SOURCE: "Sport, the Aesthetic, and Narrative," in Philosophy Today, Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 93-104.

[In the following essay, Feezell humorously examines competitive collegiate sports in light of Dewey's Art as Experience.]

From Paul Weiss's relatively early and legitimating reflections in Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry, to more recent ruminations in books and scholarly publications, numerous philosophers have been fascinated by the fascination of sport. For example, in his recent book, Philosophy of Sport, Drew Hyland again wonders about the "significant and apparently transcultural appeal" of play and sport.¹ I won't attempt to catalogue the various attempts to understand why so many of us are attracted to sport, especially those sports that involve the playing of games. Like many people, I've wasted a good part of my life playing and watching these games, and I've given up being ashamed or apologetic about it. But I still want to understand the attraction, as any reflective human being should. I suppose one could read the writings of Hyland (a former college basketball player), George Will, or Bart Giamatti as wholesale rationalizations in defense of triviality. But there must be something "deeper" going on here. Or so we think. What could be deeper?

According to my students (and, of course, many others), the deeper attractive realities of sports relate to competition, victory, and the pursuit of excellence. Each semester, at the beginning of my classes, I ask my students to write a paragraph telling me something about themselves. Invariably the most common response expresses a strong interest in sports. These responses cross the boundaries of race, sex, class, religion, and region. (After all, ESPN is as committed to equality and democratic viewing as is MTV.) Whenever I have the occasion to ask my students to explain their attraction, the responses are as predictable as they are obvious and facile. Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh. Surely part of the nature and attractiveness of sport does involve the intense and often satisfying experiences involved in competing, striving for victory, and becoming better. But such a view of sport is partial; it leaves out too much of the joy. It makes sport sound too much like winning a war or closing a big business deal. It robs the thing of its magic and its imaginative appeal, and it impoverishes the rich vocabularly that can be used to reveal sport's possibilities. Previously I've tried to make the case for the view that sport is a form of human play. A play theory of sport is more phenomenologically adequate in showing the attractive possibilities of sport and in showing what sort of attitudes and comportment are appropriate when engaging in playful activity.² The play theory of sport seems to me to be a more powerful explanation of the attraction experienced by the player. However, it is not obvious that the people who view sport, the fans (in the broadest sense), are attracted in the same way as the player.

In this essay I want to suggest another fruitful response to the question concerning the appeal of sports. I begin with an intuition and I hope to develop the intuition and its implications more fully in what follows. Consider the notion that one of the significant elements in the fan's love of watching games like baseball, football, and basketball has something to do with the way in which sport structures experience and represents it to us. We can see here a close relationship between the kinds of experiences associated with art and the experiences of watching games. Perhaps the aesthetic element plays an important role in the fan's love of the game. Furthermore, in certain kinds of aesthetic experiences we are captivated by our involvement with another temporally articulated world. In the world of the aesthetic object we are taken up by an alternative context of meaning and significance, so much so that these very involvements seem not only to give us a momentary reprieve from the ordinary world; they also help give sense to our lives. If such a response concerning the appeal of sports is enlightening with regard to the fan's experience, I believe it will also disclose something important about the participant's experience. Thus two central notions will emerge from these reflections. (My method will be, roughly speaking, phenomenological.) First, sport provides the occasion for intrinsically interesting experiences and insofar as it does, it is aesthetically valuable. Second, sport also provides contexts of meaning for people, narratives that become existentially valuable for selves seeking a sense of meaning in life.

To work toward these conclusions let us begin with an alternative account of human experience. Against the backdrop of the view of experience described by Sartre in his early novel, Nausea, the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of experience will emerge more sharply.

Nausea is the purported diary of a young man, Antoine Roquentin, whose life is undergoing fundamental changes.³ Antoine is writing a biography of a minor nineteenth century historical figure while he attempts to understand the recurring revelatory experience named by the title of Sartre's great existentialist novel. Antoine's nausea supposedly reveals the brute facticity of being, the utter contingency of himself and all other things, a contingency concealed by various philosophical, religious, and practical strategies. To exist is simply to be there, superfluous (de trop). One shows up on the scene and must realize that any attempt to understand human nature in terms of some kind of rational necessity is to falsify what it means to be. Sartre's novel is a sustained reflection on the theme of contingency. For our purposes, however, it is Antoine's related remarks on adventure that are most significant, for the feeling of adventure, he insists, relies on the imposition of narrative structures that falsify the basic contingency of experience.

