Emotion is central to human character, infiltrating our physiological functions and our mental constitution. In sport, athletes feel emotion in specific ways, from joy to anger and despair. This is the first book to examine emotion in sport from a philosophical perspective, building on concepts developed by ancient Greek and modern philosophers. For instance, how is Aristotle's concept of catharsis applied to the sports field? How about power as advanced by Nietzsche, or existentialism as discussed by Kierkegaard? Emotion in Sports (...) explores the philosophical framework for the expression of emotion and relates it to our psychological understanding, from the perspective of both athlete and spectator. A fascinating and useful read for students, researchers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of sport sciences, philosophy, and psychology. (shrink)

The word ‘sport’ next to Nietzsche’s name may raise eyebrows among many Nietzsche readers. ‘What an odd pairing?’ one may ask. We prefer Nietzsche and arts or something from the domain of the Geist. Sport is embedded in mass culture and Nietzsche detests anything that has to do with masses; fandom, an important part of sport culture, is nothing Nietzsche would look at favourably but call it a manifestation of the herd instinct. Besides, clubs and sports organizations control this sporting (...) culture through political and economic apparatuses. On the other hand, modern sports, far from producing higher types and the overhuman, appeal to the lowest common denominator, the person on the street and all athletes are equal. All of these objections notwithstanding, one may still speak of a sporting spirit that embodies play, ecstasy in the sense of Dionysian, inventiveness, agonism, grand spectacle, festivity, a specific type of aesthetics and a form of askesis of the body, and a specific outlet for enactment of active justice and a Gestalt of power relations. Playfulness and game-making are crucial in sports, and play is key to Nietzsche’s thought. Sport is a form of letting go, losing oneself in the game, and can be construed as a field for Dionysian forces. Agonism, a significant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, applies to all competitive sports. Furthermore, sport constitutes one of the major types of spectacles in our age. Finally, sport belongs to the regime of the body, a form of askesis, which Nietzsche would have supported as opposed to the ascetic idealism. In what ways do Nietzsche’s ideas on interpretation shed light on sport and its various aspects as listed above? What hermeneutic tools do we have to interpret sport as a field of culture? These were the guiding questions for this essay. (shrink)

Marx’s concept of value has been subject to significant criticism. Robinson argues that the concept is awkward and obscure, as it is meant to explain the prices of commodities and thus must be a kind of price, but it is not. Consequently, Robinson holds that the concept of value makes no sense. Furthermore, according to Harvey, Marx in the _Grundrisse _confuses value with price. It seems to me that both Robinson’s criticism and Harvey’s exegesis are based on serious misunderstandings. In (...) this article, I first unpack Marx’s criticism of Darimon’s proposal concerning time chits. The upshot is that, for Marx, production relations enjoy a priority, and a monetary reform like Darimon’s cannot fulfill the function of revolutionary change. So, time chits become a triviality. Second, I suggest a reconstruction of what I call Marx’s “nonconvergency thesis.” The thesis states that there is a supervenience between value and price. Marx says that Darimon is ignorant about this thesis, and his proposal relies on the delusion that the two are convergent. Therefore, I maintain that Harvey’s claim is misleading, as he overlooks the nonconvergency thesis articulated in the _Grundrisse_. And Robinson’s condemnation of the concept of value should be dismissed because her understanding is very much the same as Darimon’s, in that she ignores the two-layered ontological structure between value and price. (shrink)

Agonism permeates Nietzsche’s spirit and works from early on starting with his close engagement with ancient Greece. However, while many thinkers have made references to agon in Nietzsche in the twentieth century, this aspect of his philosophy did not come under close scrutiny until a few decades ago, and some of the research in this area saw its first monographs in Tuncel’s Agon in Nietzsche (2013) and Acampora’s Contesting Nietzsche (2013). In addition to these two works and prior to (...) them, an anthology, Nietzsche, Power and Politics, based on the proceedings of a conference and edited by Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt, came out in 2008. The three editions reviewed here bring out many other aspects, insights, and nuances in the study of agon in Nietzsche’s works. (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive study of Nietzsche's relationship to the agonistic culture of ancient Greece. The book examines not only the overt elements of Greek agonism in Nietzsche's early works, but also shows how his later works embody its spirit as it is manifest in such notions as the will to power, the overhuman and "active justice.".

