Why I love football

No one knows for sure why so many people love football. Football is a mixture of nothing and everything. Most the latter, I will argue.

Trying to make sense of football, I am aware, there is a risk of overintellectualising the game, of ‘reading’ it metaphorically, symbolically or addressing all kinds of psychological, political and philosophical aspects of life. Nevertheless, all these aspects are part of what makes football special. There are, after all, numerous way of how and why football plays a major role in many people’s lives.

As long as I can remember, football has been a part of my life, from playing, to watching it as a neutral spectator or a fan, to selling beer and sausages at a stadium in Denmark’s best league, to being a father of children who play football in Spain.

“Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men [or women] chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win,” the English captain Gary Lineker once said. He was wrong, of course, and he knew it. In 1986, Lineker and England lost in the World Cup quarter-final to Argentina due to Maradona’s two famous goals: one with the help of God, the other godlike. In 1992, Denmark beat German in the European Cup Final.

Perhaps, football is not that simple.

Unlike many other games, it’s played at a particular time and place and for a certain time and the players change clothes before playing.

Time. Place. Clothing.

Read the rest of the essay in The Football Pink

Ordinary Unhappiness

I got acquainted with the American author David Foster Wallace while I was in Rome looking for The Savage Detectives by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The Chilean’s book was sold out, so the friendly girl working at the bookstore said I should try this one instead as she passed me Infinite Jest. I bought the book, and two others, and, perhaps three years later, I finished the book (and most of his other stuff). 

That event in Rome took place in 2008, a few months after Wallace’s suicide. I mentioned this story because, for several years, I have thought about writing about the philosophy of DFW, but now I don’t have to. Writer, journalist, and the founding editor of The Point, Jon Baskin, has written an admirable book called Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace. In this book, he illustrates how Wallace’s fiction is an encounter with various ways of doing philosophy. 

Baskin is not the first to explore the universe of Wallace through a philosophical lens. For instance, of noteworthy mention is Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace, published in 2003; however, due to the time of publication, this work didn’t cover all of Wallace’s fiction. Furthermore, Baskin deals solely with Wallace’s fiction, showing not only the philosophical quality of literary critics but also—and more importantly—how fiction at times can be regarded as philosophy. 

Philosophy for Baskin is not just a method “exposing logical fallacies”. “There is not,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations, “a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.” (p. 5–6). 

To explain what he means by this crucial concept of “therapeutic”, Baskin relies on the two philosophers Stanley Cavell and Robert Pippin and their reading of Wittgenstein “… therapeutically, criticism—in both Cavell’s and Pippin’s hands—is concerned with what has kept us from seeing what is right on the text’s surface. It seeks to expose not something hidden in the work of art but something we have hidden from ourselves” (p. 35). 

The problem being addressed is not something to be found in the text but in ourselves, in our form of life, our approach, or relationship with the text. Therefore, the philosophical or literary therapy of Wallace is not concerned with answers but “aimed at helping us see the senselessness of our questions” (p. 78). The problems in life should not be treated like the questions at a quiz-show. Instead, by exploring our approach toward life (or a text), we might become aware or conscious about the fragile and temporary position we speak or see from, as if our position were closer to the truths. Another way of illustrating this is by stressing Wallace’s wish to overcome the stereotypical academic debate between solid positions: position A oppose position B and so forth; rather, Wallace brings the reader out into the open, naked or without his or her academic amour, in a kind of constantly emerging pre-position where the point is not to debate who is right; rather to recognize “problems as different, your world if different,” as Cavell is quoted as saying (p. 78). 

