The Athlete as Philosopher

Josh Landy
Do sports cultivate virtues like discipline, self-knowledge, and wisdom?

Ken Taylor
Or do they just cultivate vices like aggression, greed, and brutality?

Josh Landy
Are athletics a way to find ourselves or just a way to lose ourselves?

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ken Taylor
And today we’re thinking about the athlete as philosopher.

Josh Landy
Philosopher… I mean, look, Ken, I love lot watching Liverpool on the telly as much as the next person. I have a great time kicking the ball around once a week, but I don’t see how that’s gonna make me a better thinker.

Ken Taylor
Well, Josh, that’s because you’re thinking into contemporary terms. I mean, think about the ancients, like the ancient martial arts tradition of the East. I think about the ancient Greeks and like, like Plato, what about them? Well, they thought philosophy was not just a set of ideas, but it was a way of life. And they also thought that athletic training helps you live and engage in that way of life.

Josh Landy
Because it makes us stronger, fitter, healthier—that kind of thing? What’s philosophical about that?

Ken Taylor
You’re missing the point. I mean, it’s much more than about health of the body. I mean, think about sports and what they do they make us more discipline, better equipped to deal with failure. Sports instills habits of like focus and determination. And us, it turns us into team players, and it gets us to value fairness. What’s that—you Brits have a phrase about fairness.

Josh Landy
Oh, you mean, “That’s not cricket?”

Ken Taylor
Right, right. That’s all about if it’s not cricket, it’s not fair.

Josh Landy
So yeah, look, I just think you’re moving way too fast, Ken. I mean, look, I’m not even convinced yet that being an athlete’s entirely good even for your health.

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on. What do you mean by that?

Josh Landy
I mean, look, I exercise is great, right. But once you start getting involved in competition, you know, things can easily go too far. And pretty soon, you’re doing lifelong damage to your body.

Ken Taylor
Well, that is true. I mean, Earl Campbell, great running back, can’t even walked now. And I wrestled through college and I had five knee injuries in five years in a row. So yeah, there is that. But there’s a downside to everything.

Josh Landy
And that’s not even to mention the brain injuries that young people are getting from playing American football. What’s that expression from Friday Night Lights—clear eyes, full hearts, smashed heads.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s not. That’s not that wasn’t the goal at all. Besides, Besides, you’re ignoring the really good stuff that I was talking about earlier: discipline, fairness, teamwork. What about that?

Josh Landy
Yeah, look, that’s absolutely true. I grant it. I’m just saying that for every benefit of athletics, you know, there’s a corresponding downside. I think about that collaboration with your teammates good. Yes, but tends to go along with despising the players and fans on the other team. Right. And that fairness, yeah, but haven’t you heard about, you know, steroid taking baseball players, diving soccer players? Oh, and ball-deflating quarterback.

Ken Taylor
Okay, I heard about all the things I have not been living in a sports cave. But I grant you sports aren’t perfect. But you know, nothing human is perfect and great things are still possible, even within imperfect institutions. And you know, we haven’t even really talked about the real the greatest benefit of all, what’s the greatest philosophical benefit? Well, every time you train, every time you play every time you get on the field, Sports teaches you something. It teaches you something about yourself about your limits about your potential sports are nothing short, Josh have like a confrontation with itself. That’s profound.

Josh Landy
Okay, that sounds like philosophy. I totally grant you that. But wouldn’t you admit Ken that this this school of self knowledge doesn’t always entirely do its work? I mean, you know what, that guy that racist guy, John rocker? What about that not so entirely well intentioned? Tonya Harding?

Ken Taylor
You mean the misunderstood Tonya Harding. Look, Josh for every Tonya Harding there’s a Serena Williams. For every John Rocker there’s a LeBron James. LeBron and Serena, they were both poor underprivileged kids when they started out and look at the amazing adults they’ve become today. They’re great role models. They’re socially engaged, and they’re amazing athletes, and you know, athletics help them become who they are.

Josh Landy
Yeah, you know, I grant you that I think you’re absolutely right.

Ken Taylor
So then you have to concede to that athletics. It’s not just good for the individual, but can also help to make the world a better place.

Josh Landy
Can you clearly see sports through rose tinted spectacles?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, Josh, but you see them through Pete Rose tinted spectacles.

Josh Landy
Now that’s definitely not cricket. I’m not saying that sports are all bad. I’m just saying they’re not all good.

Ken Taylor
Well, I agree with you there—nothing human is all good. And to help us sort out the good from the bad, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale to find out what popular culture has to tell us about the value of sports. She files this report

Friday Night Lights
Being perfect—it’s not about that scoreboard out there.

Liza Veale
In Friday Night Lights, the camera pans from Coach Gary Gaines to the players listening to him in the locker room with that stifled vein-popping furious look that means a teenage boy is having an emotion.

Friday Night Lights
Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down. Because you told them the truth. And that truth is is that you did everything that you could, there wasn’t one more thing that you could have done. If you can do that, gentlemen, then you’re perfect.