In continuation with my on-going research and presentations on sport as a field of channeling and externalizing cruelty and violence, as a field of transfiguration of drives, in this paper I will examine instincts, drives and sublimation in Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalytic literature within the context of sports. Freud was influenced by Nietzsche on his drive theory; however, in Freud it assumes a specific meaning and finds its place within the context of his overall psychoanalytic work, especially in relation to (...) his second topology of the human psyche that consists of id, ego and superego and his theory of sublimation. Ultimately, Freud reduces all drives to Eros and Thanatos and explains their workings in relation to the constitution of the psyche. Sublimation has a direct correlation to drives, which is a culture/individual specific way of treating and channeling drives; sublimation also has much to do with suffering and how we deal with suffering (and other emotions as I discuss in my book, Emotion in Sports). What I would like to explore in this paper is to understand in what ways sport is a form of sublimation and how sport may address the subject of drives, both Eros and Thanatos. Since Freud sees both of these drives as bound together in many contexts, does sport constitute one of those areas? What type of psychic constitution does the sporting culture assume? Or, to put it differently, what are the dynamic relations of the different parts of the human psyche, the id, the ego and the superego, in the practice of sport and in the community of sports? Here and elsewhere, in agreement with Jung, I will include discussion of ‘collective unconscious’, as I explore the significance of symbols of sport in the life of individuals and cultures. (shrink)

In this article, I will examine a difficult subject in competitive sports: loss and defeat. Defeat is painful because we do not enter into competitive games to be defeated, although defeat is a strong possible outcome of the game, especially among more or less equal contestants. If losing a game is an existential condition that lies ahead of every athlete and team, even the best ones, why is defeat difficult to accept, especially in modern times in contrast to ancient times? (...) I will explore recent studies and ideas on sacrifice, especially those of Bataille, and discuss Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death within the context of defeat in sports. Every defeat presupposes a form of sacrifice, understood in the loose sense, and every sacrifice presupposes a certain disposition toward death. Not only is defeat an inevitable condition in sport-making, but it is intrinsically linked to regimes of victory. Nietzsche acknowledges this intrinsic connection between defeat and victory. I will detour into this are.. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to explore Nietzsche's philosophy of value, its influence on contemporary thought and culture and what it means for us today, that is, what we can appropriate from it in order to shed light on some of the problems of our age and to overcome them. These problems are in the areas of conflict, globalization and chronic injustices. I will approach the question of value in three parts: 1) Nietzsche's explicit writings on value starting with (...) the second half of his works (The Gay Science and after). Here I will explore his value-related thoughts such as transvaluation, value-positing as legislation or law-giving, language and value, the locus of value-creation and the unconscious -psychic and somatic, for instance- aspects of valuation. What search and research has been done in these areas in the 2 0 t n century will also be surveyed here. 2) The value of individuality and 'unity' or belonging in Nietzsche's thought, that is, the individual and his or her 'environment.' In this part, I will reexamine his notion of individuality within the context of culture. 3) What Nietzsche sees as value in culture or "interpretation of existence". In this part, I will examine "forces of culture" such as ecstasy, creativity, language, body, soul, wisdom, knowledge, character-formation and education and how these different values form a meaningful constellation. In conclusion, I will try to bring these three parts together as I, at the same time, discuss philosophers who have been influenced by Nietzsche's ideas. (shrink)