If I should have one critique of Baskin’s exemplary study, it would be to unfold the relationship between philosophical therapy and ethics even further. By seeing ethics not as a predefined normative program or as something transcendent or abstract but as an immanent way of living a lifestyle. Other interesting studies about Wittgenstein are James C. Edwards’ Ethics Without Philosophy (1982) and James F. Peterman’s Philosophy as Therapy (1992). For example, by linking thinking to living and vice versa, a philosophical therapy makes us see new possibilities or forms of life. The therapeutic—philosophical or literary—doesn’t, therefore, refer to a process of normalizing, that is to say, by telling or showing us what to think, feel, do, or live; rather, it aims at making everything more real, not by explaining but unfolding. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, I might say that philosophical work is transformative in the sense that the world of the person who has read Infinite Jest is different from that of one who has not. Hereby, I don’t make a moral judgement but a literary or philosophical one.

One of the problems of our time, according to Wallace, is related to how we think, i.e., how we relate to the world. The argument goes like this: the same kind of thinking that creates a problem can’t overcome it—the problem is part of our way of seeing, thinking. 

As Baskin writes, “For Wallace, the separation of philosophy from literature—and the crude dichotomies often correlated with the separation: mind/body, theoretical/practical, intellectual/emotional—are both a cause and a symptom of a ‘dis-ease,’ as he calls it in Infinite Jest, at the heart of modern and postmodern self-consciousness. Bringing philosophy and literature together becomes the precondition for even being able to see—much less to address or “treat”—the many symptoms of this dis-ease in our everyday lives and in ourselves.” (p. 4).

There is a quote from Infinite Jest that, in my opinion, might illustrate the goal of Wallace’s work and clarify this even further. “But what of the freedom-to? Not just freedom-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?” 

Freedom does not refer to an irresponsible adolescent or immature “I can-do-want-I want- attitude; rather it is to be bound by the right strings—those that make sense. Baskin writes that Wallace want us—the readers—“to value verbal honesty over empty cleverness” (p. 72); Wallace wants “to help us see the connection between psychological suffering and our habits of thought,” (p. 38). What Wallace is asking for; however, is not for someone to tell us what to choose or think, rather how to choose and how to think. In his commencement speech, Wallace talks about paying attention to live consciously in order to take more beneficial decisions in life. Another way of saying this is the way in which the “love-filled” parent or guide could help the child see the world more clearly or, as Wittgenstein says, in “clarity”, to bring peace to mind. 

Henceforth, the disease of today—“our philosophical problem (p.131)—is related to adolescence, a philosophical immatureness as when we hide between clever identities or ideals, instead of trying to think ourselves. “That maturity requires wisdom,” writes Baskin, a wisdom we can see being outlined in Wallace’s last unfinished work The Pale King. In this last novel, Wallace reactivates some of that ideas that formed his Infinite Jest; for example, the philosophy of freedom, the AA-session, and how addiction infects our will—“addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thought,” writes Wallace in Infinite Jest. 

A part of maturing or becoming wise has to do with “being an uncomplaining adult, who suffers the indignities of life without making too much of them.” (p.129). Not as a kind of resentment or passive nihilism, rather as an acceptance or, as the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze defines ethics, as “not being unworthy to what happens to us”. It is also this understanding that makes the titles of Baskin’s book meaningful as well as beautiful. The goal is never to solve all the problems in life—how could we even live our life without encountering problems—but rather, to quote Freud through Baskin, “if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness” (p. 19).

Baskin succeeds in making sense of why Wallace’s task mattered so urgently for him and why it might matter to us. Like all good art, it’s about life and death, about what it means to be a human being, about teaching us how to think. 

No user’s guide can help those who still haven’t read Infinite Jest and The Pale King. No one becomes a chef in the kitchen by reading cookbooks; they become one only by crying while cutting the onions and sweating while frying the mushroom. Baskin, I believe, would agree to this when it comes to understanding Wallace’s fiction; and even if by thinking with, through, or against him, there can be no substitute for reading his work in all its difficulty, and, at times, boredom. 

Wallace’s work is a diagnose and not a cure for our world; he helps us see that stress, burnout, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc., shouldn’t be regarded as individual diagnoses. Rather, it a diagnosis of a social structure or underlying governmental neoliberal ideology that is sick; “to live today is simply to be subject to such breakdowns.” Similarly, if we are just “doing our jobs” as in the great bureaucratical excuse (p.58), then perhaps our society is evil (Arendt). 