Liza Veale
According to this character and a zillion other locker room dramatizations, sports are not about winning. They’re about something other than what they appear to be about. This is why you have to get philosophical, like Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee
Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless—like water.

Liza Veale
In martial arts traditions, sports are really just exercises that teach us how to master ourselves in order to better approach life.

Bruce Lee
You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the tea. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Liza Veale
I won’t try to summarize the philosophies behind martial arts.

The Karate Kid
Show me wax on, wax off.

Liza Veale
But in The Karate Kid, they have to do with hard work and patience in the face of life’s mysteries—in your own rookie incompetence.

The Karate Kid
Show me paint the fence.

Liza Veale
Trusting that waxing your instructor’s car and painting his house will pay off if he says it well. Compare that to the way the coach in Any Given Sunday, played by Al Pacino, talks to his players.

Any Given Sunday
I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror.

Liza Veale
Here’s sports are about redemption—the idea that no one’s perfect, but what matters is making the most of a second chance.

Any Given Sunday
Life’s this game of inches. And so is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early, and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us.

Liza Veale
In team sports, redemption is crucially about making it up to your comrades. The ultimate idea is that the most meaningful achievements are the ones that take a whole team.

Any Given Sunday
Either we heal—now—as a team, or we will die as individuals.

Liza Veale
But not all athletes think of sport as a metaphor or an exercise that teaches us about life.

Philippe Petit
The wire is a safe place for me to be. The street is not, life is not.

Liza Veale
This is Philippe Petit, the gymnast famous for walking a wire strung up between the World Trade Center towers.

Philippe Petit
It’s a rigorous and simple path. It’s straight. There are not bad guys, no politicians, no representative authorities.

Liza Veale
For Petit, sports are a way to transcend.

Philippe Petit
There is no life, there is something much more supreme than life, that is carrying one’s life across. It’s the most beautiful profession in the world.

Liza Veale
Not because transcending is easier than real life but because in sport, the struggle and the risk are on your own terms. You can take life into your own hands. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Josh Landy
Thanks very much Liza, that was a fantastic piece and quite uplifting, if you’ll forgive the pun, I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ken Taylor, and today we’re thinking about philosophy and athletics.

Ken Taylor
We’re joined now by Heather Reid. She’s a professor of philosophy at Morningside College. She’s author of “The Philosophical Athlete” and also “Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport.” Heather, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Heather Reid
Thanks. Great to be here.

Josh Landy
So Heather, how did you first get interested in this subject? Were you an athlete in college like Ken or are you more of an amateur like me?

Heather Reid
Well, I was a cyclist, which wasn’t a collegiate sport. And in fact, back in the 80s, when I went to college, there weren’t that many women’s sports that were played in college, but I was a pretty serious athlete and like a lot of people I wanted to make the Olympic team.

Ken Taylor
Oh that’s cool. Did you?

Heather Reid
No, well, I made it to the Olympic trials in 1984, which is the first time they had final Olympic trials the first time they had women’s cycling in the Olympics. And I decided after I graduated in 86, that I was going to go all out for the 1988 Olympic team.

Ken Taylor
Well, you know, Heather, my wrestling career ended through knee injuries. But I had hoped to make the Olympics so I know how much passion and devotion that takes So, but anyway, Josh, and I were arguing earlier about whether ancient ideals have any relevance whatsoever. Today when it comes to athletics. I think they do. I’m not sure what Josh thinks, what do you think?

Heather Reid
Well, I hope they do. I mean, I think that like any kind of practice, any human practice, whether it’s sports, or religion, or music, you can do it in a way that makes you a better person, or you can do it in a way that doesn’t. And I think that the ancient ideals help make athletics something that we could put in the service of becoming a better person.

Josh Landy
That seems right to me. Can you just say a little bit more about what kinds of ideals you have in mind?

Heather Reid
Well, especially in ancient philosophy, both ancient Greek philosophy and ancient Chinese philosophy, the key concept is his virtue is becoming the best kind of person you can be the idea of human excellence. And the Greeks called it era Tay. And because a human being had both an intellect and physical capacities, and all these other things becoming excellent meant becoming excellent in every way.

Ken Taylor
I agree with you. But you know, sports these days, kids specialize really early. Like they do sports to the exclusion of other things. They, my son started playing sports. It started playing sports when he was very young, but started focusing on baseball, when he was 11 years old. And lots of young kids get lots of injuries that Josh something Josh was Miss missing. I mean, more Tommy John surgeries are a form performed on 14 year olds and on major league pitchers these days. So are we really doing this in a way that promotes human excellence? Are we really doing that? Are we even close to doing that?

Heather Reid
I think we’re oftentimes not even asking ourselves why we’re doing that. A lot of times, if you try to specialize a child very early on, you’re probably thinking that this is the way for them to become a really great athlete, right? And maybe you’re also hoping that they’ll get a college scholarship or maybe a professional contract. But if you look at those things, rationally, the chances are really low. And meanwhile, you can be selling out the actual idea of errata the idea of human excellence because they end up not having other skills and abilities.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like you’re appealing to an Aristotelian notion of excellence, which involves a balance. Nice, absolutely. Okay, well, you know, we’re gonna keep talking about this as the as we go on. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the athlete as philosopher with Heather Reid from Morningside College.