In this paper, I will approach the problem of normalization within the context of crime and punishment in Nietzsche and Foucault. In modern theory and law, a linear, causal relationship has been established between crime and punishment with no regard to the socio-cultural context in which crimes and punishments take place. It was not until the nineteenth century that the problems of this relationship were exposed most notably by Dostoyevsky in fiction and later by Nietzsche in his theoretical writings (the (...) essays) and in his introspective reflections (the aphorisms). Although, according to Foucault, the reformists of penal institutions around the turn to the nineteenth century expanded the domain of crime and punishment to other areas and social contexts, they too were not radical enough tounderstand the problem of crime and punishment in-depth and were not, therefore, capable of exposing them as a syndrome that is deeply rooted in the Occidental world-interpretation, its values and institutions. What I would like to show in this paper is how the syndrome of crime and punishment in the West is intricately tied to, what Nietzsche calls, the morality of good and evil (the slave morality, its absolute truth, and its normalizing trend and power) and how Foucault transplants the Nietzschean critical project to its institutional context. Despite agreements and continuities between the two thinkers, no doubt their differences toowill come to surface in this study. (shrink)

Much has been said on particular feelings that appear in Nietzsche's works, such as pity, revenge, altruism, guilt, shame, and ressentiment. But there has not been a significant study on Nietzsche's overall teachings on feeling and emotion. What does Nietzsche mean by feeling and the related phenomena? Out of such disparate types of feelings and disparate reflections by Nietzsche on them, can one make sense or can one speak of a theory of feelings in Nietzsche? If so, how does this (...) theory fit with his philosophy of value? On the other hand, how do his teachings relate to some of the later concepts of his philosophy such as the overhuman, the will to power and the eternal return of the same? While the book will contextualize Nietzsche's emotive theory in relation to other emotive theories in the history of ideas, it will also explore Nietzsche's influence on later generations in this area. (shrink)