Baskin’s book is, of course, relevant and insightful to all readers of Wallace, both literary critics and laypeople, but the book is also relevant for students of philosophy with an interest in philosophical or literary therapy as something other than psychological therapy. 

I highly recommend this book.

First published in Metapsychology, Vol. 24, No. 27

Stakkels Jim

Min nye roman Stakkels Jim udkommer i dag på forlaget Brændpunkt!

Romanen tager os med på en episk rejse gennem døden, venskaber, kunsten, og hvad det overhovedet vil sige at være (eller ikke være) et menneske. Efter sin storebrors død går Jørgen til grunde. Ulykkelig af sorg flår han sig løs af sin fortid, og forvandler sig til kunstneren Jim. Undervejs i sin forvandling møder han den jævnaldrende Iggy, der bliver et holdepunkt i Jims turbulente liv. På en druktur lover Iggy – mest i sjov – at fortælle historien om Jims kunstnerliv. Men da Jim en dag forsvinder, føler Iggy sig forpligtet til at dele sin vens historie; en historie, der viser sig at gemme på en skræmmende hemmelighed. For hvad sker der, når vi kan se et andet menneskes liv? Skal Iggy fortælle hele historien?

Bogen kan købes i paperback eller E-bog

Læs anmeldelse fra Berlingske Tidende her.

The Changing Pace of Football: Coaching in Focus

I moved to Barcelona in January 2008, six months before Josep Guardiola took over as the head coach of FC Barcelona. It was the beginning of four years of tika-taka. Although I have always liked Real Madrid more than their rivals, I was somewhat seduced by the style of football played by the Catalans, especially Messi, Iniesta and Xavi; the latter in that period deserved to win one of Messi’s Ballon d’Or.

After a year of watching tika-taka, I grew tired of the often pointless sideways passing of the ball. The worse part was that, at times, it seemed as if Barcelona were unable to change their tactics, as a growing number of opponents had learned how to play them. I started to wonder whether Guardiola’s rigid belief in ‘one-system-fits-all’ was not only ruining the extraordinary players’ freedom but also showing a lack of tactical skills.

Then, one day, I read an interview with Guardiola that he gave after he had left the club. In the interview, he admitted that he was not an exceptional coach and that he had only won with Barcelona because of the players – Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Puyol. Of course, such a statement can be perceived as a show of false humility; however, the interview led me to study whether Guardiola’s team was better than Johan Cruyff’s ‘Dream Team’ during the early 90s, which comprised players such as Michael Laudrup, Ronald Koeman, Romario and Hristo Stoichkov.

It was while I was comparing those two successful periods that I noticed how Laudrup played in slow motion compared to Messi. It made me think: If the game is much faster today than it was twenty years ago, how does that affect the role of the coaches?

Read the rest in The Football Pink

Dancing with your sister

‘It’s like dancing with your sister’, said Luis Enrique, the Spanish national team coach, referring to how it is to play football without spectators. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all sports activities were put on pause, including the football leagues. At present, a few months later, most countries are playing or planning to play again, but this time without spectators. It can be seen as the return to a new normality.

Read the rest in The Football Pink

Armstrong – a convenient scandal?

For some, former cyclist Lance Armstrong is like an annoying stain you can’t get rid of, and for others, he is just a good story—the archetype of a modern scandal. For me, he is both, but mostly the latter. I still believe that the Armstrong story has something to tell us about the media’s uncritical desire for scandal.

The media have a penchant for scandal because it’s easy to angle: for or against, right or wrong, good or evil. Furthermore, the media has a proclivity for finding someone personally responsible. When a single person is highlighted, the journalist—and we, the readers or fans—need not worry so much about the context, the surrounding culture. Very conveniently, we can distance ourselves from the scandal.

Read the rest of this article here

Freedom is the element of love

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and the so-called “father of existentialism” was born today, May 5 in 1813. To celebrate, I drink a bottle of champagne and share this essay which, recently, was published in the Wild Roof Journal.

