From the volume Editor: Some remarks on sport from its historical-cultural horizon
Authors: Zowisło Maria 
Published: January 2020

The beautiful parable of Pythagoras, handed down by
Cicero (Tusculanae Disputationes, V, 3), about the Greek
Games as a metaphor of human life, is well-known.
In this parable, the great philosopher and mathematician
presents three groups of people who come to
the Games (figuratively, the World Games, the Theatre
of Life): these are athletes – applying for fame and
a wreath of victory, viewers – motivated by an impartial
desire to watch the competitions and merchants –
putting up stalls for the sale of goods and profit. The
featured groups serve Pythagoras as allegories of social
roles and human aspirations for values: prestigious and
elite (athletes), cognitive and exploratory (spectators)
as well as mercantile and consumer (merchants). This
parabola essentially serves to expose a sense of philosophy,
love wisdom, based on pure and autotelic cognitive
curiosity (viewers represent this attitude). The fact
that Pythagoras uses the image of the Games here is
not accidental, since Greek philosophers were greatly
interested in athletics (Pythagoras was friends with the
famous wrestler Milo of Croton). Greek athletes were,
in fact, spectacular and faithful representatives of their
culture, marked by strong individualism flourishing in
the tensions between the two oppositional poles: time
(fame) and ajdos (shame). The sources of the ancient
Hellenic “culture of glory and shame” are rooted in
the heroic myths of Homer’s rhapsode. These myths
were later subjected to rational sublimation in the ethical
and anthropological considerations of philosophers
(Pythagoras made a brilliant and, at the same time,
raw contribution to them). They also became an archetypal
element of the pan-Hellenic agonist ethos and
the local athletic and artistic games. Pierre de Coubertin,
nostalgically fixated on noble myth and heroic
ethos, transferred his senses and values to the ideology
of neo-Olympism, desiring the modern Olympic
movement be not only a government of bodies, but
also a lesson of character, a government of souls. He
initiated not only modern Olympiads, but also the theoretical
hermeneutics of sport, which is still doing well
and developing in the form of, among others, Olympic
education, philosophy and ethics of sport, history
of sport and physical education, sociology of physical
culture. Here is today’s participation in the Games
of these Pythagorean spectators – theoreticians (Greek
theoria, a panorama, observation), researchers, scientists
who develop an ideological and axio-normative
basis of sports practices.
Despite didactic efforts, effective crystallization
and articulation of principles and ideological imperatives
by Coubertin and his followers, sport today seems
to be losing its archetypal eidos. According to numerous
diagnoses, this is the result of the faster appropriation
of athletic spaces by heterogeneous economic influences
(Pythagorean traders!), – those political, media-
and marketing-related. Pure sports values, such as
competition, perfectionism, pageantry, bodily and psychological
power of man are today subjected to instrumentalisation
processes and are used for non-sporting
purposes. Critics practicing jeremiads on the condition
of modern sport and the decline in the value
of its ethos even go as far as to theorise that “sport
no longer exists” because it gave the field to foreign
dictates. Therefore, sport may appear as a “contemporary
slave market”, “marketplace of vanity and greed”,
“post-human laboratory”, “pitch of imperial skirmishes
of world political powers”. All these affairs actually
concern the condition of not only sport, but also
the state of society and culture in general. Sport, due
to its spectacular presence in the global world, is particularly
predisposed to focus dominant trends, influences
and interests within it. Sport is not more immoral
than the world of which it is a part. For these
reasons, it is so eagerly analysed by historians, sociologists
and cultural scholars, for whom it is a heuristic
model for studying the dynamics of cultural changes.
Sport is a mirror focusing the whole of social life and
historical processes occurring within the human world,
i.e. culture. Approaching this from a hermeneutic understanding
and interpreting reflection towards sport,
we can (as Hans-Georg Gadamer taught) fuse horizons
of historical tradition and contexts that are the
result of problems, crises and dilemmas of our time.
A meaningful interpretation of these collisions regards extracting vital meaning for current life, as well as increasing
the level of human self-knowledge and responsibility.
Sport, in its rich historical tradition, in
the solstices, barriers, temptations and challenges of
present day, requires such a complex understanding.
In the introduction to Elements of the Philosophy of
Right, Hegel expressed an unusual and invariably current
formula: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings
only with the falling of the dusk”. Wisdom is born
at dusk, it is the knowledge of the times that passes
by in the eyes of the people who create it. Only
at the end of events can one clearly and unambiguously
draw (against the symbolism of dusk) explanations
of their important moments, including the symptoms
and causes of crises. There is no wisdom without
a historical sense and reflection on the transformation
of culture. Wilhelm Dilthey, the creator of philosophical
hermeneutics, extended the self-knowledge of
man to the knowledge of the vast history of the past,
stating that only history tells man who he really is.
We can use these directives to study the evolution of
sport, both in its historical forms of flourishing and
decadence, as well as in the institutions, biographies
of sports champions, the fate of ideas and values deposited
in it. Sport studied in such a manner has the
power of anthropological recognition, it can tell a man
who he himself is. Despite the symptoms of crisis,
sport is still important for a person, arousing his enthusiasm,
giving birth to new masters who become admired
models and personal authorities. A man defends
sport, fair play and the values that fund his ethos, because
he cares about sport, considering it an expression
and fulfilment of the rudiments of his own existence.
The collection of articles presented in this volume of
Studies in Sport Humanities can be viewed as a small
fragment of the wider fresco of sport culture in its historical
changes and present shapes. Two historical texts
relate to the development of sport in the Polish interwar
period, on the example of the individual career of
the Polish footballer Ernest Wilimowski and institutional
management of sports disciplines in Volhynia,
an extremely ethnically and culturally diverse province
at the time. The other two articles present contemporary
discussions on sports tourism (casus of the Philippines)
and the religious dimension of sport. We invite
you to read, and through these texts to, continue the
debate on the historical and current great and smaller
matters of sport.