Sport is a humane phenomenon, the motivations of which reach astonishing depths. I could just as easily have called this article “What an athlete can teach us”, but that would have omitted the philosophical and culturally critical aspect. The issue here is actually why people do sport, how this relates to modern culture and ultimately what an anthropology of sport actually is.
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Everyday understanding of sport
When we commonly speak of sport, our everyday understanding is the same as with many other terms, namely that we do not know clearly what sport is. It seems quite strange to talk about – what is sport?
Although a definition of the term sport is not the central point of this article, but rather the question of the why of sport, I will go into it shortly to at least show how tricky this question turns out to be.
An obvious and first strategy in such an investigation could be to describe the term sport using a few examples. So we are looking for how we use the term sport in everyday life and so come to a better understanding of the essence of sport.
Football, handball, tennis, weightlifting, baseball, bowling, windsurfing, polo … all fall under the category of sport, but what do they have in common? Among the similarities, we quickly find three main features that can apply to a sport individually or together:
- Game or competition character
- Physical activity
- Purpose alignment
The third aspect of purpose orientation can again be broken down into three further components, namely firstly pleasure as an end in itself, secondly strengthening the body as a health purpose, and thirdly – based on the first main characteristic – competition as a performance purpose.
Can you define sport?
From here everything gets complicated. We will quickly find that these characteristics are not sufficient to describe what we intuitively understand by sport – yes, in many cases they are even mutually exclusive and make a definition impossible!
Take chess as an example: is chess a sport? We could only deny chess being a sport if we attacked the second characteristic, because the first and third are now really difficult to deny. If we now say that chess does not count as a sport because the second condition (physical activity) is unfulfilled, we consequently have to do the same for countless other activities that we commonly consider sport, including archery, darts, bowling and so on .
Suppose we are willing to pay that price – even in this case we are still far from a solution, as the following problem persists: We cannot possibly reasonably justify why we, for example, count javelin throwing just like triathlon as a sport that But not playing chess!
After all, the ratio of purely physical activity compared to triathlon to javelin throwing is pretty similar to the same ratio of javelin to chess games. How can we deny this?
The concept of sport as a linguistic mystery
In other words, this example is about setting a minimum level of physical activity, and this business is simply impossible. A similar game could be played with the other two characteristics to show that the term sport cannot be universally defined, but we will spare ourselves this. For these reasons, the consensus has solidified to define the term sport based solely on context and usage:
Since the beginning of the 20th century, sport has become a colloquial term used worldwide. A precise or even unambiguous definition cannot therefore be made. What is generally understood by ›sport‹ is less a question of scientific dimensional analysis, but is determined far more by everyday theoretical use and by the historically grown and traditional integration into social, economic, political and legal conditions. Furthermore, the factual occurrence of sport itself changes, expands and differentiates the understanding of sport [1] .
Sport as a stress relief?
Let’s finally get from the what of the sport to the why – why do people do sport? The Swiss psychologist and educator Édouard Claparède (1873-1940) founded the anthropological model, according to which the human being is a being who has needs and is out to satisfy these needs, ultimately only for the purpose of avoiding tension [ 2, p.86].
This theory actually seems quite plausible. Man strives to restore his own inner balance or to maintain it accordingly – he seeks a balance just to form a balanced system. Sport is a possible access to this for him. In other words, it can release stress in the general sense in this way.
From today’s perspective, however, Claparède’s theory of motivation, that is, his justification for why people do sports, is out of date for good reasons. At its center it sticks to the biological concept of homeostasis, which describes the maintenance of a state of equilibrium in an open dynamic system through an internal regulating process.
The eminent biologist and systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), on the other hand, was able to demonstrate with his research that homeostasis is by no means as universal as it had previously been assumed.
In particular, processes such as growth and reproduction cannot be explained homeostatically in any way. Above all, the conclusion from a biological level to a level of the psyche and human drives is even invalid. Sport can therefore by no means be interpreted simply as a relaxation of tension.
No! We need tension
The homeostatic theory is not only severely limited by empirical research results, but is also questionable due to obvious examples. Why would a person want to climb to an altitude of 8,000 m – to restore his physical balance?
In addition to these self-explanatory objections, the neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) delivered empirical results that speak out against an anthropological model based on the biological concept of homeostasis. The idea of tension and balance is not that bad, if you reinterpret the understanding of balance.
It is necessary for the organism that every change in the organism caused by the environmental stimuli is balanced out again in a certain time so that the organism returns to the mean state of excitation that corresponds to its nature – which is adequate to this [3] .
At this point it is of major importance that Goldstein does not understand the balance as a return to a zero point, i.e. to a balance in the form of relaxation, but now assumes a medium state of excitement as the normal state, according to which the person always has a basic tension.