A man in his late fifties enters a tattoo shop in Barcelona. He shows up unannounced with his new girlfriend. They are both a little bit drunk.

“Can you write her name on my arm?” he asks the young female tattoo artist who was busy tattooing me. 

Before waiting for an answer, he rolls up the sleeves of his grayish sweatshirt. “Here,” he says, pointing to a vacant spot of bare skin close to his wrist. I notice that his arm already carries four other female names. Three of them are crossed out. 

“I need you to cross out the last one and add her name,” he says, as he points to his partner. Her. 

The tattooist looks at the man’s arm, looks at the lady, and says, “Lucky you!” 

Is she being ironic? 

She observes, “Before he didn’t have room for you; now he does.”

Love and Freedom Are Bound Together 

This episode makes me think of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who once wrote in a letter to his fiancée, Regine Olsen, “Freedom is the element of love.” This statement encapsulates the two most important features of a life worth living: freedom and love. 

You’re free to do almost whatever you want as long as you’re willing to take all the consequences. It goes without saying that you’re never free to violate or harm anyone, deliberately, which also has nothing to do with love. Love is edifying, as Kierkegaard writes wrote in Works of Love (1847). 

For Kierkegaard, love is the metaphysical foundation of life; it is what is. Yet, combined with freedom, love can take many forms: friendships, parents, lovers, etc. 

Regardless of one’s gender or sexual orientation, what is important when it comes to love is there; it exists. We are all free to experience the possibilities of love, but doing so in our own way. Looking at Kierkegaard through the recollection of this episode, I believe it illustrates—or at least encourages me to reflect on—something more general about society than whether a few people like ink or not. 

For example, many people in today’s achievement-oriented society who suffer from insecurity, anxiety, stress, or burnout do so because they feel alone. They basically lack the experience of real and honest contact with other people. Often even with themselves, as when Wittgenstein defines a philosophical problem with being lost. 

Isn’t showing a new acquaintance, a potential lover, that your arm already carries the names of four other women a way of showing honesty? A way of trying to facilitate real contact? Create a space where love can flourish, despite it all?

If I am right, then there was nothing sad about it for him or her. Quite the contrary, being unconnected with other lives leads to sadness. Unfortunately, many people live behind what resembles a firewall that falsely protects our vulnerability or fear of losing face while, at the same time, prevents us from connecting with other people. It’s like a veil between the world, you, and me. 

Are we being too  polite to be honest?

Many, would probably feel embarrassed if they had to cross out a name on their arm, especially if they hadn’t learned from their first, second, and third mistakes, but just kept on adding name after name. Still, they would only be embarrassed because they would look at themselves through the ideals or norms of others, especially those people with whom they might hope to be identified. This, I believe, illustrates how the existential and political tend to become indistinguishable. For instance, in today’s identity-political sphere, many tend to criticize or oppose other people, thoughts, or forms of life, not because of critical thinking but due to prejudices. Knowing how easy it is to fall outside in a society where people tend to shoot before they ask, or even think (if they think at all), firewalls eventually emerge. 

Freedom, therefore, also becomes a question of power. As Byung-Chul Han has shown in What Is Philosophy? (2019), “Violence and freedom are the two end points on the scale of power.” Although there is a tendency among philosophers to leave power to political scientists and organizational theorists, power addresses existential questions. 

For instance, whether those subjected to power follow their own desire while doing so, or whether they follow the desire of the powerful as if it were their own, or whether they even anticipate the desire of the other. Thus, regardless of how trite this may sound, I believe that many people lack the courage and creativity to live the life they want (again, I am thinking of any kind of life that doesn’t deliberately harm anyone). If we are afraid of losing our good standing among people who don’t actually tolerate any diversion from their own ideals, we are not free, and therefore—following Kierkegaard—not capable of loving. The kind of firewall that I refer to is mainly constituted by powerful norms and ideals of our current achievement-focused society that constantly forces us to live in a particular way. 