Ken Taylor
Have sports today become impossibly corrupt? Or is there still space, however small for athletes to learn about themselves and become better human beings through sports? Can athletes still live philosophical lives?

Josh Landy
Athletics, the ancients, and altruism—plus your calls and emails, whe Philosophy Talk continues.

Survivor
And he’s watching us all with the eye of the tiger.

Josh Landy
Does sports just teach us to be prowling tigers, or can they help us become something more? I’m Josh Landy and you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. Today we’re thinking about philosophy and athletics. Our guest is Heather Reid from Morningside College. She’s the author of “The Philosophical Athlete.”

Josh Landy
So Heather, Ken and you were saying earlier on ancient ideas is still alive and relevant today. But you know, some people might worry that rampant commercialism is sort of destroying the capacity for that, right. It’s turning sport into a business players into mercenaries fans like being to SAPs. So you know, is there still space for that Greek Abertay that virtue you were talking about earlier?

Heather Reid
I really think that there is and I don’t think it’s so much that money itself and sponsorship is the culprit. The culprit is really the idea that the only value we can gain through sport is financial value. And it’s actually the sponsors don’t think of it that way. Obviously, they’re putting money into the sport. So they think they’re getting something else out of their advertising other than more profit. Whereas a lot of athletes say, Well, I’m just playing sport to hope to make money someday.

Ken Taylor
Well, I want to challenge you a little bit. I mean, I love athletics. I spend a lot of my life pursuing it, I encourage my son to pursue it, right? But there is this commodification, this capitalist commodification of sports I mean, these guys and and women, mostly the guys, but in areas like tennis, even the women, right? A big business, they are big, huge their branding business there. I mean we follow their every move and it’s all about this commodification. And doesn’t that doesn’t that change it from a theater? I mean, underlying it is this capitalist commodification, which which are bound to have a corrupting influence? Don’t you agree? Or do you disagree or what?

Heather Reid
I think it corrupts, like I said, in the sense that it makes the individual practitioners think that the reason that they must be doing this is so that they can make more money, whereas the chance of making a lot of money in sport is really small. Whereas the chance of getting other kind of benefits are is quite good. And so the real corruption is just from us thinking that what sports is all about making money?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but just think about how far down that corruption trickles, right? It trickles down to college athletics. Because when you get to be a D-1 athlete, you start to believe, well, maybe I am going to get that especially a D-1 athlete and the big revenue sports, basketball and football to a lesser to a certain extent, baseball, you’re going to get drafted into the majors, right? I mean, even at the D-1 level, but you think, but then I want to try and get to that D-1 level that zero in high school, you think I want to be a D-1 athlete? And then I want to get drafted into the majors. And you know, my Why did my 11 year old sons start so intensely love baseball, he did just love the game. And he was really good at it. But there was this thought in the back of his mind. And I got to admit our mind, if he gets seen by the right people, then eventually he’ll you know, he’ll be a star in high school, and he’ll get recruited by a D-1 school and the whole thing.

Josh Landy
And you might you might even think, can I get to agree with you. Even if an individual player doesn’t feel it doesn’t think my future is making money through sports, they might be entering an institutional framework, where there’s a certain amount of corruption. So you think about the NCAA, all these cheating scandals are these awful coaches and the kind of culture of coverup and corruption? So I don’t want to be too much of a downer. I mean, I agree with you, Heather, that these ancient ideals are alive. But are they are they a little bit in peril?

Heather Reid
Absolutely. I mean, I think that, especially when you talk about the problems with institutions, and if we look at intercollegiate sport, especially at the very high division one level, those programs themselves are even thought about by the university, in terms of profit in terms of recruiting students in terms of bringing in dollars from donors. And so how are we going to expect athletes to have other values in playing sport, if the institutions that promote their sport, only care about money and are only using them to make money?

Ken Taylor
So how do we do Okay, so answer your So, you know, I just was watching the Little League World Series on ESPN. And those kids play that game with such delight, such utter delight, and they’re the coach from Hawaii, it seems like a great guy, that kind of guy would have willingly entrusted my kid to and his formative years, right, because he was really encouraging. And I used to belong to this thing, when I coached baseball called the Lions for Positive Coaching, which was about empowering kids, you know, and all that. So, but there’s a lot of forces out there. So I’m just wondering, how do you get a young athlete, and maybe the parent of that young athlete to like, resist those forces? I mean, how’s that? How’s that work? And to focus on this, this theater? What did you call it, the School of the self or something like that? Josh? Got it. I really believe that the school of the self metaphor, right, I think I called it—No, you criticized me for believing that the school was really—

Josh Landy
But I believe in it.