Prior to returning to Bouville to use the library for his historical researches, Antoine had traveled widely. The pathetic little "humanist," the Self-Taught Man, systematically reading all of the books in the library in alphabetical order, envies Antoine's adventurous past. The "autodidacte" wants to pursue adventures after he has finished his own instruction. As they talk, the Self-Taught Man's adoring interrogations occasion Antoine's reflective denial of the possibility of adventure, because he realizes he has lost the sense that adventurous events can make moments of life special or particularly meaningful. He attempts to understand and explain this loss of meaningfulness.

Antoine says that he "had imagined that at certain times that my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: All I asked for was a little precision" (N, p. 37). The "precision" would be constituted by a series of events with a "beginning." "The beginnings would have to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium" (N, p. 37). Antoine believes that when one experiences an adventure, the experience of time is altered. "Each instant appears only as part of a sequence," unlike the daily routine of life. The felt sense of a "real beginning" is dragged forward by a sense of immanent direction in the experience, like the notes of a melody. A sense of fitness shapes each developing moment. Antoine summarizes his analysis of adventure:

This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. (N, p. 39)

Antoine expresses here the familiar contemporary theme that our stories attempt to give some narrative shape to our otherwise fragmentary and amorphous experience. But he now denies that our stories capture the true nature of our experience. Storytellers are condemned to falsify experience which has no such narrative form. Storytelling is just another mode of self-deception; it is the attempt to hide from contingency. "But you have to choose: live or tell" (N, p. 39). Live or tell! Truth or storytelling—you can't have it both ways. "Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition" (N, p. 39). Antoine realizes that life is just one damn thing after another, with no internal coherence, no direction, no unity.

One can attempt to transform the past by telling about it, but the structure is imposed, a projection in which the end artificially transforms the nature of the events. "As if there could possibly be true stories" (N, p. 39). This model of projection, the imposition of structures on the events of experience, is clearly explained in Antoine's following comments. (Note, here, as in other parts of the book, the Humean character of his reflections.)

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk about the amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. (N, pp. 56-57)

Such reflections should be disturbing to a biographer, and it is easy to understand why Antoine gives up his writing project. But where does he go after he realizes that stories falsify? Direction is puzzling, contingency is inescapable. He no longer has the luxury of seeking adventures. "I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail" (N, p. 40). Antoine's future is only hinted at in the book, but his salvation will have something to do with the necessity he perceives in the unfolding character of songs. Of course, he's not a musician, but he embraces an ontology of art that allows for the salvific qualities of the experiences of composer, performer, and perceiver. Works of art don't "exist" like the brute facticity of contingent beings in the world. In the artwork, there is a felt necessity that transcends the contingency of ordinary life. Perhaps he would write a book:

Another type of book. I don't quite know which kind—but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen, an adventure. It would be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence. (N, p. 178)

Sartre's narrator leaves us with a challenging but somewhat dreary view of life. On the one hand, life would make sense if all or parts of it had an immanent, story-like character. If life is just one damn thing after another, it's going nowhere; it's not even a tale told by an idiot, since it is not a tale at all. No wonder Antoine wanted the moments of his life to have the order of a story. We do often experience parts of our life as essentially storyless. On the other hand, must we agree that such structures are added only in retrospect, reflectively modifying, transforming, and thus falsifying a mere dissociated sequence of events as the sequence is represented or reflectively reenacted? Antoine hints that one might find salvation in the experience of aesthetic necessity, "above existence," but he leaves no doubt that ordinary life is without such order. Is there an unbridgeable gap between ordinary experience and the narrative reconstruction of it associated with our stories and our other aesthetic transactions? I don't think so, and to show this we should look at another account of experience.

