Our Broad Present by Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich;

Author:Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, SOC052000, Social Science/Media Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

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Thanks to their complex theological content, reading only a few of Pindar’s odes is enough to understand how victorious athletes were considered to be “heroes” in Greek antiquity, heroes without the distance or the irony that we normally imply today when we use this word—and how heroes were demigods. For there was no doubt that in the athletes’ great moments of performance the power of gods—and indeed the gods themselves—became present, present in the athletes’ flesh and present in space. Watching athletes compete gave their spectators the certainty to be close to the gods. The expectation that gods would be willing to engage in athletic competition was consistent with what the Greeks believed themselves to know about most of them: think of Hermes and Aphrodite, of Hephaestus, Poseidon, and, above all, of Zeus, and you will realize how the identities of those gods were built on different types of physical prowess. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey made it clear that, based on their physical strengths, these gods were constantly competing with each other, that agon, that is, fight and competition, was their central life form—and often indeed the only reason for them to become interested in humans at all.

The closeness of the gods whose actual presence the athletes’ agon was supposed to help conjure up and to embody became the reason why all Pan-Hellenic Games, most visibly the games at Olympia and at Delphos, were organized around religious sanctuaries. For the appearance of the gods was a type of event supposed to become real in space—and it may well be from this premise that Martin Heidegger took the inspiration to describe what he calls the “unconcealment of Being” and the “event of Truth” through a spatial topology—i.e., as “sway,” as “coming forth,” and through his etymologizing interpretation of “objectivity” as getting closer in a horizontal movement.2 At the same time, a culture that, as Ancient Greek culture seems to have done, counts on the gods’ presence as a permanent possibility will not be prone to use words like miracle and to single out a specific dimension of the miraculous. Once again, however, Pindar’s odes make it clear to us that the great Olympic victories were seen as events of divine presence, i.e., events that exceeded the limits of the humanly possible. One might even go so far as to speculate that the Greeks didn’t care about keeping records, i.e., about how far a discus had been thrown or by how much a runner had distanced his opponents, because divine powers will ridicule any kind of measurement.

Obviously, and for many good reasons, it is considered a symptom of bad intellectual taste in present-day culture to find an athlete’s performance “divine” or to appreciate its potentially record-breaking dimension as miraculous. For several decades now, different sports have triggered the development of scientifically based practicing methods—and in a number of countries this has lead to the emergence of an academic discipline quite capable of explaining away, rationally, what the Greeks took to be divine inspiration in athletic performance.

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