Ingvar Johansson

(Paper read at the Sport Philosophy Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 28-29, 1998.)

First of all I want say that I am firmly convinced that sports are for their sheer existence in no need of a value foundation. They will flourish anyway. Still, such foundations have been proposed and are of interest. For about a century now the main value of sports has been related to their value for a nation. With the help of sports a nation could try to prove its strength both to other nations and to its own citizens. Also, and at the same time, sports were regarded as efficient means for improving public health and for "character improvement". With nationalism rapidly fading in the Western world, nationalism as an ideology for sports is on its way out, too. Left is a view which anchors the value of sports only to its potential for developing various socially beneficial abilities and character traits.

This new view comes out vey clearly in the official program of the Swedish National Sports Association (Riksidrottsförbundet) called What do we want from sports? (Idrotten vill …) which was distributed in 1995. I myself find this a fairly good program, but nonetheless I would like to amend or transform it a little bit. The basic aim of the association is said to be to "develop human beings positively, physically and psychologically, as well as socially and culturally" (p.7). In my opinion, the value of sports consists in the fact that sports particularly well satisfies some human needs and desires, or, as I shall say: Sports satisfy some of our conations very well.

Departing from a specific philosophical anthropology, i.e. a specific view of our basic desires or conations, I will in my talk try to show how sports can be given a value foundation which can be called humanistic. At the same time, as a by-product so to speak, I think I can explain some of the attractiveness of sports.

Let me start by making three threepartite distinctions. Of course, I am aware of the fact that there is a continuum beneath the distinctions, but that fact does not make the classifications superfluous.

(1) There are three kinds of sports: recreational sports, competitive sports, and exhibition sports.

(2) There are three kinds of sports people: ancillary personel, participants, and spectators.

(3) The age of sports people can be divided into: juniors, seniors, and veterans.

I hope all the terms are familiar, but perhaps ‘exhibition sports’ needs some words of explanation. When a "dream team" plays against an ordinary team in what is often called - exactly - an "exhibition match", then it is not a matter of competition. Nor is a running arranged merely in order for one particular runner to make a new world record, real competition. It is closer to exhibition.

In my opinion, many of those who are hostile to sports indulge in conflating the distinctions made. In fact, there are three times three, i.e. nine, different discussions needed in order to highlight all aspects of sports. However, since I have only 30 minutes at my disposal, I will mainly discuss only one combination, and that is competitive sports for participants who are seniors.

I have to start with a very short detour into colour phenomenology. Such a simple entity as a colour spot is a complex unity which necessarily has at least three aspects: hue, intensity and saturation. In an analogous way, most of the phenomena of our conscious lives have three aspects. These aspects I would like to call by their old scholastic names: cognition, affection, and conation.

Cognitions can exist on their own, but mostly they are fused with both affections and conations. Affections and conations, on the other hand, cannot exist without some cognition upon which they supervene. Affections and conations must be directed towards something, and it is the cognitive aspect which contains their directedness or intentionality.

In my view, the kind of experiences which I call affections (joy, sorrow, excitement, thrill, surprise, fear, distress, anger.etc.) are complex unities which contain cognitions and conations as well, but the affective aspect dominates. When we are happy about something we are in an affective state, but in this state we have somewhat specific conations to behave in some ways, too; winners can be so happy that they have to scream and jump. Similarly, a conation or desire is a complex unity which contains cognitions and affections as well, but the conative aspect is the dominating one. When we are hungry we have a conation or desire to eat; this conation contains a cognition directed at food as well as some kind of displeasurable affections.

I will in what follows focus on the conative aspect of our lives as human beings. Now, obviously different people long for different kinds of lives. Our conations differ, and what makes us pleased or happy differs. However, if we say that each human person wants a conation melody of his or her own, then we easily realize that these different melodies may contain the same conation tones, or even the same conation chords. In my view, there is really a list of conations which all humans beings want to have satisfied. Or, put differently, we want different conation melodies, but all of us want to hear the same conation tones in the melodies of our lives. We cannot help having these conations; they are part of human nature.

My favourite sport, which is football (soccer), happens to be a game which have eleven players in each team, and I happen to think that there are exactly eleven different kinds of irreducible conations. But I am not a number mystic. Here comes my list of our basic conations or conation tones. I have divided them into three different groups.

THE BLIND WILL TO LIVE:
1. Conation for affection
2. Conation for cognition
3. Conation for conation

EGOISM:
4. Conation for pleasant affections
5. Conation for food
6. Conation for sex
7. Conation for shelter
8. Conation for activity
9. Conation for confirmation

ALTERISM:
10. Conation for benevolence
11. Conation for malevolence

Of course, much is be to said in relation to this list; and I have tried to highlight it in some of my writings. Here, however, I have to very brief. I am presenting the list merely in order to convey an impression of what it can mean to subscribe to an elaborated philosophical anthropology.

