Sporting sacrifice under suspicion and in perspective: a proposal of Nietzschean inspirationAbstract
The text reflects on the concept of sacrifice as it appears in sport. It draws on Nietzsche's philosophy and applies the method of suspicion to the ways in which life is submitted to the values of Judaeo-Christian morality. We infer that sport, as a symbolic element of life, may absorb moral values in which sporting success is understood as a reward for the sacrifices of training. Following Nietzsche's philosophy, we take up the recommendation to propose a transvaluation, in this case to consider how sacrifice might present itself not as an echo of that metaphysical vice, but rather as an affirmation of life and of the present. In this transvalued sense, sporting sacrifice would be seen not as a means to an end, but as the elaborate formation of excellence.
Keywords
sacrifice; sport; Nietzsche; aesthetics; ethics
Resumo
O texto faz uma reflexão sobre o conceito de sacrifício presente no esporte. Recorre à filosofia de Nietzsche e aplica o método da suspeita quanto aos modos de submissão da vida aos valores da moral judaico-cristã. Inferimos que o esporte, como elemento simbólico da vida, pode absorver valores morais nos quais o sucesso esportivo é entendido como recompensa para os sacrifícios do treinamento. Pela filosofia de Nietzsche, seguimos a recomendação de propor uma transvaloração, no caso, de pensarmos como o sacrifício poderia se apresentar não como um eco desse vício metafísico, mas, antes, uma afirmação da vida e do presente. Nesse sentido transvalorado, o sacrifício esportivo não seria visto como um meio para se atingir um fim, mas a elaborada formação da excelência.
Palavras-chave
sacrifício; esporte; Nietzsche; estética; ética
Resumen
El texto reflexiona sobre el concepto de sacrificio presente en el deporte. Recurre a la filosofía de Nietzsche y aplica el método de la sospecha a los modos de sometimiento de la vida a los valores de la moral judeocristiana. Inferimos que el deporte, como elemento simbólico de la vida, puede absorber valores morales en los que el éxito deportivo se entiende como recompensa por los sacrificios del entrenamiento. Por la filosofía de Nietzsche, seguimos la recomendación de proponer una transvaloración, en este caso, de pensar cómo el sacrificio podría presentarse no como un eco de ese vicio metafísico, sino, antes bien, como una afirmación de la vida y del presente. En ese sentido transvalorado, el sacrificio deportivo no sería visto como un medio para alcanzar un fin, sino como la elaborada formación de la excelencia.
Palabras clave
sacrificio; deporte; Nietzsche; estética; ética
Introduction
Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, became known for his peculiar way of philosophizing “with a hammer”. His thought and his philosophy are characterized by a radical critique of the religious and moral constructions that exert deleterious effects on the body and on the life of the subject, in both an aesthetic and an ethical sense, which he frequently points out as inseparable.
The philosopher proposes that we keep our beliefs and our values always under suspicion, since such truths are only the fruit of human creation arising from particular relations of forces (Nietzsche, 2009). Known as the thinker of suspicion, the German invites us to doubt all our convictions, certainties and judgements: “I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too haughty to be satisfied with a crude answer” (Nietzsche, 2008, p. 33).
In terms of a philosophy of sport, it falls to us to suspect whether the principle of sacrifice, so present in the sporting context, in fact represents what is ordinarily associated with it, or whether it carries, beneath this veil of appearance, an entire heavy moral apparatus scarcely questioned by sporting actors. Within this discussion, it seems to us that sacrifice has become a criterion for a subjective perception of the quality of effort in sport. The daily pain and suffering arising from injuries and physical discomfort must be overcome through sacrifices, and from this results a sense of a task accomplished by virtue of the improvement in performance (Gonçalves & Vaz, 2012; Torri et al., 2007; Vaz, 1999).
On the variable of suffering, Dostoevsky (2017) points out that it acquired a relation with beauty and thus came to be proclaimed and extolled, given its dimension of reason. In this way we would displace these elements from the existential sphere to the dimension of the quantifiable and the ordinary. A supposedly secure understanding of life came to be superior to life itself. Suffering thereby becomes a founding and evaluative condition for the attribution of meaning to the actions performed (Brady, 2019). Moreover, the equation pain + suffering = sacrifice acquires a familiar character in the routine of training.
