They Have a Powerful Aesthetic Appeal
At a recent event at Stanford University sponsored by the program in literary and philosophical thought, longtime colleagues Hayden White and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht got into a spirited debate about the value of sports and what role, if any, they should have on college campuses. White maintained that professional sports are a corrupting influence on society, while Gumbrecht, who has a new book out, In Praise of Athletic Beauty, argued that sports are a form of aesthetic experience. Afterward they pursued their debate in a series of e-mail messages. Their conversation continues here.
At our discussion in April, you decried the alleged corruption of American college sports. Of course I am aware of many problems, but your blanket condemnation reminds me of those who evaluate the potential of socialism by Stalin’s invention of the gulag.
The first truly critical question is whether it is possible at all for university administrations to definitively exclude scandalous situations like the “parties” of the Duke lacrosse team or the financial “support” offered by a sports-marketing firm to the family of Reggie Bush while he played football for the University of Southern California. I am proud to be a member of the Stanford Athletic Board, and the university has repeatedly been honored for its overall collegiate athletics program. Yet we have never had incidents that deserve to be called “scandals,” and the average graduation rate of the fellowship athletes is as high as that of Stanford undergraduates at large (about 94 percent). So there is empirical evidence that it is indeed possible to run an outstanding athletics program and to exclude the typical negative effects of college sports.
To avoid excess, however, is not enough to justify the existence of an institution as complex and as expensive as college sports. So my second question is, what would America lose if it followed the advice of intellectuals like you that we abandon college sports?
At a recent event, jointly organized by the libraries of the university and the athletics department, a Stanford quarterback presented a thought-provoking interpretation of the famous (and famously difficult) remarks by the late Austrian novelist Robert Musil about the mystical experience of sports, more precisely about whether it is appropriate to call an athlete — or even a racehorse — a “genius.” Now I concede: Not many Stanford athletes (and not many Stanford or Ivy League students in general) achieve an expert level in reading an author as challenging as Musil. Of course Kyle Matter, Stanford’s quarterback, is an exception — but he is not the exception that confirms a rule of abuse.
Rather, he is the exception that makes college sports important in the present cultural situation for their potential. Whenever students use that potential, they demonstrate to themselves, and they remind us, their spectators, that a convergence between high-level physical performance and high-level performance of the mind is well possible. Why would that matter? The strongest answer that I know comes from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trying to understand, in the historical situation of the mid-1940s, how the Shoah could have unfolded in one of the heartlands of Western civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno pointed to a loss of bodily sensibility for the concrete things of the world as the dangerous flip side of the flights of abstraction that had made possible the objective conquests of the Enlightenment.
I hold that practicing sports and even watching sport can work — and indeed already works — as a powerful antidote to such effects of the principle of abstraction. But rather than praising athletic performance, intellectual discourses on sports today belittle and sometimes flatly denounce what athletes do. When scholars, even scholars who love sports, apply the tools of their training to athletic events, they often wind up feeling obliged, like yourself, to interpret sports as a symptom of highly undesirable tendencies — denouncing them as conspiracy or seeing their popularity as a sign of decadence. But as I argue in my book, In Praise of Athletic Beauty, the most obvious explanation for the widespread popularity of sports is their aesthetic appeal, as powerful as the experience of a beautiful work of music or art. A perfectly executed double play in baseball, a quarterback’s pass to an open receiver, or a complex routine in women’s gymnastics are epiphanies of form and of bodily grace. Experienced as such, they can help us recuperate a positive feeling for the physicality of our existence in a physical universe — and in this potential effect, they converge with the effects of a Mozart opera, a painting by Jackson Pollock, or a novel by Toni Morrison.
It may therefore be worth a self-critical thought whether we intellectuals who want to pay exclusive attention to the concerns of the mind have not entered a hidden alliance with the type of consumerism that tries to convince society that a life glued to the computer screen and the cellular phone — a life in which body and space have become negligible dimensions — is the most fulfilling life. That is why I believe it matters, more than ever before perhaps, that we keep open the possibility for events where physical intensity and intellectual intensity can come together — that we keep such occasions open for those among our students who want to perform music, create art, and play sports, as well as for their readers, listeners, and spectators. We will lose much more than a political edge if we allow the next generation to believe that a fusion of software and critical spirit is the formula for a desirable life.
The intensity of the moments I care about may be joyful as well as painful — but they never have the shallowness of complacency. Those whom we encourage to experience such moments will almost instantly know that they are like islands of survival in an everyday of abstraction, distance, and solitude. To betray, in our teaching and in the development of college education, the longing for such moments would be as irresponsible as banning the spirit of critical analysis, whose importance I do of course not doubt for a minute.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and the author of In Praise of Athletic Beauty, published in April by Harvard University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 42, Page B10