For example, many young people today feel a pressure to attain an unrealistic body image, often only achieved through plastic surgery or synthetic enhancement. Or how we may feel forced to develop certain competences or express warranted opinions (typically only those that already fit into or enhance our “human capital”). The result of this capitalization of life is that we drain ourselves emotionally, mentally, and physically. We not only fail to live up to all the ideals but also to forgive ourselves for not being able to do so. We have lost our direction in life playing the power-game of others.

To Become Free 

Returning to the opening episode, we must understand that instead of one true love, some people might experience several. Similarly, instead of claiming that there only exists one right way of living a life worth living, there are several. If Western philosophy teaches us anything, it is that we are always placed in the middle, trying to do our best, exploring and testing life. That is testing our freedom and desires, like asking whether our desire to do this or that really is our desire, or whether we’re just being seduced, forced, or manipulated.

According to Kierkegaard in his letter, love and freedom cannot be separated. Feeling loved and being capable of love make a person free. A simple example could be how most people feel free when they are together with their loved ones. Together with friends, we can turn off our protective firewall. 

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau opens The Social Contract (1762) with the claim: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” Despite the power of this sentence I don’t believe we are born free; on the contrary, as a father of three, I have noticed that we are all born helpless and impotent. Still, to some extent, I agree with Rousseau. Instead of cultivating a capacity for critical thinking and compassion in our children, most future citizens are institutionalized in a way that chains them mentally. For the same reason, I agree with Rousseau when he goes on to say: “Those who think themselves masters of others are instead greater slaves than they.” They, the masters, maintain a self-constraining system, yet they do so because they seduce themselves into believing that the systematic status and prestige they have reflects how good they are at living a life worth living. But it doesn’t. 

To become free in an existential sense requires more than stripes on the shoulder, a high salary, or being born in a privileged part of the world. It requires first of all an acknowledgement and respect towards the world we are born into, its norms and ideals, but also an empathic yet critical capacity to question these norms and ideals, the structure behind them, perhaps even to change them. In my book A Philosophy of Mindfulness (2018), I defined freedom as a combination of having the courage to stand against all that which limits, controls, or even destroys our lives, combined with the imagination to create space for alternative lives. It’s a mixture of resistance and inventiveness. Or, to put it even more simply, a mixture of saying both “no” and “yes.” The reason why I don’t believe that we are born free is related to the fact that in order to know what is important, we will have to have tested, explored, or experimented with life. With age, most people know when to say “no”; however, they only know so because they become conscious of what to affirm or say “yes” to. 

Love All People as Equals 

Reflecting on the couple entering the tattoo parlor, I propose that we might see them as a couple that, despite their setbacks, imagines a world where love is still possible. They still know what is important, what to affirm: love.

Another way of confirming that freedom and love are the main ingredients of a life worth living could be by postulating that egocentrism is the exact opposite of freedom. I say so because I only believe we can become free together. Saying this, I am aware that some may suggest that the man entering the tattoo parlor is being egocentric in the act of getting a tattoo of each woman’s name. However, such an assumption would require that we see the tattoo as a symbol of more than it is, for example, a kind of ownership or possession which is a part of our habitual capitalist mindset. On the other hand, the tattoo might be nothing more than a faithful confirmation of the strength of love. Of course, the tattoo—-especially in this situation with so many names—-can make us think of the person as naive, romantic, or too spontaneous, and yet, it is also an affirmation that emphasizes what connects those names on his arm: love. 

Love is everywhere the same, although it always expresses itself differently. 

Kierkegaard illustrated this strength in Works of Love (1847), where he elaborated on the biblical sentence “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” stressing that “thy neighbor” does not refer to your people, nation, gender or sexual orientation, but all people. We should love all people as equals.

Now this is something that very few of us are capable of, but even more sadly, loving everyone as equals (not equally) is something that many of us don’t even strive to accomplish. Capitalism has made us lazy in a comfortable way, either by avoiding any kind critical scrutinization of our own pre-existing biases, or by assuming that all problems can be overcome through consumption. On the contrary, love teaches us to become worthy of what happens. It’s hard work but nothing is more enriching and liberating. 