Sacrifice and philosophy of sport
This study is characterized as a theoretical investigation of a bibliographical nature, guided by the philosophy of suspicion and by Nietzschean perspectivism. The methodological path was developed in two complementary stages.
Initially, a bibliographical survey was carried out in the two main international journals devoted to the philosophy of sport, the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport (JPS) and Sport, Ethics and Philosophy (SEP). As a search strategy, the term “sacrifice” was used as a keyword. Ninety-seven texts were identified in the JPS and ninety-one texts in the SEP in which the word occurred at least once in the body of the text.
Next, the titles and abstracts of the works found were read, with the aim of identifying those that effectively addressed the concept of sacrifice in the sporting context. Thirty-seven articles were selected as pertinent to the conceptual field under investigation. Texts in which the term appeared only incidentally, as a linguistic resource for expressing ideas of self-denial or renunciation, were excluded, as were occurrences restricted to bibliographical references or footnotes.
The selected articles were submitted to an interpretative analysis of hermeneutic inspiration, seeking to identify the different meanings attributed to the concept of sacrifice in the specialized literature. From this reading, distinct perspectives on the understanding of the phenomenon were mapped, such as sacrifice associated with dedication to training, with the pursuit of victory, with the observance of rules, with collective relations and with the symbolic legacies of the Greek tradition. This set of interpretations constituted the analytical material used for the dialogue with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and for the elaboration of the proposal of a transvaluation of the concept of sporting sacrifice presented in this study. This effort proceeded in three directions: to set out the critical fortune already existing in the field; to ratify the concept of Nietzschean perspectivism in its claim that there is no Truth but only interpretations; and, finally, to present our contribution regarding the concept of sacrifice from a Nietzschean perspective.
Corlett et al. (2013, p. 44) appropriate the term in order to address the theme of anti-doping testing and state: “The testing procedures best ensure that ‘clean athletes’ hard work and sacrifice is not in vain as those who dope are caught and punished accordingly”. We perceive in this excerpt a flirtation with a possible purism and a search for justice and equality. Sacrifice, in turn, will not be in vain, and it comes accompanied by the promise of a supposed reward (Cléret & MacNamee, 2012). A form of demonstration and endorsement of success, of validation. A certain inducement to the maintenance of this cyclical behaviour. What remains for us is to ask whether it is really possible to guarantee this reward. Should the answer be negative, would there still be the same impetus to carry out certain sacrifices?
Other authors, across various sporting modalities, also make this approximation (Austin, 2012; Ávila da Costa & Lacerda, 2016; Bellieni, 2015; Boxill, 2006; Cudd, 2007; Gorichanaz, 2019; Hochstetler & Hopsicker, 2016; Ilundáin-Agurruza, 2014, 2017; Kretchmar, 2012; Macrae, 2018; Martínková, 2012; McNamee, 2006; Reid, 2010a; Sampedro, 2015; Sarremejane, 2015; Scarpa & Carraro, 2011; Tuncel, 2015). In these works, the uses of the concept of sacrifice are directed at various associated objects, such as time, family, leisure or study. In short, a reduction or an impossibility of engaging in other social activities that might diminish or compromise performance. The passages below serve as samples of these findings: “Similarly, endurance athletes sacrifice time with their loved ones, and perhaps work-related careers as well, in order to pursue their own athletic goals” (Hochstetler & Hopsicker, 2016, p. 343):
Sport may represent an opportunity to fully develop as an individual, provided that it does not lose its dignity, thus merely becoming a hankering after results. In order to talk about real sport, a series of values must be present: tenacity, a spirit of sacrifice, interior and exterior discipline, and again a sense of justice, awareness of someone’s limits and respect for others
(Scarpa & Carraro, 2011, p. 120).
Training requires the compromising or sacrificing of other benefits of a well-rounded life, such as developing friendships and pursuing other social opportunities, along with educational opportunities, and with them opportunities to cultivate interests in life-long learning (not to mention improved economic life prospects)
(Macrae, 2018, pp. 63-64).
