be it in de(con)struction of scientific totality and autonomy. The parallelism between art and science as two autonomous domains of modernity, and their postmodern turn which left them without solid ground of inherited autonomy, will be exposed to support this thesis. Finally, University used to be the special and autonomous workshop with its own laws of procedure, secluded from market economy, to become educational factory, and now, finally, the enterprise. There is no way back. But is there a way out? Contemporary critique of political economy is where we should look at least for a start, and united appearance of students and teachers could give some power to bring academy back into hands of those to whom it originally belongs. Adapted from the source document.
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