Kierkegaard, in my opinion, doesn’t present us with an abstract ideal of love; rather, he confronts our confusion and limitations, which can be extremely powerful in a time where many are so self-conscious of their own way of thinking (often anchored solely in their race, gender or sexuality) that they become resistant to alternative perspectives. 

Perhaps this more humble approach to life could lead to a more caring educational mission: How can we teach people today what makes them capable of loving all people tomorrow? 

Love is all inclusive

This reflection of love, freedom, and tattoos has become more political than intended. However, and perhaps I am being too romantic or naive as well, I do believe that love belongs in a political context as well. The power of love transforms not only our lives but also societies by overturning the cultures of domination and repression because they have nothing to do with love. For example, when we are dominated or dominate someone, we are never free. Violence and coercion are lifeless. In other words, those who misuse power (not those in power per se) do so because they are not free. A parent hitting his or her child might claim that he or she did so “out of love”, although it is just an act of violence. 

Love is all inclusive. Or as Kierkegaard said, we should love everyone as equals, not favoring our own gender or religion. Our human history is full of violence, discrimination and killing of women for being women, killing and discriminations of different races, religions or thoughts solely for being different. Human history is one where far too many only like the stranger as long as he or she thinks exactly like them. Thus, there are many reasons to be angry, and anger often comes with a clearer vision, just as there is a lot of needed fuel in it, and yet in order to build or construct a better future, only love can do the work. Love cares for everyone and everything. It was there before we were born, and it will be here once we are gone. Love is what links each name together, not just the one on the man’s arm, but all names in human history. 

Love is not hierarchical, nor does it moralize. The tattooist illustrated this. She didn’t moralize as if she represented a higher and more lucrative position of unquestionable “good”. Instead she was open, not just because they were potential paying customers, but due to her capacity to empathize with them. 

The couple in the tattoo parlor shared a belief in love. Not in the sense that life is without difficulties and suffering. It is; but rather that it’s love that helps us overcome these setbacks, never revenge or hate. 

Love, therefore, is not an abstract ideal but something we all experience and notice if we pay attention. It is like pointing out what all football fans share regardless of their favorite team, which is a love of the game; what all languages share, which is the ability to communicate, make connections, and dialogue; what all people share regardless of national origin, which is that they live on this planet; or what all of us share regardless of gender, race, and sexual preference, which is that we need sunlight to live and that we all breathe the same air. 

If we can love all people as equals, then we would also be capable of seeing why all people should be treated with the same respect, trust, care, and justice. There is no love without mutual respect and equality. However, and this is why I have been using this little episode about the man and women as my point of departure; if I cannot encounter two drunk people in a tattoo parlor without feeling better than them, pitying them or any other kind of sad behavior that would illustrate my embedded prejudices, how should I then make myself available for those who live lives far more different.

Is love bulletproof then? Without answering directly, I would claim that the mistakes we make in love can be crossed out. We can go on living because they initially emerged from a free, honest, and nondiscriminating relationship to and with life. It’s an honest mistake. The man in the tattoo parlor doesn’t hide his previous relationships. On the contrary, he brings (or she brings him) to make another affirmation of love. It is like an ethical confirmation; despite all the discrimination, greed, and violence in today’s world, we must “go on” affirming what matters. Daily.

You know when you’re in love. Or to put it differently: if you’re doubting, you’re not in love.

The last thing I heard the tattooist ask the man as I left the store was, “Are you sure?”

“Do I look like I am doubting?”

 It was her saying those last words. 

Meditation – i svære tider

Coronakrisen har begrænset menneskers muligheder for at mødes fysisk, hvilket har nødvendiggjort andre måder, hvorpå vi kan nå – og måske – hjælpe hinanden.