Many athletes are willing to make great sacrifices in order to achieve victory (Gilbertson, 2016). Some researchers corroborate and make this approximation:
The “virtues” of the modern athlete are those characteristics typical of winners; sports figures are glorified for their outstanding performances, self-discipline, ambition, and capacity for hard work and sacrifice. In a society that conceives of itself as a meritocracy, and whose economy is driven by open competition, the attraction to sport as an opportunity to vicariously undergo highly visible forms of victory and defeat is understandable. For many modern sports fans, athletic competition possesses cathartic qualities once thought to be unique to drama
(Mitchell, 2004, p. 66).
Along the same lines, Jones (2015) comments on the predisposition of athletes to make sacrifices with a view to the podium, through the remembrance of the sacrifices they have made up to the moment of competition. Archer (2017, p. 370) likewise announces a series of questions that interest us:
How much sportsmanship should we demand from athletes? Are there limits on the demands we can make on athletes to sacrifice their own interests in the interests of sportsmanship? If so what are these limits and how can they be justified?
Although similar to the idea set out above, of giving something up for the sake of victory, Gaffney (2015), Hemphill (2005), Cudd (2007) and Brady (2019) addressed the concept of sacrifice in a manner more restricted to the context of team sports. In order to achieve a given objective of the game, it is common for some athletes to perform certain actions so that a teammate may reach the goal, as is the case with the screen in basketball and handball, or even the dummy (corta-luz) in football. In this way, the concept of sacrifice presents itself as a kind of giving up, or of performing a secondary action that enables and facilitates a teammate, in a better position, to execute the play or to score a goal or a point.
Ciomaga (2013, p. 29), for her part, brings the concept of sacrifice close to the rules present in the sporting context in order to draw an excellent parallel:
First, games are possible only if all or at least most of the participants cooperate all the time or at least most of the time, where cooperation means following the rules of the game. Second, cooperation (in the form of rule following) presupposes sacrifices from the participants, either because sport rules limit the freedom of the players or, more specifically, because they make it more difficult to achieve the prelusory goals of the game than it would have been in the absence of these rules.
Sacrifice presents itself tacitly as a founding condition for the execution of the proposed activity, for the establishment of a minimal consensus and a necessary convention. Otherwise there would be no elementary organization, and the structure itself would be compromised, given the incapacity for understanding.
Beyond the perspectives already presented, there is a vast production in the journals devoted to the classical Greek question. Among the many studies on the theme, we highlight the contributions of Reid, who has published extensively on that context. The term sacrifice, in this field, is set in perspective in various ways, all of them nonetheless circumscribed by the symbolic contributions originating in ancient Greece (Adluri, 2015; Carlson, 2018; Reid, 2006, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2017; Tuncel, 2015, 2016).
Reid (2010c) comments that sacrificial rituals are present in the genesis of the Olympic Games, with athletics in ancient Greece, having remained for a long time within that context. The same author, in another study, states that sacrifice, not only of animals but also individual sacrifice, is present as one of the oldest and most celebrated rituals in the tradition of sport (Reid, 2013). From this claim, Reid (2013) develops a critique of the modern context and its exacerbated commercial dimension. The overlapping and the overvaluation of this sphere could bring about a conversion of the social and communal dimension of sport into individualism. The author holds that the Greek spirit of serving the community, as well as that of giving back whenever possible, deserves to be revived in the modern sporting context.
On the purposes, the functions and the religious relations existing in sacrificial rituals, such as pleasing, cultivating and bargaining with gods and goddesses in order to be favoured by them, we highlight some excerpts:
The central function of ancient Greek religious festivals, including the Olympic Games, was sacrifice: an offering of gifts in gratitude for benefits gained and in the hope of benefits to come. Sacrifice seems to be the opposite of profit: the apparent aim of our modern sports economy
(Reid, 2010c, p. 137).
The success of such exchanges depended of course on attracting the godsʼ attention. Perhaps it was for this reason that athletic games were at some point added to the sacrificial ritual at Olympia – such a spectacle would attract gods and mortals alike. Like every other religious ritual, the Olympic Games were separate from worldly concerns and conflict
(Reid, 2006, p. 208).
It seems to us that, from the reading of these passages, it is possible to sketch two ways of understanding sacrifice in the ancient Greek context. One perspective denotes a more passive form, a kind of offering intended to please the gods and goddesses. Even though attracting the attention of a particular god or goddess might culminate in an affront to another (Reid, 2010c).