One of the main problems with Antoine's view of experience is that his own diary belies the general account his diary expresses. Obviously, the "form" of a diary might be an appropriate way to express the fragmentation that he describes. His diary was found, supposedly, among his papers. Does it begin? Only in the sense that there is a first entry, but there is no "real beginning." The reader merely shows up at a point at which the diary is in progress, not that this date is of any particular significance. Neither is there some specific "end" to transform the sequence of events. In the final entry we find that Antoine will drift into indeterminacy, his future hinted at yet shrouded in uncertainty. But the life described in the diary is no undifferentiated flow. Antoine recounts a series of situations and events: lunch with the Self-Taught Man; the meeting with his former lover, Anny; the final tragic scene when the Self-Taught Man is caught flirting with a young boy and chastely caressing the boy's hand. It is this last scene, especially, that is expressed with tautness and suspense. The situation unfolds with dramatic necessity. When the Corsican smashes the Self-Taught Man's face and the little humanist retreats in humiliation, his abstract love of humanity suffocated by the realities of real human hatred and disgust, it's not that Antoine's telling has transformed the experience. The narrative has disclosed the immanent development of the situation.

Life is simply not necessarily like Antoine's description of it: "No beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition." I think of my own life. I'm a teacher. For many years at least part of my life has been structured by the rhythms of an academic calendar (an academic "season" in the language of baseball). My life, in part, consists of semesters, courses, and classes. Parts of my life stand out from the general flow of experience. For example, most teachers can recall an especially excellent and pleasurable course, and within such a course certain days in which the class discussion developed in an exciting and wonderful way: perhaps a new line of inquiry, novel comments, an interesting new argument, effective Socratic direction, the material coming together in an unsuspected way leading to a satisfying conclusion. Such an experience is integrated and fulfilling. Contrast that with courses and classes in which there is no smooth development; there are starts and stops, gaps and edges, and there is no sense of completion or satisfactory windup. Contrast the alluring and satisfying character of the good class with the unappealing quality of the bad class. Our lives are not simply "one damn thing after another," in one undifferentiated flow of experience. (Later we will see the way in which experience can be interpreted in terms of the concept of narrative. For now, we will be most interested in the aesthetic possibilities of experience.)

John Dewey has described this with acuteness in Art as Experience.⁴ "For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout" (AE, pp. 35-36). Dewey speaks of the difference between experience in general and having an experience, when "the material runs its course to fulfillment. Then and only then is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences" (AE, p. 35). I have given as an example of an experience my own experience as a teacher, but such possibilities are pervasive in life. Dewey mentions such possibilities in relation to finishing a piece of work, solving a problem, eating a meal, writing a book, having a conversation, and (obviously important for the purposes of this paper) playing a game. He offers an extended description of an experience of thinking to show when it is possible that an experience is "so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency" (AE, p. 35).

Dewey stresses two important features of an experience. First, there is a temporal structure of connection within the experience. There is a structure of organization and growth: "inception, development, fulfillment" (AE, p. 55). "In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues" (AE, p. 36). Such experiences are temporally integrated. The second feature is somewhat more difficult to get at phenomenologically. There is a felt unity within an experience, "constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it" (AE, p. 37). In some experience one of these elements may dominate, and reflection can apprehend such dominance. If I recall an experience of philosophical reflection, the intellectual elements would predominate, but Dewey insists that the experience as lived would be emotional as well. "No thinker can ply his occupation save as he is lured and rewarded by total integral experiences that are intrinsically worthwhile" (AE, p. 37).

We are now ready to connect Dewey's account of experience to the aesthetic and ultimately to sport. Dewey insists that every experience so constituted as an experience has "esthetic quality." Aesthetic experience proper, for example, the creation and experience of works of fine art, differ from predominantly intellectual and practical activities in the dominating interest, intent, and materials. But here as elsewhere, Dewey wants to deny what he sees as a pernicious dualism. He denies the radical separation of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. In practical activity ("overt doings") and in intellectual activity ("thinking") there are latent aesthetic possibilities. Even in an experience of thinking, "the experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement. The artistic structure may be immediately felt. Insofar, it is esthetic" (AE, p. 38). I believe Dewey calls such a quality of an experience "esthetic" for two related reasons: because the quality is felt or perceived in an immediate acquaintance and because such a structure is intrinsically satisfying or valued. In fact, Dewey believes that art involves the intention to make objects whose sensuous qualities are immediately enjoyable to perception because of the aesthetic structure he describes.