The first group of conations listed, the blind will to live, articulates the fact that there is a general desire just to get cognitions, affections and conations. It is better to have negative affections than to have no affections at all; and it is better to have a conation whatsoever than to suffer from acedia or weariness. Acedia is displeasure caused by lack of conations.

In the second group, egoism, I will comment upon the last two conations, the conation for activity and that for confirmation. Children's games and some recreational sports show that there is a real conation to be active now and then. The conation for confirmation is just another word for what psychologists usually call our need "to be seen". Confirmation is on the psychical plane what food is on the material plane. We need confirmation in order to survive psychically, as we need food in order to survive physically. As we can hunger for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, we can also hunger for a kind and encouraging look, some tender and nice words, a clap on the shoulder or a pat on the cheek. Sometimes we desire a huge meal and sometimes we desire a declaration of love. Of course, the conation for confirmation plays an important part in competitive sports and exhibition sports.

From a philosophical-historical perspective, my belief in the third group, alterism, is a tribute to Jospeh Butler's and David Hume's criticism of psychological egoism. Taken together, the conations for benevolence and malevolence explains the widespread, perhaps universal, phenomena of group egoism. If I had chosen to speak about spectators of senior competitive sports instead of practitioners, I would have elaborated on these conations. Many members of modern fan clubs, sometimes even those who started them, lack a natural connection with "their" club. They simply want something around which they can center their desires for community, belongingness, supportiveness, and aggressiveness.

Desires for community, belongingness, supportiveness, and aggressiveness are not, however, conation tones. They are conation chords like desires for friendship, comradeship, adventure, and the famous desire for "the sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome."

Conations, it should be noted, are not created by their intentional objects. A conation is searching for objects who can satisfy it. The conation is primary and its specific intentional object is secondary. This is most easily seen in relation to conations who have a pulsating structure like the conations for food, sex, activity, and benevolence. It is not the existence of food which creates the desire for food. It is the other way round. We simply desire food now and then.

To be a humanist means having man in the centre of one’s world view. Humanism, however, is a rather abstract doctrine untill it is specified what human nature looks like. In order to get substance, humanism needs a philosophical anthropology. Since, in my view, man is essentially a conative being, I regard human conation satisfaction as being an end in itself. The problem, of course, is that there arre often conation conflicts; both between different persons and within one single person.. How, for instance, should we look upon satisfactions of intense anger and hatred, i.e. satisfactions of the conation to be malevolent. Is it really possible to be a humanist and regard the satisfaction of the conation for malevolence as an end in itself? I put forward the question now, but I will give you my answer later on.

Let me return to my remarks on the conation for confirmation, i.e. our need to be seen. As I said, I think that confirmation is to our psychological survival what food is to our physical survival.

It is better to meet angry looks than to meet no looks at all, and it is better to hear nasty words than to be totally neglected. Put paradoxically, disconfirmation or negative confirmation is a kind of confirmation, too. If we try to rank different kinds of confirmation, I think we should put being loved on top, then being admired; and after that being feared, being detested, and being held in contempt. But worst of all and at the absolute bottom: being invisible to others. Now, if someone is prepared to compete with you, you are seen and you are confirmed. You are at least worth being an opponent. In competitive sports the loser is seen, too. This fact is extremely important for the understanding of the popularity of competition.

Usually, emotions and affections are thought to be central to the arts but not to sports. In my view, however, the conation for affection is just as important to sports. I think that practitioners of competitive sports unconsciously use sports in order to get affections. A life without affections is simply boring, and a match day automatically contains a lot of different emotions.

As I just pointed out, in the case of confirmation negative confirmation is better than no confirmation. Similarly, it is better - normally - to have negative affections than to have no affections at all. Feeling sad is better than having no feelings at all, just as it is better to be criticized, or to be the loser, than to be neglected. Therefore, in competitive sports, both the winners and the losers can even before the game starts be pretty sure that they after the game will feel something. Their conation for affection will, for sure, be satisfied to some degree. Life is very seldom an all-or-nothing affair.

In my experience, there is one specific feature of many sports which seem to be especially hard to understand for those who are very hostile to sports, and that is aggressiveness. If a peace-minded person, unfamiliar with sports, were to enter a locker room where a coach is trying to push the team, he or she would become somewhat shocked about how much talk there is of the importance of becoming aggressive.