It is also possible, however, to extract a more active, more vitalist and immanent dimension from this ritual of sacrifice. A kind of celebration of victory, of conquest, of confrontation, of the strength and the courage to place oneself before becoming without the illusory need for supposed guarantees. A plunge into the darkness of chance. In this way, there is no interpretation of cult or devotion to the gods as something transcendent, but rather a celebration of the body and a cultivation of the instincts.
In the same direction of a twofold interpretation, we have the idea of purification. If, on the one hand, it does not necessarily engage with a metaphysical catharsis, akin to a moral asepsis of the vices, on the other it may be conceived as an active affirmation of living in its entirety. As we see:
The Olympic Games were a manifestation of a religious, not a profane experience. The effort of the body, the purpose of which was to win a sports competition, was a sacrifice dedicated to the gods. The sacred elements of the games included ritual purification of the competitors and the overall cult framework. It should also be mentioned that the stadium was located in the district devoted to religious duties, an inseparable part of which was not only the palaestra and gymnasium, but also the temple and other areas where religious rites were performed
(Jirásek, 2018, p. 41).
In a more immanent sense, we still find a certain type of sacrifice necessary in order to enter the battle without great certainties, though moved by the spirit of the contest.
On the other hand, among the aspects and functions of agon, the following can be listed: sacrifice, greatness, strength, strife, struggle and fight, competing among equals, to be animated by the feelings of ambition, envy, and hatred in contest, attacking, desire to have enemies or opponents, cruelty and infliction of suffering, self-mastery and victory
(Tuncel, 2016, p. 355).
Tuncel (2015) invites us to think the logic of defeat in the sporting context and its possible perspectives on the basis of the conceptual matrix of some philosophers, among them the German Friedrich Nietzsche. Although the theme and the object of analysis in his article differ from ours, Tuncel touches on the theme of sacrifice and corroborates our approach at some points.
The author understands defeat as a kind of sacrifice necessary for a transformation of the self, or even for great works to be created. In Tuncel’s words: “Mistakes are inevitable on the path to greatness, so are defeats, losses, and sacrifices” (2015, p. 415). Every defeat presupposes some form of sacrifice, understood in its most generic sense. The author announces that Nietzsche recognizes this inseparable connection between defeat and victory and that he establishes no value judgement about these poles, faces of the same coin. Still with regard to Nietzsche’s contributions, Tuncel (2015) takes up the discussion of the term agon and ratifies not only the necessity but also the importance of defeat and sacrifice in competition. Inspired by Tuncel’s work, Adluri (2015) mentions the absence of this agonistic spirit in the modern world, which insists on advocating an illusory equality.
We perceive that, although there is a plurality of interpretations, in all of them there remains a prevalence of the use of the term sacrifice according to a notion of withdrawal, of abdication, which resonates with the Christian aspect of renunciation highlighted in our hypotheses.
Perspectivizing in order to transvalue the notion of sacrifice in sport
The Nietzschean project of transvaluation1 occupies a prominent place in his philosophy (Abbagnano, 2003; Beardsworth, 2003; Nietzsche, 2005b). To distrust the prevailing values, those that sustain the herd morality to which the Judaeo-Christian tradition has submitted us, is the starting point of this operation. Such a project denounces the sick and decadent behaviour of the morality of the regular and repetitive customs that diminish modern life.
When we take this as the starting point for reflecting on modern life and turn to the various social phenomena that represent the moral dispositions identified, it is inevitable that sport should appear prominently, since it is a practice that gathers a peculiar intensity of desires and that, in a certain way, may represent a simulacrum of human existence.
Common sense about sport holds that exhaustive efforts and dedication to training are rewarded with good performances, victories and sporting excellence (Cléret & McNamee, 2012). It is not our intention to disagree with the essential content of this idea, since there is a certain obviousness in the observation that the more certain skills and techniques are practised, the better the results one may expect. The way in which such dedication is incorporated into conduct, however, may reveal more than merely an option for greater sporting excellence. In many cases it may be laden with the moral values that bear upon human activities. As we have already announced to be proper to Nietzsche’s philosophy, an inference such as this does not crave conclusive data, but inhabits the field of “suspicion”, which allows us to present a provocative scenario for the aesthetic-ethical reflection on sport.