It is clear that the upshot of Dewey's analysis of the aesthetic is to alter the normal view that aesthetic experience is different in kind from acting and thinking. He attempts to show that "the esthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but that it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience" (AE, p. 46). It is striking to read Dewey's account of "an experience" with sport in mind, since the description captures so sharply the experiences of viewing (and playing) sports. Consider a baseball game. The game is initiated by a real beginning, not merely an accidental first occurrence associated with clock time. The first inning is internally related to all future occurrences in the game; events that occur later will invest early moments with novel significance and earlier moments will be meaningful in relation to later moments (a kind of hermeneutic circle). The pitcher attempts to establish his fastball, probes the weaknesses of certain hitters, and attempts to gain a sense of the umpire's strike zone. Fielders position themselves according to their judgment of the swing and strength of the hitters, and they must remember previous at bats. Coaches learn and respond as the game proceeds. The pitcher has a poor move to first; the catcher's arm is strong but his release is slow and his feet are plodding. The pitcher never throws breaking balls when he's behind in the count. A decision is made to steal second base. And so on. The game involves "overt doings," but these practical activities are invested with strategic meanings. Each moment is pregnant with future possibilities as the game develops. If the game is a good one, the action is tense and occasions excitement and suspense. From the fan's perspective, attention is intensely focused on the actions, decisions, and meanings inside the world of the game. If one knows baseball well, the complexity of a particular game is quite amazing. An entire book might be written describing one game!⁵ The teleology within the development of the game finally leads to a consummating moment when victory or defeat makes the experience complete. In Dewey's language, the game has constituted an experience, an integral experience with aesthetic quality.

Dewey describes a mundane practical activity: a stone rolling down a hill, towards a resting place. But he imaginatively adds an interesting possibility. Suppose the stone is self-conscious:

Let us add, by imagination . . . the idea that it looks forward with desire to the final outcome; that it is interested in the things it meets on the way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end; that it acts and feels toward them according to the hindering or helping function it attributes to them; and that the final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement. Then the stone would have an experience, and one with esthetic quality. (AE, p. 39)

Let's change Dewey's example slightly. Suppose that the stone is a self-conscious leather ball filled with air, but it allows others to act in order to achieve its final resting place, and those others are interested in its movement. Together, the ball and other self-conscious beings (persons) make some arbitrary decisions in order to make possible intrinsically enjoyable actions (playful activities) and experiences. They decide to construct a goal, allow the ball to be advanced only by kicking, place boundaries on the space within which the ball can be advanced, the time it takes to have opportunities to kick the ball into the goal, and the number of players who will either attempt to make a goal or keep others from kicking the ball into the goal. The players, interested in such activities, would have an experience. Likewise, if we let others watch and these self-conscious beings were knowledgeable about the rules of the activity and interested in the outcome, they would also have an experience with aesthetic quality.

Why would people be captivated or fascinated by watching such activities? One reason, I believe, is the contrast they would find between the satisfying structures of an experience and the typical experiences of ordinary life. Recall Antoine's interpretation of human experience: life is merely a series of events leading nowhere. Things happened to him, but with no apparent meaning that related these events to one another. Life can be like that, as we have said. Again, to use Dewey's language, it is to see life as an aimless succession of events. We drift, towards nothing or nowhere in particular. The drift of aimlessness leads to boredom. At the other extreme, parts of our life may be so ruled by a kind of order or structure that each moment seems to succeed the previous one in mechanical determination. Here the paradigm example would be factory work, in which some task is repeated over and over, activities strictly determined by time, tightly governed rules, and technical expertise. Aesthetic interest, constituted by acute attentiveness, anticipation, tension, and teleologically directed captivation, is contrasted with the boredom of aesthetic looseness and the oppressiveness of aesthetic constriction. Moments of experience are aesthetically interesting when integration is mediated by novelty; unity in development is colored by uncertainty; initiations are fulfilled by consummating moments, not mere endings. Dewey is right to insist that it is incorrect to distinguish sharply between aesthetic experience associated with art proper and supposedly ordinary "non-aesthetic" experience, simply because so much of our experience consists of one of these two poles: loose succession with no internal development and consummation or mechanical succession:

There exists so much of one and the other of these two kinds of experience that unconsciously they come to be taken as norms of all experience. Then, when the esthetic appears, it so sharply contrasts with the picture that has been formed of experience, that it is impossible to combine its special qualities with the features of the picture and the esthetic is given an outside place and status. The account that has been given of experience as dominantly intellectual and practical is intended to show that there is no such contrast involved in having an experience; that, on the contrary, no experience of whatever sort is a unity unless it has aesthetic quality. (AE, p. 40)

If Dewey is correct, experiences of sport and in sport, like the experiences associated with reading books, listening to music, going to movies, etc., can be seen as attempts to replace aesthetically impoverished ordinary experiences with experiences that have aesthetic quality. Of course there are differences, but it is the Deweyan similarities that I want to stress. These similarities, it seems to me, offer a plausible explanation of at least part of the attraction of sport.

Let me end this section with some brief related remarks that confirm the association I have suggested. Monroe Beardsley's well known notion of aesthetic value depends heavily on Dewey's description of aesthetic experience.⁶ Beardsley says that, among other things, aesthetic experiences are intense, unified (they "hang together"), and internally complete, in the sense that they are differentiated from the "general stream of experience." All of this is quite familiar to us after having looked carefully at Dewey's account. Beardsley adds that the characteristics of aesthetic experience are found in other experiences but that they are combined differently. He even mentions playing games in which we enjoy activities having "no practical purpose." But, according to Beardsley,"it seems not necessarily to be an experience of a high degree of unity. Watching a baseball or football game is also generally lacking in a dominant pattern and consummation, though sometimes it has these characteristics to a high degree and is an aesthetic experience."⁷ Beardsley's comments confirm the notion that sport offers aesthetic possibilities. However, these possibilities may be more available to those whose interests in and knowledge of the sport are keen, just as the aesthetic possibilities of a work of art are more available to the sensitive and knowledgeable consumer of art.⁸

As we have seen, one way to respond to Antoine's phenomenology is to think about the concept of the aesthetic in Deweyan terms. But recall that Antoine specifically uses the language of narrative and story. As storytellers we are condemned to falsify our experience. Sartre's narrator wanted the moments of his life to be ordered, like a story, but that would merely be a life remembered, not lived. However, the aesthetic structure of an experience is not merely imposed. There are "real beginnings," in sport and elsewhere in life. What Dewey calls the aesthetic structure of a developed and integrated experience, rounded out and differentiated in the general stream of experience, could also be described as a narrative. As Dewey has said, life consists of histories, with different plots, rhythms of development, distinctive "emotional" qualities, and consummating moments. Life consists of stories we live, not simply artificially reconstruct in reflection.

Alasdair MacIntyre has stressed the role of narrative in life, in the context of a criticism of the modern conception of a self who is unable to be the bearer of the traditional virtues.⁹ For our purposes, a narrative conception of selfhood will be another significant ground for the attractiveness of sport. Briefly, MacIntyre criticizes modernist conceptions of life that either attempt to explain human action atomistically or radically separate the individual from the social roles he inhabits. He shows that action can be adequately explained only by referring to an agent's intentions, and that these intentions are themselves embedded in "settings" that have histories. (Settings may be practices, institutions, or other situations.) To explain what a person is doing is to refer to narratives within which individuals live and act. An act of gardening may be a way of sustaining the family, helping a marriage, or attaining a more healthful personal life. "Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential¹⁰ genre for the characterization of human actions." Narrative interpretation makes action intelligible by placing it in a historical context.

MacIntyre insists that even such a common and familiar type of situation as a conversation must be understood in terms of narrative. Conversations "have beginnings, middles, and endings just as do literary works. They embody reversals and recognitions; they move towards and away from climaxes."¹¹ Likewise, human transactions in general have a narrative structure: "battles, chess games, courtships, philosophy seminars, families at a dinner table, businessmen negotiating contracts."¹² He concludes that "both conversations in particular then and human actions in general are enacted narratives."¹³ He is quite clear that Antoine's view of life is simply a false picture typical of modernity:

It is now becoming clear that we render the actions of others intelligible in this way because action itself has a basically historical character. It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told—except in the case of fiction.¹⁴