Novovjekovni ideal demokracije temelji se na apstraktnog kategoriji humaniteta, koja svoje uporište nalazi u univerzalnim vrijednostima i jednakosti ljudi kao nositelja tih vrijednosti. Prepoznatljivo obilježje takve apstraktne osobe je vezana uz racionalnost. Međutim, razumijevanje demokracije u modernosti, koje izjednačava pojedince apstrahirajući od svakog funkcionalnog/ povijesnog obilježja, predalo je svoju ulogu diskursima »razlike« i »identiteta«, što je postalo očitim naročito nakon atmosfere neizvjesnosti u 80-im godinama prošloga stoljeća. Stoga je glavna os suvremenih rasprava u političkoj filozofiji određena bipolarnošću partikularnosti i univerzalnosti. (...) S jedne strane osi nalazi se pojam univerzalnosti koji naglašava bivanje kao bivanje bestjelesnim i potpuno konceptualnim, no s druge strane se nalaze partikularizmi koji revitaliziraju ontologiju biti, koja njih same čini robovima partikularnog. U ovom radu nastojim otkriti vezu između univerzalnosti i partikularnosti na putu kritike ontologije biti. Problem s kojim se suočavam nije onaj odabira između univerzalnog i partikularnog, već je onaj prikazivanja neuništive međusobne veze između univerzalnog i partikularnog.The democracy ideal of the Modern Age is grounded on an abstract humanity category, which is based on universal values and on the equity of people who are bearer of these values. The distinctive characteristic of such an abstract person is related to rationality. However, the modernity’s understanding of democracy, which equalizes individuals through abstracting them from all of their functional/historical characteristics, left its role to the discourses of “differences” and “identity” and became obvious especially after the 1980s’ atmosphere of uncertainty. Therefore the main axis of the contemporary political philosophy debates is determined by a bipolarity of particularity and universality. On one side of the axis there is a concept of universality which emphasizes the being as being bodiless and totally conceptual, however on the other side there are particularisms that revitalize the ontology of essence which renders themselves a slave of the particular. In this study I aim to unfold the relationship between universality and particularity on the path of the critique of ontology of essence. The problem I handle here is not one of choosing between universal and particular, rather it is one of depicting the indestructible mutual connection between universal and particular.L’idéal démocratique de l’époque moderne est ancré sur une catégorie abstraite d’humanité qui trouve son fondement dans les valeurs universelles et dans l’égalité des hommes qui portent ces valeurs. Le caractère distinctif d’une telle personne abstraite est lié à la rationalité. Cependant, la compréhension moderne de la démocratie, qui égalise les individus en les extrayant de toute caractéristique fonctionnelle/historique, a laissé place aux discours de « différences » et d’ « identité », ce qui est devenu évident notamment après l’ambiance d’incertitude dans les années 80. Ainsi, l’axe principal des débats de philosophie politique contemporains est déterminé par la bipolarité de la particularité et de l’universalité. D’un côté de l’axe se trouve un concept d’universalité qui met l’accent sur l’être comme étant immatériel et complètement conceptuel, mais de l’autre côté se trouvent des particularismes qui revitalisent l’ontologie de l’essence qui les assujettit au particulier. Dans cette étude, je vise à découvrir le lien entre universalité et particularité sur la trace de la critique de l’ontologie de l’essence. Le problème dont je traite ici n’est pas celui de choisir entre l’universel et le particulier, mais plutôt de décrire la relation réciproque indestructible entre l’universel et le particulier.Das neuzeitliche Ideal der Demokratie gründet auf der abstrakten Kategorie der Humanität, die auf universalen Werten bzw. der Gleichrangigkeit der Menschen als diesbezügliche Werteträger aufbaut. Das Unterscheidungsmerkmal einer solchen abstrakten Person steht im Konnex mit der Rationalität. Das modernitätsbezogene Demokratieverständnis hingegen, welches die Individuen mittels deren Abstrahierung von sämtlichen funktionellen/geschichtlichen Charakteristika gleichstellt, übergab dessen Rolle den Diskursen der „Gegensätze“ bzw. der „Identität“ und wurde insbesondere augenfällig im Anschluss an die Atmosphäre der Ungewissheit der 1980er-Jahre. Dementsprechend wird die Hauptachse der zeitgenössischen Debatten in der politischen Philosophie durch Zweipoligkeit der Partikularität und Universalität determiniert. Auf der einen Seite der Achse ist der Universalitätsbegriff positioniert, der das Sein als körperlos und durchweg konzeptuell akzentuiert, während auf der gegenüberliegenden Seite Partikularismen ruhen, welche die Ontologie des Wesens neu beleben, die alsdann sie selbst zu Sklaven des Partikularen macht. In dieser Arbeit ziele ich darauf ab, das Verhältnis zwischen Universalität und Partikularität abzuhandeln, und zwar auf dem Wege der Kritik der Ontologie des Wesens. Das Problem, das ich hiermit behandle, figuriert nicht als jenes der Wahl zwischen Universalem und Partikularem, sondern vielmehr als jenes der Veranschaulichung des unverwüstlichen gegenseitigen Zusammenspiels zwischen Universalem und Partikularem. (shrink)