Jeg har i denne ånd lavet en ti-minutters meditation til min far, der handler om at leve i svære situationer. Den kan høre og deles her, hvis det har interesse:

Sportsfilosofi

Sportsfilosofi – når filosofi bliver en sport

Kære potentielle læser

Velkommen til Sportsfilosofi – et laboratorium om sporten i filosofien og filosofien i sporten.

Filosofien besidder en kærlig eller venskabelig tilgang til visdom. Dette kommer til udtryk i måden hvorpå filosofien bekymrer sig om, undersøger, udforsker, gransker og eksperimenterer med alle facetter af livet, idet livets visdom er en integreret del af verden. 

Filosofi er en kærlighedsaffære med livet – i al dets spraglede rigdom.

Sporten, der oprindeligt betyder “adspredelse”, “distraktion” eller “tidsfordriv” er en oplagt arena for filosofiske refleksioner, kritiske tanker og argumentation. Ikke kun fordi sporten er en del af verden på samme måde, som litteratur, politik og økonomi er det. Snarere fordi, at de få gange et menneske virkelig tænker, eller får en såkaldt “lys ide”, ødsler vedkommende gerne med sin tid. Det vil sige, at vedkommende er distraheret med hensyn til dagligdagens mange strategiske og opportunistiske gøremål. 

Det er klart, at sport også handler om konkurrence, ligesom sporten i stigende grad er blevet kapitaliseret. En vare. Ikke desto mindre er det sportens legende element, der fascinerer mig. Det er min klare overbevisning, at legen er frigørende, fordi den er et mål i sig selv. Modsat arbejde, der altid er et middel til noget andet: status, prestige, magt, rigdom. 

Sporten besidder altså en modstand, som kan være eksistentielt frigørende. 

Sportsfilosofi er for alle, der er interesseret i sport, men som gerne vil perspektivere, nuancere, kritisere eller erkende mere af dette bemærkelsesværdige fænomen: Sport. 

Eller Sportsfilosofi er for alle dem, der søger en mere sporty tilgang til filosofien. 

Sportsfilosofi har reelt været på banen længe, men tog sin form i forbindelse med coronakrisen. Det er ideen, at indlæggene vil udkomme relativt struktureret, hvilket vil sige med et indlæg cirka hver anden eller tredje uge. Om der er tale om et COVID19-projekt, hvilket vil sige, hvorvidt jeg lukker ned, når samfundet lukker op, er endnu uvist. 

Tænk med her!

Doing Nothing

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.” 

These are the opening lines of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger. If these words seem gruesome, it’s because the reader has an expectation that a ‘normal’ person simply must know when his or her mother died. 

But does it really make any difference if my mother died today or yesterday? 

The Stranger, like so many other books and songs, reminds me of living with the dominant presence of  the Coronavirus. The days become indistinguishable. The virus—or death even—has become an intimate part of all aspects of my life.  

Camus’s story about Meursault, whose mother is dead, might be regarded as absurd. Instead of grieving at his mother’s funeral, Meursault falls in love with a girl. Afterward they go to the beach, where they bathe and make love. The girl wants to marry Meursault, and he tells her that it is of no consequence, but if she really wants to, he will go along with it. 

Today or yesterday, marriage or no marriage: Nothing really matters to Meursault. As if nothing is important. And that is exactly the point: Nothing—or death, to emphasize my point—is important. 

Since mid-march, I’ve been imprisoned—together with my wife and our three children—in our apartment in Barcelona, Spain. As a family, we do many things. Many more or less normal things, like cooking, eating, playing, working, homeschooling, reading, training, and watching a film together daily. 

Listing all these things, I can’t help realizing that I actually do nothing when it comes to fighting the pandemic. Of course, I’ve—we all have—been told that we do good by staying home. 

Still, I wonder: How can doing good feel like doing nothing? 

When I do nothing, I do so to the level that any Buddhistic monk would envy my capacity for non-doing. Non-doing resembles what we refer to when we say that something has presence. Life has presence. The Latin word prae-esseliterally means “to be in front of.” After 41 days (and counting) of imprisonment, I feel like standing more directly in front of life. It’s within reach; I can touch it, smell it—and, at the same time, I am also just being a witness to a crucial part of life, to the doctors, nurses, garbage collectors, and supermarket employees who are doing what the government calls essential work.