Heather Reid
Well, I think that the sporting experience still is a school of the self and that individual athletes, when they face the challenge of having to perform in sport are going to learn about themselves. Yeah. But what we forget to do is we forget to talk, we don’t create a space, where we talk about what you we’ve learned from our sporting experience. So when I teach my course, in philosophy of sport, I provide that space. And it’s amazing what the what these athletes talk about, and their most meaningful experience often isn’t winning their most meaningful experience often is when they were injured or when they failed or something like that.

Ken Taylor
So let’s focus on the idea of sports is a school of the self. Let’s talk about that for a while we’ll block out the ugliness of the commodification of sports. We’ll come back to that. But tell me more about how you think. I mean, I do think of athletics as a theater of self cultivation. Right. So tell me more about how athletics works as a theater of self cultivation.

Heather Reid
Well, I think that one of the first things that I actually think that athletics can be thought of like philosophy in the sense that it’s a truth seeking activity. So one of the first things What happens in philosophy is we start with a question and to have a question means you don’t know the answer. So when you stand on the starting line of, say, 100 meter race, you don’t really it’s like a question you don’t have an answer of, can you run fast enough to beat the next person? How fast you can you go? And so it begins in a question. And then it seeks out to learn something about what I can do.

Josh Landy
Right. And it sounds like you’re also suggesting it’s, it’s an a kind of a productive encounter with failure. So it’s not just about what I can do, but what I can’t do and, and how I can develop a kind of whatever resilience or coping strategy or something like that?

Ken Taylor
What I can’t do now, but may be able to help myself to do right.

Heather Reid
Right, well, in that, that what I can’t do is the destruction of the illusion. It’s like the Socratic, when Socrates talks in the Platonic dialogues, he’s always refuting the answers that the interlocutors give, and you realize that what you thought was the case is not the case. So you, you have to find out what you can do and then deal with that loss that shattered illusion. And then as Josh was saying, then maybe you start to think well, you know, maybe I can get closer to this. Maybe I can create a program to find the or to be the the faster athlete that I want to be.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about philosophy on athletics with Heather Reid from Morningside College. We’ve got Pat on the line from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Pat, what’s your comment or question?

Pat
Thank you. Well, like a lot of parents we told our two boys, you can pick the sport. But when your system sixth graders, we want you to join a team sport for at least two years, we were following a brother and sister in law’s model. So we took them to all kinds of little classes when they were younger. But we thought, isn’t there something different that you get from team sports? I’m interested in knowing your ideas. And once the ancient thought, you know, cycling versus baseball team. Is there something your child’s really getting that’s different when they join a team sport? I’ll take my answer off the line.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s a wonderful question. What do you think, Heather, because you know, you were a cyclist? That’s a that’s a solo. I mean, obviously, not necessarily doing it just on your own. But it’s not a team sport. Is there? Are there differences here?

Heather Reid
Well, it is, it is a team sport and an individual sport at the at the same time. And I think that they both have their benefits, but the individual benefits that confrontation with yourself and with failure happens in team sports, too. So if you think of throwing a free throw in basketball, you are pretty isolated and alone at that moment, even though you’re playing a team sport. So those moments are in team sports, as well as individual sports. An advantage that team sports brings that just individual sports might not is that you have to learn to find your place in the group to work with others in order to achieve a collective goal. So that is something that’s really important educationally, of course, we find them in individual sports to because really, you’re working with other, even your competitors, in a way are working with you to make you a better athlete, a social aspect.

Ken Taylor
And it’s important that even I mean, this boy, many sports are a combination of team and interview. So I wrestled, right? And you might think Well, that’s an individual sports. Well, there are tournaments that I entered as an individual, but they’re also they’re also the teams, teams, wrestling teams. And that matters, right? Because here’s the thing, when you’re on a wrestling team, if you can beat your opponent, by more points, you score more points for the team. And so you are you are incentivized to give more for the team? If you were just yourself, you think I’d settle for the victory, but I want the pin, right? And why do I want the pin because my team is this many points behind. So and baseball is like a team sport. But it’s a it’s a coordinated set of individual moments in which you are on the hook. Right? Before this. Only you can make that play, right? You can’t pass it off to somebody else. Only you take this at bat. So I think many sports interweave. They have the combination.

Josh Landy
And I want to come back something Heather just I think it’s really interesting because you know, something you might think about right away is teamwork, collaboration and so on. But, but I really like your idea, Heather, that it’s also about a certain kind of interaction with the opponent. Right? And you can we can learn something for life from a kind of respectful. I mean, I was thinking, you know, there’s another Greek word we could throw around the Argonne right? The app this kind of rivalrous competition in which everyone raises their game and it’s ultimately ultimately mutually beneficial rather than being violent or confrontational, or antagonistic.

Heather Reid
Absolutely, and the idea is that the root of Agon comm is the same root as the word agora which means the gathering place or marketplace and so Agon means to struggle together to come together. And you have to respect your opponent and you have to treat your opponent as an individual like you under the rules and this is also really good for young people. To look at the opponent no matter what gender what color, what what social status this person might have, they are a human opponent. And so it helps us to look at other people as fellow human beings, right?

