Sporting Philosophy: The Euro Cup (and Socrates)
‘My lifetime preoccupation with
sport is so deep that only philosophy can hope to get to its
roots’. Old boy in the
Olympia enclosure, Wembley, circa 1972. ‘What’ll
you have, sport’, said the barman.
On
the balcony across from me a symposium of bald young Existentialists is
in
progress while watching the Euro Philo Cup. I hear their sallies in the
antechamber of my brain, like young Samuel Johnson half observing Sally
Ford
dancing in the kitchen yard as he does his homework, until a collective
cry
brings me back two years to the last World Cup to hearing a despairing
‘NON’
when well thought of France was eliminated in the opening round by
negativists
from Latin America (nil all) having previously missed a penalty in
losing to a Quietist
ex-colony. I was riding my bike through the vine-yards, half hearing
the
commentary from the transistors of pruning paysans scattered all over
the
hills. The
‘NON’ was long and painful
but mercifully subsided into stoic acceptance (what’s the
Good of despair? And
there’s always the Six Nations after Christmas). But the
gendarmes were busy
that evening in the bars with Dionysian fans.
France
went out, I gather, because Pascal and Montaigne appeared to come to
blow when
Blaise said to Michel ‘you only think about
yourself’ (actually Montaigne
merely slipped while trying to avoid a confrontation and the ref was on
the
blindside). Both were given red cards and Captain Sartre had to call up
Voltaire
and himself for the penalty shoot-out. Vol cynically put it wide with
his left
foot and J-P of course missed by a mile.
It
has been a thought-provoking tournament. The elimination of
Spinoza’s Holland
and England’s Logical Positivists came as no surprise. But
Hegel’s Germany
really should have done better (Kant alienated the referee). Italy made
the
mistake of making Vico rather than Machiavelli the captain and the
Azzurri
neo-Communists he picked were in the pocket of the Vatican Mafia who
put their
bets on Beghard’s Bulgaria springing a surprise. And Spain
should have taken
Gracian’s advise and withdrawn their indigenous thinkers
gracefully, since no
native philosopher of note was fit, and left it to George Santayana, an
American transfer, to be player-coach. ‘The body is an
instrument, the mind its
function’. Know that and you can avoid an own goal.
Some years Later
The
Euro final is between Portugal (the hosts) and Greece (where the
Olympics take
place at the end of the era). Mostly it’s all port wine and
Greek to me. I
don’t even know why ‘i-grec’ is
‘Y’ in French. But I’m a fan and put on
my
thinking cap to attend to the results of matches and indeed mismatches.
The
outcome I anticipate will be dual. The post-Classical Humanists
triumphing and
the promoters, PIGO (Post Industrial Global Oligarchy) making a
fortune. Both will
be true to themselves. Perhaps, that’s what the game of
philosophy is all
about. Everybody wins like a dodo race.
The
balcony Existentialist had Portuguese colleagues along to watch the
final, and
sat with the television sound down. The
Humanist disappointed, being sent off for barracking the ref, leaving
the no
nonsense Nihilists to make sure Greece won (en - zero). An
unknown thinker
called Charistes used his head in the fifty-seventh minute after
Diogene
barreled his way through and lofted a wild shot. Their German Idealist
coach,
Otto Rehhegel (no relation to Georg Wilhelm Friedrick), must be over
the moon.
And so am I. The Cup is back where it really belongs. Filosofie, after
all, is
a Greek word, and ‘no idea’ is where the need for
it started.
The
Portuguese Existentialists are beyond the consolation of Boethius. At
regular
intervals they emit a muted ‘Aie’, which could be a
tribute to the Greek’s
superiority, but I think it is more kneejerk than that. Under the
influence of
the ancient Egyptians of Nakhon, who averaged ten and half pints a day
of beer
during the Holocene drought, they are reduced to mere reflexes.
Throwing up
over the side comes next. If the result had been the other way round,
Greek
youth would have taken hemlock and the pompiers would be coming round
to pump
out their stomachs. But really, I don’t know what all the
fuss is about. Philosophy
is only a game.
Coda
Socrates
wasn’t just a medical doctor
and a late Existentialist. At left back, he held the team together
while all
around him were playing fast and loose. His instructions were that the
last
word be dropped from the ‘I could do that if’’,
and ‘to stop watching
others all the time to see how they react. Watch yourselves’.
And so, he
relaxed his team-mates by example – unhurried but calm,
dedicated to the existential
idea of ‘the beautiful game’. He smoked two packets
of Lucky Strikes a day to
put super-fit attacks ‘in countenance’, thus
setting himself up as a sitting
duck to decoy opponents away from his gifted rabugenta.
The team went
from strength to strength on the back of his smoker’s cough.
After leading them
to two moral victories (catching the imagination of the world while
losing), he
put them on the scent of an ideal, which two World Cups later in 1994,
got
democracy in Brazil off to a winning start.
Who
said ‘philosophy is air-raid shelter for old men’?
Oliver StJohn Gogarty
(updating Plato and his philosopher’s cave). Another Oliver
(Goldsmith) got it
right ‘philosophy is a good horse in the stable and an errant
jade on a
journey’. But
it can get you to a desirable
destination as Socrates the Second has shown, and even a conclusion.
Play on,
thinkers. But when Madame Phila Sophia presents you with a Cup, beware.
It may be
poisoned with the baby-fed Andes God Chac-Mool’s philosophy:
‘I don’t subscribe
to the popular belief that there is a simple explanation for
everything’. Living
an idea can be complicated.
The
original Socrates
claimed, ‘Ignorance is our salvation. We must learn to know
the things we
cannot understand’. Socrates the Second qualified what he
knew with a humanist rider:
‘First the severity of the ideal. Then the
gentleness.’ You have to love the
game.
Albert
Camus, no slouch as a
sportsman, caught tuberculosis and could no longer play football, the
game he
loved. His doctor recommended rowing to increase his lung capacity. He
practiced with friends on the Seine and declared it the purest of
sport, and
developed his philosophy on its first principle, ‘measure et
equilibre’. It’s
not about brute force but balance.