What do we make of MacIntyre's narrative conception of selfhood in relation to the possibilities associated with sport? Perhaps MacIntyre is right that narrative is the essential way we make sense of life. Of course, there is a complex relationship among the various narratives we live as individuals. MacIntyre speaks of narratives being "embedded" in one another. A person may be a mother, wife, friend, teacher, scholar, poet, and amateur chef, all embedded in one life. But whether it's merely an aberration of modernity or an inevitable part of any human life, individuals often appear to lose the sense that important parts of their life or life in general have any narrative structure. Marriages fail and important friendships fade. Flowering careers are displaced by unemployment, and health is replaced by disease and suffering. Families disintegrate and communities or small groups are wrecked by dissension. It is often quite difficult to see where all of this, or even discrete parts of it, could be going. MacIntyre's account of the narrative structure of human life is tainted by nostalgia, as if fragmentation is merely an accidental historical condition.

Richard Lischer has expressed a halting pessimism in the face of attempts to make story pervasive in life. In his useful article, "The Limits of Story,"¹⁵ he expresses a middle way between MacIntyre's optimism and Antoine's deep and abiding pessimism that narratives falsify our life. Arguing against theologians and preachers who have embraced the primacy of story, Lischer believes that parts of our life are indeed shapeless and storyless, that "story falsifies those vast and deep non-narrative domains of human life."¹⁶ Narratives impose a structure on a disordered life, and "may provide the sense of order so desperately needed or they may appear transparently palliative to those whose experience has resisted the broom that sweeps in one direction."¹⁷

We may experience our life or parts of our lives as essentially storyless. And when we do, it is natural to seek out new stories, or return to areas of experience which offer the meaningful possibilities of story. I can think of no area in modern life that offers more possibilities for story-like experiences than sports. Certainly, viewing sports and being a "real fan" may appear to be more "transparently palliative" than reading our scriptures or praying to our gods. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the ways in which people identify with the narratives associated with sports are important strategies for finding a sense of meaning and concern in an otherwise anarchical life. I don't want to appear to be saying that the only role that sports play in the life of individuals is therapeutic, keeping the wolf of despair at bay. For the psychologically fit as well as the despairing, sport is there. But if our gods are dead, our politics shallow, our cultural life thin, our work alienated, and our relation to the world overly technological, we may need the atmosphere of play and narrative more than ever. (The overcommercialization of sport may be cause for despair as well.)

Lischer offers apt comments on the storyless places in our lives:

They exist wherever episodic complications have stagnated and cease to develop with any organic connection toward new episodes and new complications. Life continues as a series of unrelated episodes, as in a collection of short stories by many authors, or it proceeds by a series of "slices" or scenes, as in a cabaret show or picture gallery. An objective thread of identity may persist, but to those caught in this kind of life, the "I" known long ago in Act One has become a stranger. Indeed, if one is to make sense of such a life, it will not be by casting it into acts and rationalizing its plot but by rediscovering the continuity of identity throughout the confusion of broken plots, botched lines, and embarrassing non-sequiturs.¹⁸

Think about these comments in relation to the games we played in childhood and the games we still care about as adults. One might consider the deep love so many have for baseball. (I use baseball only as an apt example. There may be nothing particularly "special" about our national pastime as a source of certain kinds of story-like experiences.) For many who played baseball as children, it meant really caring about something, about hopes and dreams, special moments, enduring relationships, magical situations, and joy. It also meant having heroes, collecting baseball cards, listening to and watching games, sometimes heated conversations, and yes—fathers playing catch with their sons. So one grows up and gets on with life. Winter comes to a close, days get longer, and spring rolls around. It's baseball season again! At least there may seem to be one thing in life that makes sense in its captivating and alluring qualities. The unity of a life may reappear as spring training begins. If "episodic complications have stagnated" in one's life, and have ceased "to develop with any organic connection toward new episodes and new complications," there are still available the narrative experiences of sport. To watch a baseball game is to move from ordinary life to a realm of experience in which episodic complications are alive with possibilities, organically developing in a teleologically directed movement. But a game may be "embedded" (MacIntyre's term) in a series, and a series may be embedded in an entire season. If we think about major league baseball, the narrative possibilities that we may identify with and vicariously experience are practically endless. For each game, each inning, even every pitch and at bat, are embedded in a complex historical setting. Players, coaches, teams, and leagues have careers, statistical relationships abound, and strategic maneuvers are omni-present. To love baseball is to immerse oneself in a world of transparent meanings, efficacious actions, and admirable excellences. It is to identify with the story of a game, a team, a career, and even one's own life. If there is a need for story in our lives, as there was for Antoine, one may momentarily keep the wolf at bay by being a fan. And the distance between the transparently palliative experiences of the fan and "real life" may be closed by sustaining an internal relationship to sport by playing or coaching.¹⁹