In other terms, the idea that sacrifice is an efficient practice, capable of inspiring conduct as well as of purifying, dignifying and even morally correcting human actions, a conception proper to a certain Judaeo-Christian imaginary, may be influencing the sporting scene in such a way as to generate the hope of objective sporting gains from the sacrifices expended in terms of moral desert.
This morality wagers on a supposed purification of the senses and a pasteurization of the emotions and the instincts (Barrenechea, 2014). Faced with a view in which the world is seen under the binarism of good and evil, it becomes necessary to correct its flaws, errors and contradictions, excluding its negative aspects in the attempt to posit a positive and idealized world. The athlete, in turn, must change radically in order to become improved and moralized. To that end, the body will be analysed, explained and rigidly assessed by the dictates of reason, so as to reach an eschatological destiny realizable only in the true world (Barrenechea, 2014). Such presuppositions corroborate the fostering and the production of meanings that transcend the world of the instant, of the present moment.
Nietzsche, in his proposal of transvaluation, insists on the need to recover certain Greek values of strength, converted into weakness by the Christian advent, which brings us back to Reid and Tuncel, as already discussed. Greek nobility, expressed in Homer, is that which shows the gods on the side of the courageous, revealing that these divinities frequently recognize virtues but rarely act out of mere pity or confine themselves to wanting a passive adoration from mortals. Values such as glory and courage inhabit the universe of the Greek warrior, yet the virtuous use of these qualities is always mediated by prudence (phrônesis) and by cunning (métis), which places mortals in a kind of “negotiation” with the gods.
One of the most valued virtues in the classical Greek context was courage, precisely because it neither limits itself nor reduces itself to the hope of something anchored in the future. There is, rather, an affirmation and an acceptance of the present, in an active manner, without having, a priori, any prior security or certainty, which allows us to associate the element of courage with the dimension of risk. Sacrifice, seen from an immanent standpoint, would encompass this dimension insofar as it surrenders to uncertainty, that is, it is not a matter of sacrifice as an instrumental means to victory but of a jubilant affirmation of existence. In the degeneration of classical Greek values, sacrifice lost this characteristic of affirming life in its entirety and took on a romanticized and, above all, rationalized form, in the inglorious attempt to establish a degree of control.
Exemplary is the narrative of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, in the first movements of the voyage to Troy. The great leader of the Greek fleet could not leave Aulis with his armies because of the strong contrary winds that the goddess Artemis incessantly sent against the ships, all on account of the offence of Agamemnon, who had said that he was superior to the goddess in the arts of the hunt. To resolve this impasse, the seer and counsellor Calchas proposed an immolation, that Agamemnon should sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, in honour of the goddess. Obsessed with the idea of victory over the Trojans, and to the surprise of Clytemnestra, his wife, Agamemnon accepts the sacrifice of killing his own daughter and thus initiates a cycle of misfortune and decline for himself, even though the winds abated. Had Artemis subjected Agamemnon to a test?2 Had the daughter of Zeus verified that the arrogance which had led Agamemnon to offend her persisted in the king to the point of his sacrificing his own daughter in the obsession with victory?3 Agamemnon’s compulsion characterized what the Greeks named Hybris, the spirit (daemon) of excess. The Greek gods are not merciful, so that sacrifice in itself is not a positive value but only one further resource of virtue (areté).
The counterpoint in this narrative is the virtuous Achilles, since the device by which Clytemnestra was to bring her daughter to Aulis was Agamemnon’s false promise that she would marry Achilles. On learning of the sham, Achilles rebels against Agamemnon and against the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Pity and sacrifice as passive hope are not values of the virtue displayed by Achilles. A Nietzschean project of transvaluation perhaps corresponds, then, to the restoration of areté and of strength to their leading roles.
Returning to the contemporary context of sport, the cliché “no pain no gain” summarizes, in a certain way, the exaltation of sporting practices governed by a moral precept of pain and sacrifice; an invitation to dedication certainly, but possibly also an immolation in search of reward (Machado, 2015; Sabino & Luz, 2014; Silva & Ferreira, 2019). And, in this way, an understanding of pain and sacrifice as an inevitable path towards the acquisition of certain achievements (Lima, 2017).