Ken Taylor
In some ways, even though sports is highly competitive, it’s also deeply cooperative in its competitiveness. Because it’s true that, you know, the, I once heard LeBron James, he he’s heavily involved in the NBA players union. And somebody asked him, Look, LeBron, you’ve got this multi million, you’re gonna get yours no matter what. And he said, You have to understand the NBA players. We’re a band of brothers, we compete like crazy. But you know, in the offseason, we work out together, we’re all trying to improve the game. We’re all trying to push ourselves together. We are a band of brothers. And I think there’s a deep truth to that. Right. And, and in any sort of sport, this thing where you respect the opponent, but compete like heck against the opponent. I think that’s an important element of it.

Heather Reid
I was gonna say that there’s something that the Greeks understood about arity, individual excellence that I think we forget in the modern time is that’s always in a context of community. And so your excellence has to benefit your community. And your excellence also has to be something that benefits everyone. So in the Olympic Games, it was really the ancient Olympic Games were a religious, a religious festival that was designed to please the God for the benefit of everyone there. So a good athlete, like your example of LeBron thinks of himself as some as a member of a team, even if it’s not specifically a athletic team.

Josh Landy
That’s great. Yeah, we have another caller on the line. It’s Ed from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. What’s your comment?

Ed
Okay, I think I’m gonna talk about the the long term effects of doing this, I was a pretty good high school basketball player. And I was best at waterskiing. But I didn’t compete. But I mean, I’ve done this, I actually enjoyed, I enjoyed playing basketball with a team, but I actually enjoyed pickup games much more, when there wasn’t the pressure necessarily, to when they said all the aspects of friendship, and, and, and you still wanted to win, but you know, it just, it just wasn’t met outside pressure. But the long term effect is I’ve done something like this all my life, you know, I went, I quit basketball as my knees gave out and I go swimming, and I’ve taken up to Qi Gong and Tai Chi and, and yoga recently, and, you know, I I’m 73 years old, and I don’t believe the shape I’m in. I mean, I didn’t just just the long term physical condition. In my mind. I was taught that people my age were elderly and over the hill, and I’m not, you know.

Ken Taylor
That’s good for you, Ed.

Ed
Well, I think I think that’s another aspect of sports that I think Aristotle mentioned that it was good for the mind, you know.

Ken Taylor
Thanks a lot, Ed. You got a comment on that. Heather?

Heather Reid
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think what it’s thinking about is where Plato, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that the main purpose of athletics is for the benefit of the soul or the mind. And not specifically the body, he’s this is not the body like everyone thinks it’s really the soul. And that’s because the soul of the mind is what moves the body. So moving your body is really sports, you know, we talk about it being physical, but it’s not physical. It’s about moving. It’s about voluntary movement. So your mind and your soul are always involved in that. So EDD really represents athletic arity in the sense that it’s the excellence of a human being and human beings have have bodies and they move them and by, by keeping moving his body through sports, he’s able to achieve errata even in his old age.

Ken Taylor
That is true. I don’t want to downplay what it says, but I did have my knee surgery when I was 28. And I said, I had many knee injuries in my sport. And the doctor told me Taylor, you got the knees of a 65 year old man and you can’t forget what Josh referred to in the opening the long term damage to some of these football players. It’s now it’s true. Medical sports science is sports medicine has gotten better when I had my first torn cartilage. It was before the days of arthroscopic surgery, and the doctor said, well, we’ll take it at the end of the season because if we did, you know they had to go in and cut you and it was gonna be long term rehabilitation. Now you get you get it for a torn meniscus, you get sculpt out your back in a few weeks. It’s no big deal. But there is for certain sports, very severe damage to the body that can pile up over the years. And so there is that downside.

Heather Reid
But in some ways, if we were to eliminate all of the injuries and eliminate all of the risk of injury, we would lose a profound part of the educational part of sport, which is kind of learning our limits and learning that you you can’t go all out that there are limits that you’ve got to deal with them that you have to rehabilitate these injuries. I mean certainly the things like The head injuries which have these horrible long term consequences are serious and we got to do whatever we can to try to eliminate those. But other things, some of the arm and leg injuries that young athletes endure actually might be part of the educational effect of sport.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but I don’t know. I don’t know what a 14 year old pitcher learns from having Tommy John surgery. I don’t really know the price of education.

Heather Reid
Maybe the wrong thing.

Josh Landy
Can I correct something. I loved what you’re saying before about the relationship to society. I think that’s really powerful, this notion, right? That it’s always in a context and, and you’ve got these amazing figures like LeBron James, Serena Williams, you’ve got these these role models, these, these people are using their platform to protest injustice, all these wonderful things. But just playing devil’s advocate, can we also see the flip side of that? I mean, so take one example. You know, around some male sports, there’s a culture of toxic masculinity that seems to to grow around them. I don’t know if it’s inevitable or not, but But you know, there’s sometimes some negative social effects as well as the positive ones.

