As a woman and a professor of philosophy, I have seen football always very differently. I had poor knowledge of tactical systems, but I enjoyed from all my heart the great spectacle from the peach with emotion. If a Nobel winner, Camus, acknowledged that everything he knew about ethics was learned from football, why wouldn’t we recognize that it happened the same for ourselves, as the round ball equipped our mind with a playful sense of fairness, rational thinking, and moral altruism? Being in the stadium made me though that supporters are nothing like the masses embracing the false sense of democracy, as Nietzsche argued reading Schiller’s reflections on the raise of the choir on the stage of a tragedy. Fans belong to a voluntary and passionate social contract. The values of the football club they support make them equal in front of the other, be it woman or man, adult, or child. So, a democrat means being capable of loving all those who share the same values with you and respecting all those who have different commitments and perspectives on a competitive world that they all share together.
As a little one, I grew up watching France’s international competitions: for my father, football was a blue spectacle with Zizou’s melancholy, a glacial look, even when trophies were breaking any record. Consequently, I was educated with the conviction that passions should always be controlled by reason, regardless of the triumphs or the losses you might face.
In time, I found out the opposite of the Cartesian, methodical game: it was British, and this pedigree imposed quite a different Weltanschauung. Football was part of the DNA of a nation: kids were filling the stadiums; the game was part of their canonical education; it was no shame to argue that the sense of citizenship and the taste for loyalty started on the grass. Football was Bildung, there was no doubt. The sense of competition was learned empirically. Football was, as Locke would put it, sensation,…
Source link : https://www.footballparadise.com/imagine-sisyphus-happy-jurgen-klopp-part-manager-part-philosopher/
Author : Oana Serban
Publish date : 2024-05-07 14:00:00
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