Recall that Antoine's diary ends on a somewhat hopeful note. He says he may write a book, create a story "which would not exist, which would be above existence." His ontology of art is the basis for an act of transcendence, beyond the contingency of the ordinary, as if participation in the structure of a story would give some hope of salvation. Although I've insisted that ordinary experience has aesthetic and narrative possibilities, the experience of sport is not quite ordinary. If Antoine can be saved by or through art, "above existence," the story-like experiences of sport are also insulated, in some sense, from real life, and that is why sport is such a fecund arena for these possibilities. This is the point at which sport as aesthetic and sport as narrative naturally reconnect with sport as play. Recall Huizinga's famous account of play.²⁰ Play is not ordinary or real life; it is a free activity standing outside of ordinary life, in which a distinctive order reigns. Kenneth Schmitz has also emphasized the notion of play as "suspension of the ordinary," the world of play as a "distinctive order," and sport as a rule-governed activity grounded in the spirit of play.²¹ We are now in a position to see the peculiar order of the world of play in aesthetic and narrative terms. Since persons find aesthetic quality intrinsically satisfying and since persons need stories in order to experience life as having some shape, pattern, or end, it is natural that so many people would be drawn to sport—not merely because of a thirst for victory, a desire to make the other submit, or a need to be excellent. Lovers of sport need not be apologetic about their appreciation of the aesthetic nor their need for story in life.

NOTES

¹ Drew Hyland, Philosophy of Sport (New York: Paragon House, 1990), p. 125.

² See the following articles by Randolph Feezell: "Sport: Pursuit of Bodily Excellence or Play? An Examination of Paul Weiss's Account of Sport," The Modern Schoolman 58 (May, 1981): 257-70; "Play, Freedom, and Sport," Philosophy Today 25 (Summer, 1981): p. 166-75; "Play and the Absurd," Philosophy Today 28 (Winter, 1984): 319-28; "Sportsmanship," Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 13 (1986): 1-13; "On the Wrongness of Cheating and Why Cheaters Can't Play the Game," Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 15 (1988): 57-68; "Sport, Character, and Virtue," Philosophy Today 33 (Fall, 1989): 204-20.

³ Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964). I will abbreviate the title and refer to it as N. Also, I will cite all specific references to the novel in the body of the paper.

⁴ John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958). I will abbreviate the title and refer to it as AE. Also, I will cite all specific references to Dewey's text in the body of the paper. All quotations will come from Chapter 3, "Having an Experience."

⁵ As a matter of fact, a recent book has been written describing and analyzing only two games. See Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan, Pure Baseball: Pitch by Pitch for the Advanced Fan (New York, Harper Collins, 1994).

⁶ Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981), pp. 524-56.

⁷Ibid., p. 530.

⁸ Also see Joseph Kupfer, Experience as Art: Aesthetics in Everyday Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), for a more lengthy treatment of the aesthetic possibilities in ordinary life. Kupfer has also been influenced by Dewey. Chapter 5, "Sport—The Body Electric," is especially interesting.

⁹ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1984).

¹⁰Ibid., p. 208.

¹¹Ibid., p. 211.

¹²Ibid.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 212.

¹⁵ Richard Lischer, "The Limits of Story," Interpretation 38 (January, 1984): 26-38.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 30.

¹⁷Ibid.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 31.

¹⁹ See A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games (New York: Summit Books, 1989), especially Chapter 3, "Baseball as Narrative," for a loving reflection related to these comments.

²⁰ Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, Beacon Press, 1955), especially Chapter 1, "Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon."

²¹ Kenneth Schmitz, "Sport and Play: Suspension of the Ordinary," in Morgan and Meier, eds., Philosophic Inquiry in Sport (Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics, 1988), pp. 29-38.