In this sense, the discourses of the acceptance of pain and the practice of self-impositions are highly acceptable and explicable, provided that desire is maintained and that a body considered perfect is attained. This is what the discourse ‘No Pain, No Gain’ suggests when it is taken as a kind of mantra portraying the bodily, social, physiological and mechanical sacrifices related to the pain and the pleasure of obtaining a perfect body or a high performance
(Pessoa et al., 2018, p. 65).
Once this prerogative is established and, through it, considering also the devices that seduce the subject around this expectation, we may infer that what really comes to induce behaviour are moral stimuli. If there is no pain there is no progress, and it is not even possible to maintain the objectives already attained, which causes the efficacy of training protocols to be questioned. Sacrifice, in this mechanism, comes to acquire a mediating and legitimating character in the process of achieving victory or sporting excellence. Lessa (2016) comments that many athletes, more precisely mountain climbers and cyclists who take part in the Tour de France, come to enjoy this sensation, establishing a dialogical relation with the aesthetic construction of these modalities. Pain tolerance becomes an index of sacrifice. A kind of manipulable rationalization in the pursuit of expanding human performance.
Symbolic immolation, renunciations, acts of self-denial, detachments and even pain tolerance migrate from the moral context of religious sacrifice to the real practice of sport. We all know stories of sportspeople who underwent such privations for the sake of sport, which is generally seen as greatness of spirit, at least of “sporting spirit”, and at times as a moral-mediatic production of success in modernity. The great key of reading present in these assertions is the moral prerogative. As already said, they are renunciations and suppressions (and it is important to stress what we are suspecting here), they are privations “in the name of something”, submissions with a view to a grace. Sacrifice as the endurance of pain and suffering is not conceived as constitutive of existence, but as an investment with future pretensions.
Every attribute or mechanism that distances us from life sounds to Nietzsche like a flight from existence itself. Religion, for the German philosopher, presents itself as a vast territory of knowledge servile to a faith in the invisible, which, when it materializes in the world of the instincts, the conflicts and the adversities of living, goes mad under the weight of the body of flesh and bone.
For Nietzsche (2009, 2012, 2016), Socratic-Platonic rationalism, the religions, metaphysics and morality are creations of resentment. The shadow of the dead god persists through modernity. The effects caused by this shadow still generate new effects and influence our way of dealing with life.
Some notions are foundational in Nietzsche’s conception of the affirmation of life, such as disciplining and cultivation.4 We endorse the idea that both concepts are directly imbricated with the conception of experimentation (Nietzsche, 2016). What the German philosopher proposes with this ethical conception is experimentation and the affirmation of great challenges. To bear and, above all, to transfigure the vicissitudes of human existence into stimulants that potentiate life. To that end, rigour and hard discipline are necessary, such as to make transfiguration possible without succumbing to the moralizing precepts present in society (Barrenechea, 2014). Sacrifice, thus understood, would not become transitory or something detached from existence, but would be presented as a potent element in the affirmation of life in its entirety, an indispensable part of living, without the attribution of transcendent meanings, whether the reward of the beyond or merely success in sporting objectives. We reach a point, then, at which an attempt at a transvaluation of the concept of sacrifice becomes present. If what we had been discussing was a notion proper to Judaeo-Christian morality, which, associated with modern sport, produced a kind of shadow of the dead god, another understanding of sacrifice would be the one that extracts vitality and affirmation from the discipline of sacrifice. In the terms we announced at the beginning of this text, when we pointed to sacrifice as a kind of virtual extension of dedication, it is a matter of an inversion, that is, of the understanding of dedication as an extension of sacrifice. The “yes to life” is the affirmation of an aesthetic-ethical option that assumes the whole set of affections and not only the instrumental part.
It is also interesting to note how the contours of this discussion are especially timely in the so-called technological information society, so accustomed to a sense of progress mediated by innovation, by the incessant creation of new objects and of processes that sustain our relations. What we are pointing to, in aesthetic-ethical terms, is not a transvaluation in the sense of an invention, but rather a revitalization of values having life and strength as their founding principle.
