a birthday present suggestion for the football thinker
SOCCER AND PHILOSOPHY
Ed Ted Richards Open Court 408pp
Postutulates Of the Pitch
Here's a categorical imperative: Put the ball in the net.
Review By JOHN HEILPERN
In a blissfully funny, vintage Monty Python sketch, there is a soccer game between Germany and Greece in which the players are leading philosophers. The always formidable Germany, captained by "Nobby" Hegel, boasts the world-class attackers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while the wily Greeks, captained by Socrates, field a dream team with Plato in goal, Aristotle on defense and—a surprise inclusion—the mathematician Archimedes.
Toward the end of the keenly fought game, during which nothing much appears to happen except a lot of thinking, the canny Socrates scores a bitterly disputed match winner. Mayhem ensues! The enraged Hegel argues in vain with the referee, Confucius, that the reality of Socrates' goal is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, while Kant holds that, ontologically, the goal existed only in the imagination via the categorical imperative, and Karl Marx—who otherwise had a quiet game—protests that Socrates was offside.
And there, in a philosophical nutshell, we have the inspired essence of the delightfully instructive "Soccer and Philosophy," a surprising collection of essays on the Beautiful Game, written by soccer-loving loonies who are real-life philosophers, whose number includes the book's editor, Ted Richards. Soccer purists, incidentally, who were born in England (like myself) prefer not to refer to soccer as soccer. It is football—as cricket is cricket. Even so, there is something for everyone in this witty and scholarly book.
For those of you who remain bewildered by the mysterious global appeal of the world's most popular sport, for example, I can guarantee that this book will bewilder you even more—but in a good way! Attend to the enduring dictum of the working-class Sophocles of England, the legendary former manager of Liverpool Football Club, Bill Shankly. One of the book's essays quotes from his line: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that."
For those worried by dubious behavior on Wall Street, see the splendid essay "How to Appreciate the Fingertip Save," in which Edward Winters quotes the guiding principle of Albert Camus—the existential novelist who played goalkeeper as a young man in Algeria: "All that I know of morality I learnt from football."
Or, for those who believe that the irresistible universality of the game will be breaking through in America any day now, see the essay "The Hand of God and Other Soccer . . . Miracles?" in which Kirk McDermid cites St. Thomas Aquinas' identification of the crucial elements that make an event truly miraculous.
Robert Northcott discusses Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety in relation to penalty shots, but right now the Danish philosopher's thinking is best applied to England's dark, neurotic fear of what would be a thoroughly deserved national disgrace should the United States beat England in the teams' opening World Cup match on Saturday.
Is there, perhaps, one too many high-flown footballing philosophy in the book? There is. (And there isn't.) The claim that Nietzsche would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the London club, Arsenal, is curiously speculative when everyone knows that he would have rooted for the steamrollers of Europe, Inter Milan. Another of the essayists—raving about the artistic skills of one of the greatest footballers of our time, Cristiano Ronaldo—calls on the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle to ponder: "Is Ronaldo a Modern Picasso?" To which we might be tempted to respond: "Maybe so. But could Picasso bend it like Beckham?"
And then where would we be? The answer to that is exactly where the authors of "Soccer and Philosophy" want us to be: thinking in fresh and intriguing ways about the Beautiful Game we thought we knew. "The Loneliness of the Referee," Jonathan Crowe's wonderful essay, is particularly appealing to all who, like myself, yell irrational abuse at that ultimate despot and strutting God of the stadium, the ref. But only when his unbelievably blind decisions go against us. The referee, in other words, is to blame for everything.
Mr. Crowe first reminds us that the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was an avid student of football—see his "Critique of Dialectical Reason," where he remarks with undeniable wisdom: "In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team."
But it is to Sartre's earlier works, "Being and Nothingness" and "Existentialism and Humanism," that Mr. Crowe appeals, revealing the loneliness of the referee in a new and sympathetic light. The referee's ordeal is that he alone bears responsibility for his decisions and therefore the mortal fate of the game. Yet the referee who errs badly is within the rules of the game, because the rules of the game allow him to err badly. His irreversible blunders are final.
Think, if you will, of the of the fatal decision of poor Jim Joyce, who last week made the worst umpiring call in baseball history and ruined Armando Galarraga's perfect game. But, unlike the forgiving, sweet baseball fans of the Detroit Tigers (and the guilt-ridden, tearful Mr. Joyce), the football fan is so passionately committed to the game—the only true game—that he never forgives or forgets (and the lonely referee never explains).
Ergo, the referee's rationale: I whistle, therefore I am.
That does not help me much, actually. It helps the referee. It helps us understand his confident, fallible power. But from the fan's point of view, the secular religion of football is all about mad, obsessive love and awesome bias, it is about irresistible skill and glory and, yes, a certain divine, beautiful transcendence. All the rest, according to the rewarding "Soccer and Philosophy," is thinking aloud enthusiastically. Or, put it this way:
"Gooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaalllllll!!!!!"
Mr. Heilpern is the author of "John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man."
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