What makes the Beautiful Game?: The Kantian perspectiv

When I set out to write this blog, I decided that it would be pointless to simply write about my favorite sport or team, simply giving a rundown of the days (or more likely week’s) news. There are countless better sources for that information. Why run a blog that would only be a pale shadow of the impressive duNord? No, if I were to add to the blogosphere, I would need a fresh angle, one that wasn’t being covered. I suppose I could run a Minnesota Thunder blog, but there isn’t actually a whole lot to write about a minor league team in the offseason, unfortunately.

I decided to go with philosophy, though I discovered soon after beginning that it would be a difficult feat to pull off; finding enough subjects that I could plausibly link to soccer would not be easy. I began with the Germans, I think mainly because I was thinking of the old Monty Python skit of the soccer game between the Greek philosophers and the German philosophers (with Franz Beckenbauer being the surprise selection for the Germans.)

I created a short list of a few updates that I could make regarding philosophical quotes that could be applied to the sport of soccer. I even took a look at the wonderful shirts over at www.philosophyfootball.com (Yes, that’s a Christmas present hint) for inspiration. There were plenty of good ideas, the problem became that each would take a lot more effort than an average blog entry pontificating on the state of things. Not such an easy task to update at work during a crowded part of the year (I made a poor choice as to when to begin my blog.) On top of that I have recently become engaged and so have been planning for a wedding.

However, I think that the best antidote to the constant pressures of these diversions is to take my mind off of them and talk about what I love: soccer.

So, here is an update on Immanuel Kant and the beautiful game.

Immanuel Kant is among the most influential philosophers of all time. And I hate him. Well, not so much do I hate him as I hate his writings. He’s difficult to get through, partly because of his writing style, but I think that it’s more of a function of the amount of thought that went into each sentence. I have to read his words two to three times simply to begin to understand them. I wonder sometimes if it would be easier in the original German as opposed to translations, but I doubt it; he’s just too dense.

On the subject of aesthetic beauty, Kant asks what type of judgment we must make in order to judge something beautiful. He says that such judgments have several

First, he argues a fine distinction between something that is a judgment of taste (that is a beautiful sunset) and a judgment of agreeability (I like bagels.) That is to say, we find pleasure in something because it is beautiful, that is, we do not find something beautiful because we take pleasure in it.

The view is perhaps advanced by the standing ovation that Ronaldinho received recently at the Bernabeau for a goal scored against the home side. The Real Madrid fans didn’t find pleasure in the goal, resulting in them thinking it beautiful resulting in them giving the standing ovation. They found the goal beautiful despite finding no pleasure in the result of it and therefore gave it the ovation.

Next, Kant argues, these judgments must be “universal and necessary.” That is to say that we would expect others to agree with our judgment. We may say things like ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ but we do not actually believe that. We might argue about whether Pele or Maradona was the better player, but we can agree they were both wonderful artists in the game. This is where it is important to note the distinction earlier described. I might find a last gasp, bundled home equalizer absolutely beautiful as it rescues a point for my team, but that goal might be amongst the ugliest goals ever seen by a fan of the other team. However, if that goal came as a result of a beautifully flighted curling outside shot, most fans would have to say that despite hating the goal and the result, the goal itself was a thing of beauty.

Finally, Kant says that beautiful things are ‘final without end.’ By this he means that though they serve no real purpose, they seem to do so in our minds. What purpose does sport serve? That’s a question that I might have to take up later in my blog.

The reason that Kant examines the judgment of the beautiful so closely is to determine why such things are universal. Ultimately the best he can come up with is essentially due to “the interplay of the faculties of perception and imagination with the faculty of understanding.”

So what would Kant say makes the beautiful game beautiful? I think that Kant would argue that we find the beautiful game beautiful because of a ‘common sense’ of taste. Kant presents a tidy deduction for the existence of taste which amounts to the combination of imagination and understanding being able to together consider not only the object (or play) at hand but also the set of things (or game) in general.

Somehow, I don’t feel like I’m making this any clearer than Kant did originally. Perhaps this is too heavy for a Monday morning.

Why is the beautiful game beautiful? It serves no purpose other than itself, though it may seem to and it can be nearly universally agreed upon in certain cases (as much as any art or aesthetic judgment) and we gain pleasure from watching them as a result of that beauty.

I know this comes across as if P then Q and since we have Q we must have P, but I it makes sense when someone smarter than me says it. Trust me. I think I’ll go for someone a little less difficult next time.