So, I wonder some more, whether all this doing nothing is absurd? After all, being a writer is not on the list of essential jobs.

When you write, it’s impossible to distinguish the story from how it is being told, its style, and general mood. The stories being written now will have another rhythm. Perhaps a kind of non-rhythm. For example, while doing nothing, it doesn’t matter what day it is. Presence doesn’t exclude time, but it binds time to a now and here. This is a liberating experience. Most of us are much more here: present.

Maybe that is why I never really did find Meursault’s behavior in The Stranger absurd; rather, it confirmed his capacity of being present with something much more important: death. 

The coronavirus is raising many questions, but one seems to be of great importance: How do we accommodate death? How do we live with the daily presence of death? 

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn to die. The idea came from Plato, who saw his mentor Socrates condemned to death because he encouraged young people to think. Socrates could have avoided the punishment, but he chose to drink the poisonous potion of hemlock. 

One way of learning to die is to acknowledge the questions that the end of life confront us with. How can we minimize the estrangement that can arise in our meeting with death? Why does death make so many feel uncomfortable? 

I assume that the answer is not only—as typically proposed—related to the fact that death makes us reflect on whether we manage, or managed, to live sufficiently, whether we were attentive and full of appreciation and gratitude. Death is not what makes life meaningful per se. Quite the contrary, life is what makes life meaningful and worth living. I see the daily presence of death as a test of how well I live with nothing, for example, doing nothing, not being capable of doing anything, or more, accepting my mental or spiritual limitations. 

Doing nothing is for many people—in our current coronavirus—the same as doing good. But is it good in the sense that we come closer to dying without being dead? Perhaps it’s similar to Gandhi’s non-violence philosophy, which was not a resignation, not even the kind of refusal that is found in Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and his “I would prefer not to”; rather it was doing non-violence. Nothing can, therefore, be done. 

So, doing nothing should not make people feel inferior or impotent. I don’t. Rather I am grateful to be witness to so many courageous women and men making things work. 

Many years ago, I accepted that I have a need to invent or create ideas, thoughts, or worlds of fiction. I don’t think that words can stop a virus, but perhaps they can heal wounds caused by the virus. Literature and art can challenge, shock, and expand our field of experience. It is difficult to share sorrow without the aid of art. What binds people together in Europe, where I am placed, is not the European Union; political solidarity is almost absent in the region. The borders are closed. Each nation is responsible for their own actions. What connects people are music and relieving words of compassion. Literature is like a string of sentences tying the past to the present, while throwing a lifebuoy of words into the future.

Death can easily steal time, as people stay in front of their screens slurping the corona news 24/7. It can also make time stand still. During these weeks, most people will experience why the French philosopher Henri Bergson defined time as duration. An hour can feel short or very long, even though 60 minutes is 60 minutes. Bergson can teach us that accepting what is real can be both a positive or negative experience, though it doesn’t change what time really is. 

Paying attention to the passing present moment is also a way of qualifying what forms of life we might leave behind when we can leave our apartments. What will I not forget? Which life is really worth living? 

During the crisis, we are confronted with the basics: Life is movement. Something in life moves us, makes us feel alive. Is death part of it? Yes. Love is another pole. It takes courage to accept the presence of death—that is, to be willing to risk everything for nothing. 

The coronavirus makes me become nothing, not feel like nothing. I am impermanent, constantly changing, becoming someone else. I hope that I might be of a kind of use, when and if I am capable of affirming life when it passes through me. Catching life with a word. Actually, becoming nothing makes me think of the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who once said that “in the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.”

 I believe that this corona-experience is good for my moral formation. 

The morale might be something like: Doing nothing is good, and when I become nothing, I am good. Why? Becoming nothing makes it easier to resonate with all life’s movements. 

First published in The Mindful Word, April 2020

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