Heather Reid
Absolutely. I mean, and that’s why we have to think about what we’re doing with sport sports are human constructions we can make of them and do with them whatever we want, as human beings, so we have to be really careful, are we using it just to enforce certain things like obedience and hyper masculinity and imperviousness to pain that will make these young men easily exploited by somebody for their own purposes? That’s not what we want. Right? So we have to look at how we practice them and you I don’t think sports reliably reward virtues. They try to they should but sometimes they reward vices and so you have to be really careful about what’s being rewarded in sport. And also sometimes you know, you you got to say sometimes you will win but they win ugly they went in a way that it they wasn’t virtuous and and then that doesn’t have value or we shouldn’t socially see it as value.

Josh Landy
I agree. You’re you’re listening to Philosophy Talk and today we’re thinking about philosophy and athletics with Heather Reid from Morningside college.

Ken Taylor
What can we do to make sports more of a space revert to and less of a haven for advice? How can we reform our leagues, our training camps or educational system to make all athletes able to live truly philosophical live

Josh Landy
Training a new breed of philosopher athletes—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Decemberists
How they love the sporting life

Josh Landy
Should I well live life include the sporting life. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor, our guest is Heather Reid from Morningside College, and we’re thinking about the athlete as—get this—philosopher.

Josh Landy
And I feel like we were all agreeing that sports they are entirely perfect, right? They aren’t in every case, living up to those ancient model. So. So let’s get back to the question of what we can do to make things better. What do you think, Heather?

Heather Reid
Well, I think the first thing is, we need to reintegrate the especially the educational level, the sporting experience with intellectual experience. I mean, I teach ethics, I do it in a classroom ethics is about how we asked why not have a class where you play sports, and then you talk afterward about the ethical implications of certain actions, you know, why did you help somebody up? And so we can reintegrate the the philosophical side of sports with the physical sides of sports, which is what the ancient Greek gymnasium did.

Ken Taylor
That means that coaches need to be like teachers of young men and women. And this some, some of them are like that. But I gotta tell you, that I’ve seen a lot of coaches. I’ve had a lot of coaches. I call I think of some of my coaches, some of my sons go to this, what I call small men with big problems. Oh, boy. Right. And, and, like in high school sports, for some reason. Well, I know why. Because the teams want to win in the high school. Varsity, you want to win, right? The coach gets rewarded for winning, they don’t get rewarded for teaching these young men to be better young man. I mean, they just don’t. Well, they would, if it’s a side benefit, right? They would, but if they were losers, but they made the kids better, better young men and women, you know. So how do you how do you re incentivize, how do you what structure of incentives can you introduce into this world of coaching and all this?

Heather Reid
Well, first of all, you don’t you don’t hire and fire coaches slowly by their win loss record, especially at the lower levels in second. The training that we give to coaches should have training in in ethical education and other things that that the coaches can learn. Also, it shouldn’t be only coaches that are talking about sports and are involved in our students. Athletic lives there other teachers should we philosophers should know what’s going on and help them to learn from their sporting experience.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, maybe every team should have a resident philosopher.

Heather Reid
That’s a great idea.

Josh Landy
We’re gonna go to another caller. We have Anthony on the line from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Anthony.

Anthony
good morning, really interesting conversation. I assume that most of the or all of the athletes in an ancient Greek gymnasium would have been the sons of citizens. And we live in a society where there’s a huge reality of economic and racial inequality. And we see that playing out in sports. And I wonder how does that play into the virtue or lack of virtue?

Ken Taylor
That’s a really good question. And I’m going to add a little twist to it. Heather, before we turn it over to you, because I think Anthony’s right about the ancient Greeks. But I think in ancient Rome, a lot of those athletes would have been slaves and non citizens. Am I right or wrong about that? And but anyway, what do you think about Anthony’s question?

Heather Reid
Well, I mean, the specific question about in ancient Rome, whether a lot of the athletes were slaves is that it’s true. The specifically to Anthony’s question, I think the the, the question of how sports deals with inequality is really interesting, because sport is I said, in terms of the rules, teacher treats each athlete as an individual, and as equally it is also a space where a lot of times, especially young people who are socioeconomically in completely different neighborhoods, completely different upbringings, they come together. And sometimes they come together on the same team. But sometimes they come together as competitors. And they’re forced to see each other as equals. And a lot of times the stereotypes that you were brought up with, kind of have to be left at the side of the court in order to play the game.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s true. But here’s something that’s again, that I spend so much time trying to get my son recruited in baseball, and he actually was a college baseball player, but quit after a year, because he got a lot of what college athletes is really like. But I spent so much time. Here’s the thing about like baseball, I don’t know about other sports as close up, it really has become the province of the upper middle class and upper middle class, because they’re these elite travel teams, they’re these elite tournaments. And it costs a lot of money. Right, there’s private, I mean, all the kids take private lessons with my son had a hitting coach a strength and conditioning coach and outfield coach. I mean, it’s, it’s an expensive proposition. And sports are again, at least some sports are again becoming the province of an elite.