In order to understand aggressiveness in sports, one has to distinguish between three kinds of aggressiveness. I have labelled them as follows:

1. Forceful assertiveness, or: Plato’s Aggressiveness.
2. Real malevolence, or: The Devil’s Aggressiveness.
3. Non-harming malevolence, or: Combat Sports' Aggressiveness.

First, aggressiveness can arise wihtout any connection at all with the conation of malevolence. It can arise as merely a means to satisfy some of the other conations, and it may profitably be called forceful assertiveness. In such an aggressiveness there is no aim to hurt or harm anybody. I have called it Plato’s aggressiveness, too, since in Plato’s philosophical anthropology a faculty called thumos is put inbetween the faculties of reason and desires (or conations). Sometimes thumos is translated as will or willpower, but many English translators regard anger as the best translation of thumos; and anger is very close to aggressiveness.

As is clear from my list of conations, I do think that human beings really can have a desire to be directly malevolent and aim directly to hurt and harm others. Unhappily, human nature contains a kind of aggressiveness which is real violence and literal malevolence. The Devil’s Aggressiveness, is the proper label.

My main point, however, is that there is a third kind of aggressiveness, too. It is something inbetween agressiveness in Plato’s sense and agressiveness in the Devil’s sense.

Modern technology has drastically affected the way we can handle some of our basic conations. In a remarkable way it has made it very easy to dissociate sex from reproduction. But modern technology has also made it easy to dissociate a kind of malevolence from the Devil’s aggressiveness. Think of american football, icehockey, combat sports, and, in particular, amateur boxing. Thanks to the modern padded gloves and the modern head covers, no one is really harmed in amateur boxing any more. The boxers may of course be hurt for a while, but that is quite another matter. As soon as a fight has started, a boxer can allow himself to try to be really malevolent. He can for instance think "I’m gonna beat the hell out of that monster" and act according to this aim, but the opponent will nonetheless not be harmed in the long run. The match is, so to speak, a Donald Duck event. This is the kind of aggressiveness I call Combat Sports’ Aggressiveness. It is a specific kind of aggressiveness; it contains "non-harming malevolence".

It is my definite opinion that sports should be separated from The Devil’s Aggressiveness but not from forceful assertiveness and non-harming malevolence. As I said a while ago, the humanist creed - which I subscribe to - says that human conation satisfaction is an end in itself. However, with the constraint that other human beings must not not be harmed. The Devil’s Aggressiveness does not satisfy the last requirement, but Plato’s Aggressiveness and the aggressiveness of some combat sports do. That is the reason why I am confident that my views on sports deserve to be called humanistic.

Both forceful assertivness and non-harming malevolence admits of degrees, and different sports admit of different degrees of aggressiveness. There is something like an "aggressiveness scale for sports". High up there is boxing and other combat sports, then there are, in turn, sports like ice hockey, football, and volley ball; and at the other end we find sports like high jumping and figure skating. From a sociological perspective, different sports seem to find a natural habitat in different social milieus, and from a psychological perspective it is obvious that different sports fit different people. Also, I am sure that a comparative analysis of the role of aggressiveness in various sports, and in our changing conceptions of femininity, would be very beneficial to tomorrow’s discussion subject, "Gender Issues and Sports".

I think that much hostility towards sports is rooted in a bad understanding of aggressivness. And I want you to know that some psychologists think that our understanding of aggressiveness is merely embryonic. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an article where the author said that our understanding of aggressiveness is still at the level where our understanding of sexuality was before the advent of Freud.

Before I end, I want to make it perfectly clear that I have not been trying to show that sports are like, say, music or theatre. For instance, to be a member of a football team satisfies wholly other conation melodies than being a member of a theatre group does satisfy. Surely, there are some significant similarities, but the differences are equally essential. Most notably, in relation to competitiveness and aggressiveness which I have just spoken of.

Let me now repeat what I have been trying to do. Taking departure in a sketch of a specific philosophical anthropology, I have argued that competitive sports contain one very good way of satisfying some basic human conations; conations which are ends in themselves. Even if there are some flaws in the specific anthropology from which I started, my general claim, i.e. that the value of sports should be grounded in conation satisfaction, can be true nonetheless.

I started by saying that sports are, in a sense, in no need of a value foundation. They will flourish anyway. Now I can explain why I think this is the case. It is the case because sports satisfy some basic human conations or desires, and people will always try to satisfy their basic conations. Furthermore, since I regard human conation satisfaction which does not harm or injure other human beings, as the rock bottom value of humanism, my explanation of the popularity of sports runs parallell with my normative enterprise, i.e. my attempt to make clear what the value of sports consists in.