Understanding our own life as a great experiment, Nietzsche (2016, p. 208) states: “We are experiments: let us also want to be them”. Moreover, it is necessary to pass through extreme experiences in order to live other ways of acting, of thinking and of feeling. The aim is not the conservation of already existing ways of living that occupy hegemonic places, but the suspicion of such truths, questioning them with the intent of destroying them and, subsequently, creating new paths, new forms of life. The movement of suspicion is constant.
Possible transvaluations
Suspicion, a recurrent conduct in Nietzsche’s philosophy and thought, is characterized by placing prevailing and hegemonic interpretations in suspension, with possible associations and interferences from elements of morality, in order subsequently to give them other perspectives. To perspectivize is to analyse attentively the conflict between forces, since each interpretation faces the facts only from the point of view of its own growth (Kossovitch, 2004). It is to observe, therefore, in distinct ways and under other prisms, positions with absolute and universalizing pretensions. Every interpretation is thus perspectival. Inspired by this procedure of suspicion, and with the aim of achieving the ends intended here, we invert the current interpretation of the term sacrifice in order to aspire to a possible transvaluation, with a view to a more vitalist dimension of the term, distant from the ideals of Christian morality. We also find in Nietzsche the notion of sacrifice, though one that attends to the premises of the philosophy of the will and of the tragic sense.
We reiterate that the denunciation and the suspicion carried out here attend to the moral weight attributed to sacrifice. Morality is characterized, in a certain way, as an ought-to-be, a kind of guiding code of conduct that must be followed. In this conjuncture, does resignation to moral dictates invite an affirmation or a negation of life? What is the value of the value of Christian morality? As an unfolding of these questions, we perceive that the relation established between sport and the elements of pain, suffering and sacrifice comes to underwrite conducts that are valued and accepted in the sporting context. A kind of aesthetic-ethics of the athlete, who no longer questions such an association but lives with and even extols the presence and the consequent overcoming of pain, suffering and sacrifice.
If, on the basis of the Nietzschean diagnosis that recognizes modernity as traversed by decadent values, we were to assume the posture that there is no possible way out, we would enter a field that denies life. The invitation, then, moves in another direction, namely towards the forceful affirmation of living. From a Nietzschean perspective, the dimension of sacrifice is not univocal and may be associated directly with life, without abstract mediations or metaphysical purposes.
We intend to bring another dimension and to set the concept in perspective to the point of understanding it as a condition pertinent to human existence and as an invitation that promotes life, celebrating the present moment, without pretensions to or searches for another world. Nietzsche (2017, p. 26) says: “You mean to say that the mark of moral action is sacrifice? – Consider, however, whether there is not sacrifice in every action that is performed with deliberation, in the worst as in the best”. This desacralization of sacrifice, in Nietzsche’s words, abdicates apotropaic efficacy and, by extension, the transcendent solution; sacrifice is re-presented as immanence of the body, active logic of a tragic sense of existence. Every human effort demands sacrifice, and all the more so the more excellent it is, which sport displays with exuberance. Yet such effort means nothing other than affirmation, and not a tithe awaiting some grace. In other terms, the sportsperson sacrifices for sport, not for victory or for a more just life.
Bringing these interpretations closer to sport, we note how such a discussion may be fruitful for deepening value-oriented debates in the philosophy of sport, such as victory and defeat, doping, sporting ontology, moral values, sporting spirit, among other aesthetic and ethical themes. The rationalist and moralizing legacy still persists and has gained notable force by aligning itself with the models of perfection and utopia typical of modernity. The logic of sacrifice, anchored in a Christian dimension, communes with certain precepts of modern sport, such as the abdication of certain contents for the sake of a glory or a victory to come. Under Nietzsche’s philosophy of suspicion, however, sacrifice acquires a configuration that removes the concept from a passive dimension in order to give it a more active form. An action of confrontation and affirmation of life in the face of the inevitable afflictions of existence.
We conclude that the interpretations we have carried out are only an effort to apply Nietzsche’s thought to the context of sacrifice, specifically to sporting sacrifice, so as to think in terms of an ethics applied to sport. The element of distinction indicated here is a current attribution and association of a transcendent character to the concept. From a vitalist standpoint, we have attempted to detach the term and to set it in perspective through a more immanent key. We thus reclaim the whole potency of sporting sacrifice for sport itself.
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