Heather Reid
And I think that’s intentionally on the part of the elite, maybe not consciously, but if you look at history, the ancient Olympic Games allowed people from the lower classes to demonstrate publicly that they had more athletic virtue than the aristocrats. So the aristocrats invented horse races, which were very expensive so that they could win the horse races if they couldn’t win the running in the wrestling match. They brought in specialized doctors, specialized trainers, so what happens is the elite always tries to use the advantages. They have usually financial advantages, but also political advantages in order to reinforce their status. So I think that what you’re talking about with all of these, these, the costs to become excellent in sports is something we should really try and eliminate, because that undermines sports ability to do the kind of social work to bring to kind of bridge the differences between the classes that it can do.

Josh Landy
But there are a few like, there are some disturbing that I’ve thought a lot about, you know, CTE chronic traumatic encephalopathy, these these these injuries that football players are suffering, even when they don’t get concussions. And that to me is already disturbing enough. But when you think about the racial component to then the analogy to the gladiatorial arena becomes really disturbing, at least to me, you know, where we are sitting here comfortably in our seats, watching people entertain us at the cost of their own bodies and brains.

Heather Reid
Yeah, the dehumanization of athletes, in general, also can have kind of a racial tinge to it when you say, Oh, well, you know, like, you’ll hear people say, Well, they’re earning a lot of money from that, you know, people may earn a lot of money from other kinds of dangerous jobs, but it doesn’t make it right, especially when it’s an unnecessary risk.

Ken Taylor
Right. I mean, I think that’s class dynamics is really complicated. I said, like baseball is becoming the province of the elite because of the expenditure, but there’s something else I’ve noticed a true I don’t want to over generalize but, but like a lot, a lot of basketball players are from the inner city. A lot of football players are from the inner city. I mean, these are very demanding sports that are hard to get really Good at and require a lot of sacrifice. You say why? Why is that why is like the racial composition of, of the NBA in the NFL. So different than the racial composition of baseball, there’s complicated things about it. One of them is the moving out of parks if baseball fields out out of the cities into the suburbs, but there’s this other thing, like this brutal sport of football, there are a lot of upper middle class parents who don’t want their sons to play this brutal sport. But football holds out a promise of great wealth, if you’re willing to put up with a possibility of injury and all that sort of stuff. And I’m sure there must be a racialized component to the assessment of risk and reward in that. So we do end up with, you know, black NFL players being watched by white spectators in this kind of gladiatorial thing with a great class division between between the audience and the and the participants. And that’s a fraught thing.

Heather Reid
Yeah, it’s a double edged sword, though, too, because when a group, whether it’s Rome community, like Rome, or a university, associates athletic excellence with virtue, when the people that are displaying that virtue are not part of the normal class, and really, most of our universities, before college athletics had a much lower percentage of students of color, especially from poor students from the inner city, they have to face to face up to the fact that virtue may not be a matter of class. So it helps, but it also hurts and I do think that the idea when people say, Well, you know, they should be subjected to these kinds of unnecessary risks, because you know, they’re poor. I mean, they don’t say that clearly. But sometimes that seems to be what’s going on in the back of people’s head.

Josh Landy
Well, shifting gears, we got a couple of really interesting comments here for through email. So John from Berkeley says that the heart of the hardest spirits of sports is the specific you know, there’s only one the catch, there’s only one triple crown winning run by Secretariat. So so the grand he says the grand generalizations self by philosophers are oppositional to sports virtue.

Ken Taylor
He’s attributing that to Paul Weiss.

Josh Landy
Thank you. And then another comment from Aham we got through Facebook. What about Schopenhauer? His notion that the optimal connection we have with ultimate reality and the will is through the body. So great, really fascinating. One of those?

Heather Reid
Well, I mean, they’re both good. Um, I do think this this the question of Schopenhauer his point about the connection with the code of transcending oneself through the body, I do think that there’s something there that there’s something about the lived experience of sport and the lived questioning of oneself and the lived experience of having time change when somebody has an experience like this zone, our ways of learning qualitatively different from the kind of learning that we get in conventional academics. Yeah. So that there’s something there.

Ken Taylor
So I want to—but what about the Paul Weiss point of the singular the the, the sports to find by the its ability to produce these singular moments of I assume grace and beauty and not just by the ordinary grind.

Josh Landy
Steven Gerard’s goal against West Ham—what about that?

Heather Reid
Well, I do think that those are the kinds of moments that that attract us and galvanize us in the ancient Greek Olympics, which as I said, were religious festival, I think when an athlete had an had a moment of excellence, what would happen is that the the audience would interpret it as an epiphany as an appearance of the God. So the guy that’s running the 100 meters, and he just has this incredible event like Usain Bolt that in Beijing, the people see that as sort of the appearance of Hermes or of Achilles, or, and they see this kind of collapsing of time, that creates a special experience, and I do think sports—

Ken Taylor
So sports is even more than a theater of self cultivation. It’s potentially a theater of transcendence, right? And transcendence is rare and unsystematic. But that makes it even more philosophical.