Tradition and religion are two important sources that affect the construction and continuity of social relations throughout history. Before the modern period, when the secular social structure was widely accepted, these two sources served as the primary determinant resource of social ties, sometimes alone and frequently together. This study aims to develop a scale to determine the effect of the level of clerics (imams and muezzins) working under the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the institution authorized to serve religious services in (...) Turkey, on social life. In this context, a survey was conducted with 1208 people in 12 provinces and 42 districts, based on a face-to-face interview method. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used to test the reliability and validity of the scale made for this study, in which the universe is taken as a whole. The scale, whose reliability and validity were tested, can be used to assess the impact of religious officials on family, kinship, neighborliness, and work life as well as the impact of religion on state-society relationships. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the notion of agon in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he develops by way of his interpretation of ancient Greek culture and thought. Notions akin to agon are strife, struggle, fight, and war, all of which are also studied, as they pertain to the thought of agon. The exploration is done in two parts: the first part studies Nietzsche's early works , the period in which he is primarily focused on ancient Greek civilization, and develops an (...) understanding of the notion of agon. This part relies on his posthumous writings of this period, especially those written in 1871--72, which are published in Colli and Montinari's Kritische Studienausgabe, volume 7, section 16. A translation of this section from German to English is added to the dissertation as an appendix. The second part traces the development of this notion in the later period of Nietzsche's writings in which he undertakes the critique of morality of good and evil. ;Agon means contest in ancient Greek. In Nietzsche's thought, however, agon takes on different meanings. By taking clues from KS 7, 16, Part I examines agon in the realms of destruction, suffering, conflict, individual and formation of the individual, language, culture, myth, religion, rhapsody, art and spectacle. If one could speak of an agonal culture or world-order, what makes it agonal? This question is addressed in Part I. Part II, on the other hand, relies on the interpretation of agon done in the previous part and builds on it in order to show the presence of the thought of agon in Nietzsche's later writings although the word agon or any of its derivatives such as agonistic or agonal rarely appears in this period. Some of the areas visited in Nietzsche's philosophy of this period are cruelty, confrontation, chaos, difference, multiplicity and the psyche of agon, inner conflict, instincts and agonal body, and Nietzsche's philosophical "war-praxis." Finally, the dissertation tries to keep in perspective the relevance and significance of the thought of agon for contemporary issues. (shrink)

Marx’s concept of value has been subject to significant criticism. Robinson argues that the concept is awkward and obscure, as it is meant to explain the prices of commodities and thus must be a kind of price, but it is not. Consequently, Robinson holds that the concept of value makes no sense. Furthermore, according to Harvey, Marx in the Grundrisse confuses value with price. It seems to me that both Robinson’s criticism and Harvey’s exegesis are based on serious misunderstandings. In (...) this article, I first unpack Marx’s criticism of Darimon’s proposal concerning time chits. The upshot is that, for Marx, production relations enjoy a priority, and a monetary reform like Darimon’s cannot fulfill the function of revolutionary change. So, time chits become a triviality. Second, I suggest a reconstruction of what I call Marx’s “nonconvergency thesis.” The thesis states that there is a supervenience between value and price. Marx says that Darimon is ignorant about this thesis, and his proposal relies on the delusion that the two are convergent. Therefore, I maintain that Harvey’s claim is misleading, as he overlooks the nonconvergency thesis articulated in the Grundrisse. And Robinson’s condemnation of the concept of value should be dismissed because her understanding is very much the same as Darimon’s, in that she ignores the two-layered ontological structure between value and price. (shrink)

Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene presents interesting arguments and views that propose to unite Marxism and degrowth. The importance of the book comes from the fact that it intends to respond to the ecological crisis and the Anthropocene. To this end, Saito utilizes Meszaros’s interpretation of Marx according to which Marx bases his critique of political economy on the theory of metabolism. What follows from this is nature has absolute limits and capitalism produces the ecological crisis in which the metabolism (...) between humans and nature degrades. Saito scrutinizes this crisis through three rifts: the material disruption of cyclical processes in natural metabolism, the spatial rift, and the temporal rift. Moreover, Saito maintains that the theory of metabolism is compatible with Marx’s materialism, in that Marx is neither a flat ontological monist nor a Cartesian dualist but a methodological dualist. I find this line of thinking, however, as doubtful. Lastly, Saito claims that although Marx was before the 1870s Promethean, Europocentric, and productionist he underwent a radical breakthrough and became a degrowth communist. However, Saito’s claims are hardly convincing. (shrink)