Goldstein was even able to prove through his brain pathological work that only the damaged brain is so eager to avoid tension at all costs and consequently strives to achieve a homeostatic state [2, p. 86].
Human drives and modern culture
We have now recognized that people are not out to maintain a tension-free balance, but, on the contrary, are motivated to live with a basic tension. Since both Kurt Goldstein’s and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s objections are merely criticisms of the anthropological model of homeostasis, an explanation of human motivation remains in the dark.
In the following it should be our task to look at a more adequate theory of human motives and – as already disclosed in the introduction – to relate it to the factors of modern culture. The questions that are still open for us are:
- Why is it that drives many people to over-perform?
- Why is sport a global mass phenomenon in modern times?
- What motivates people in general?
Four theses for human motivation
The Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl provides an ingenious approach to explaining human striving with his theory of self-transcendence. In one of his lectures [2], Frankl directly opposes the homeostasis principle. Some of the following passages are taken specifically from his lecture on the anthropology of sport .
But in order to come back to the outdated hypothesis, according to which all human motivation is determined by the homeostasis principle, I would like to counter it with the following 4 theses: Not only that the human being is actually not out to avoid tension at all costs, no …
- Man needs tension.
- Man also seeks tension
- At the moment, however, he finds too little tension
- That is why man creates tension
First aspect: people need tension
It goes without saying that humans must not be exposed to excessive tension and delivered. What it needs is a certain, healthy, measured tension. Extreme relief, like extreme stress, causes disease. Today even the biochemist Hans Selye (1907 – 1982), who is known to have coined the term stress, admits: Stress is the salt of life .
Frankl thinks what a person as such – as a person – needs is a specific tension, as it is established in a polar field of tension between him, the person, and a sense that is waiting for it, and exclusively from him him to be fulfilled [2, p.87].
Furthermore, if a person does not experience himself to be asked for a task that appeals to him personally and is kept in adequate tension in this way, then not infrequently a certain, so-called noogenic neurosis develops. Noogenic neurosis is understood to be an existential frustration that can be traced back to an unfulfilled human claim to an existence that is as meaningful as possible. [4]
Second aspect: People also look for tension
Frankl insists that people also seek tension. In particular, however, he is looking for meaningful tasks that could put him in a healthy state of tension. In a word: there is such a thing as a will to make sense. This concept of a will to meaning has long been empirically validated.
The latest relevant statistic is probably the one from the American Council on Education, which revealed that among 171 509 students, no less than 68% defined as their goal in life: developing a meaningful philosophy of life , which means winning the conviction, that life has a meaning [2, p.88].
Third aspect: At the moment he finds too little tension
Frankl astutely notes that today it is the case that in many cases people are no longer able to make sense of their lives. Modern man is primarily existentially frustrated and that is why he suffers from a feeling of senselessness. This manifests itself mainly in boredom.
In the affluent society, large sections of the population have funds, but no purpose in life.
People have enough of what they can live on, but their life has no what for, no point. But our society is also a leisure society, and more and more circles have more and more time – but nothing on which they could spend the time sensibly.
We can state that the affluent society of today offers people too little tension!
Fourth aspect: That is why people create tension
Frankl’s realization is that for this reason, people begin to artificially create the tension that this society owes them: they create the tension that they need. And he does this by now demanding something of himself: he demands something from himself – and not least of all to renounce.
Frankl now sums up: In the midst of the affluent society, man begins to pile up islands of asceticism, so to speak – and this is precisely where I see the function of sport: it is modern, secular asceticism. Even where people are only spectators and passively do sports, they are looking for tension [2, p.89].
But it not only creates artificial distress, but also artificial necessities: At a time when he hardly has to walk – he drives the car – and hardly climbs – he takes the elevator – he gets into his head, to climb mountains. [ibid.]
A prime example – Arnold Schwarzenegger
Finally, we should consider Frankl’s explanation based on a specific case. At the end of his lecture, Frankl takes up the important question of why some people strive for extreme performance and answers them as follows:
Human existence is deeply characterized by its self-transcendence, and self-actualization is only attainable through its self-transcendence . To transcend oneself now means that a person is all the more human – that the more he is himself when he overlooks and forgets himself, be it in devotion to a task, to a cause or to a partner 2].
By setting necessities for himself, demanding performance from himself, he also tries to explore the possible. Humans test their limits and sport is a way to do this.
Famed actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger vigorously describes this experience in his autobiography Total Recall. In his days as a bodybuilder, the main drive – the greatest motivation – became the exploration of the possible. What am I capable of myself? With that the sport grew to a self-rivalry for him [5]. Furthermore, there is more and more the desire to demand more of yourself, precisely because you can!
I was once told that a vault that has become dilapidated can be supported and strengthened – paradoxically, by putting pressure on it. It is not dissimilar to humans: with all the external difficulties, apparently their inner resistance grows