Heather Reid
Yes, and more human. I mean, that’s the thing about it. If we get too caught up in winning and too caught up, especially in the technology of sports, we forget that it’s all about the human experience, and certainly experience of transcendence and ideas of divinity are very much part of the human experience, and they’re there in sports.

Josh Landy
That is a fantastic place to leave the conversation. Heather, thanks so much for joining us today.

Heather Reid
My pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Heather Reid, professor of philosophy at Morningside College and author of “The Philosophical Athlete.” So Ken, what’s your thinking now?

Ken Taylor
Well, I think this is a really cool topic. I mean, we started out thinking, sports as a theater of self cultivation, which I think is really important and really true and a deep fact about I am in my old age, my declining age or something I have come to love athletes who are utterly dedicated to their craft. It just I really admire LeBron James because when you talk, hear him talk about His dedication to his craft. It’s amazing. And then this thought this last thought that we had that sports are theater of transcendence. That’s, that’s really good. I mean, that’s something there are many realms which offer humans of transcendence. I mean, what do you think?

Josh Landy
Yeah, look when I started thinking about this I thinking about the Iliad, and until it was already in the earliest work of literature we got in the West, there’s cheating in sports to get a charter. But But I want to leave but no, I mean, that’s not the end of sport. That’s not the only thing. It is a theater for self transformation, self understanding, and yeah, Transcendence. We’re not getting in this flow state in the zone. It’s nothing like that. Right? Right. So this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers, where with apologies to Descartes, our motto is Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog. And you can also become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we might just feature it on our blog. Now, if fast talking were an Olympic sport, this guy would have multiple gold medals—it’s Ian Shaoles the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… We’ve come a long way since Ancient Greece. Haven’t we? It was the birthplace of both philosophy and sport. Classic philosophy, of course, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, who some believe had been a wrestler in his youth. And Olympic sport, where athletic prowess was deemed an indicator of leadership ability, and one’s personal potential could actually be measured in athletic competitions. Sport was considered a moral education. For men, of course, though women could play too. Just not with the boys. These days, sport has taken over education. That is, many centers of higher education have stadiums bigger than four community colleges laid end to end with room left over for Trump University. The liberal arts are shrinking. Philosophy, unless it’s tied in with economics or tech, is one more class for a freshman to stumble through on his way to becoming an adult, and making hopeless attempts at debt reduction. Not that sport itself is such a golden career. Doping has ruined many an athletic prospect. There’s the shameless exploitation of student players, unpaid, while the NCAA rakes in billions. And what about professional athletes? Over the hill at thirty. Knees and hips gone, athletes limp into a stunted adulthood of restaurant ownership, car dealerships, and celebrity endorsements of dodgy insurance options. Now, as the Greeks showed, athletics and philosophy were once ethical guideposts. Now we consider them to be driven by jocks and nerds, overseen by judgmental dolts. The actual world is run by arm chair quarterbacks, and arm chair philosophers. Instead of debates, we have hearings. Instead of athletic events we have championship seasons. Instead of thought we have sense. Instead of flights to Olympus, we have hell in a handcart. Has been thus since the death of Socrates. But perhaps the twain could meet again, sport and philosophy. I’ve never seen any buff philosophers, with legs bigger than my torso, and the ability to hurl steel girders over goalposts while reading Plato in Greek. I have seen slim philosophers though, who look like they might swim, or play tennis, or bike. Maybe. If you squint. On doctor’s orders. But I never think of philosophers as fit, and they don’t pose in swim suits showing their six packs, abs, or sinuous thighs. Women especially. Which also puts a different spin on sport. It’s a manly virtue, sport. Still, by and large. Jocky women philosophers could open the door. Croquet. Golf. Billiards. Civilized sport. Like baseball. The most intellectual sport. Because it depends so much on a kind of scholarship. The arcana of RBis. Stats. At bats. Extra innings Every game has an eye on the record books. Where the perfect game is one where nobody hits the ball. A bit much for me. But then my idea of sport is a brisk walk to the bar. If there WERE teams of philosophers banding together to compete in sporting events, that would be interesting, but wouldn’t they need cheerleaders? Who would be willing to do that. Team center forward guard, hit em again, hit em hard. And the notion itself could become problematic. Is now, indeed, the right time to hit ‘em hard? Maybe we need a feasibility study. Let’s have a symposium instead. Little wine. Little conversation. Some of those stuffed mushrooms. Yum. We’ll hit ‘em hard later. After we’ve thought about it a bit. See how basketball fits into the grid of epistemology. See what I’m saying? I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin.

Ken Taylor
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mi-sexpressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University, or other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
AndI’m Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

SNL
Sports, say the ancient Greeks, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim the loving contemplation of worthy things. That’s an excerpt from my new book on baseball entitled “Men at Work.” And I would say it’s particularly apropos in light of today’s Expo-Padre game.