Volume 47, Issue 2, July 2020, Page 322-325.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy ed. by Herman Siemens and James PearsonVanessa LemmHerman Siemens and James Pearson, eds., Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 302 pp. ISBN: 978-1-3500-6695-3 (cloth); 978-1-3501-6383-6 (paper). £23.30.Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy is a collection inspired by the 2014 Friedrich Nietzsche Society conference on “Nietzsche, Love, and War.” However, the content of the book is broader than the conference, (...) encompassing the themes of conflict and contest in Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole. The volume is divided into four main parts: part 1: “Nietzsche’s Ontology of Conflict”; part 2: “Conflict and Culture: Nietzsche’s Agon and the Greeks”; part 3: “Ethos and Conflict: Nietzsche’s Warriors and Warrior-Philosophers”; and part 4: “Conflict and Contestation in Language, Rhetoric and Style.” Surprisingly, the volume does not include a section dedicated to conflict and politics. This question is dealt with to some extent in individual chapters across the four parts of the book.The volume is composed of fourteen chapters largely drawn from the conference presentations, with additional chapters solicited from Nicolas Lema on agon and politics in Nietzsche’s early writings; Frank Chouraqui on hyperbole and conflict in the slave revolt in morality; Ritchie Robertson and Enrico Müller on Nietzsche and Burkhardt; and Guillaume Métayer on philosophy and terrorism and the notion of “Attentat” in Nietzsche. As such, the volume achieves a balance of views on these topics from both established and doctoral and postdoctoral scholars in Nietzsche studies, as well as from both Anglo-Saxon and Continental traditions in philosophy.The volume is ambitious and claims to fill what it identifies as a series of gaps and shortcomings in current Nietzsche scholarship. According to the editors, most commentators “have failed to recognize the integral role of conflict in Nietzsche’s philosophy not only as a theme, but as a dynamic and structural principle that cuts across the different domains of his thought and acts as a moving center of gravity throughout his philosophical development” (1). Conflict and Contest takes its starting point from the works [End Page 218] of Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Paul van Tongeren, who both understand “conflict and struggle as the hermeneutic key” to understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy (8). The volume makes a welcome addition to Nietzsche scholarship, complementing the monographs of Yunus Tuncel’s Agon in Nietzsche (2013), Christa Davis Acampora’s Contesting Nietzsche (2013), and of course those recently published by the editors: Herman W. Siemens, Agonal Perspectives on Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Critical Transvaluation (2021), and James S. Pearson, Nietzsche on Conflict, Struggle and War (2022).The edited volume opens with a programmatic defense of the centrality of conflict and contest in Nietzsche’s work, beginning with his early writing on Greek agonistic culture, his middle period comprising an “extended apology of war” in HH and “a conflict-based theory of character” in D, a “stronger connection between knowledge and the conflict of drives” in GS and BGE, all the way to the development of his will to power thesis, which underpins, according to the editors, Nietzsche’s “radically immanent ontology of conflict” (5). The editors’ introduction offers an overview that includes a conceptual analysis of the terms “conflict,” “struggle,” and “will to power” (2–5), as well as an outline of the various domains of conflict across Nietzsche’s oeuvre (5–7): physical, biological, political, psychological, philosophical, and cultural.The editors make an important point right at the beginning of the book, namely, that Nietzsche has a highly differentiated understanding of conflict and struggle, reflected in the irreducible multiplicity of terms found in his philosophy, such as Agon, Auseinandersetzung, Concurrenz, Dissonanz, Gegensaetzlichkeit, Kampf, Konflikt, Krieg, Streit, Wettkampf, Wettspiel, Wettstreit, Widerspruch, Widerstreit, Zwiespalt, Zwietracht, and Zwist (1). Finding an adequate way of capturing this plurality of meanings in the original (German) text when translating into English is no doubt a challenge. In parts 3 and 4, for example, the term Kampf is translated variously as war, struggle, and contest, making it difficult for the reader to trace the various meanings back to the original... (shrink)

Traducción del artículo originalmente publicado como Sorgner, S. L. (2017). Immortality as Utopia and the Relevance of Nihilism. En Y. Tuncel (ed), Nietzsche and transhumanism. Precursor or enemy? (pp. 248-261). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Este texto ha sido Publicado con la autorización de Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Agradecemos a Stefan Lorenz Sorgner por autorizarnos a realizar la traducción de este texto.