Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  The borderlands of freedom are the shadow lands — populated not by the concrete and reassuring what is, but by the shadows of what might come to be. When I run in this sort of pain, I run the borderlands — skirting the line that divides reasons and causes. Pain — certainly moderate pain of this sort — is a reason, and can never make me stop running. But this particular pain is a reason of a special sort: a reason that signifies the imminent appearance of a cause that can crush me. The pain in my knee of two months ago was not this sort of pain at all, even though it was significantly more severe. It was what it was: it signified the imminent appearance of nothing. With the pain of today, I must push and push and push, right up until the last second: the second before the transformation occurs — the moment when a reason that I have becomes a cause that simply happens to me. I must push and push on to the borderline of the land of causes. But I must not step over.

  8

  Gods, Philosophers, Athletes

  2011

  That was how an ageing philosopher and talentless runner finished his first marathon: running, stretching, running, stretching, running, stretching, walking when there was no other choice, skirting the borderlands of freedom for the last three miles from the Rickenbacker Causeway to Bayfront Park. That was the deepest I had ever journeyed into the heartbeat of the run. In the gap between reasons and actions — the gap where Sartre found anguish but I found joy — I encountered one of the more surprising forms that the experience of intrinsic value can take. Maybe one day I will go deeper, if there is a deeper. My thoughts upon crossing the line: is that it? Can I stop running now? Then someone put a shiny medal around my neck, and I decided I probably could. It would have been nice if some more appropriately triumphant thought had taken the trouble to make its way into my head as I crossed the line; but I suppose that was never what it was about. 5.15:23 clock time, 5.08:44 chip time (because of the number of runners, there is a delay between the time of the gun and the time I actually cross the starting line. There is a little chip in my number bib, given to me by the race organizers, and this records the time elapsed since I crossed the starting line. This time is what is known as ‘chip time’). My quad-cramping issues cost me about fifteen minutes over the closing three miles. They are pathetic times really and a couple of months ago I would have been a seething mass of malefaction. But today — facticity being what it is — I am far from unhappy.

  What was the point of these last few hours, these 26 miles and 385 yards? Was it really worth it? That is the beauty of it — there was no point. It is in the places where points and purposes of life stop that you find things that are ‘worth it’. We live in a utilitarian age where we tend to think of the value of everything as a function of its purpose. The defining question of our age is: ‘What is it good for?’ And to say that something is ‘good for nothing’ is equivalent to saying that it is worthless. This, as Martin Heidegger put it, is our Gestell, our enframing, and it is one that requires us to think in a quite specific way about what is of value in life. If something is worth doing in life it must be for the sake of something else. If running is worth doing — whether it is a marathon or a gentle jog around the block — then it must be worth doing because of the health it promotes, the sense of satisfaction or self-worth it engenders, the stress it relieves, the social opportunities it affords. If an activity is valuable at all, it must be useful for something. And the implicit assumption, one built into our defining Gestell, is that this something is something else — something outside the activity.

  I see the consequences of this attitude every day, in students who tell me, ‘I really wish I could have done X’ — philosophy, literature, languages — ‘but my parents told me I had to do something sensible, something useful — something that would get me a job afterwards.’ And so their young lives are already set on a course they never really wanted. They will work to get paid, and any satisfaction they find in life will probably have to be found elsewhere. In another time, another Gestell, their parents might have said: find something that for you is play, something you do for its own sake, and then find someone who will pay you to do it. But no matter how much money this is, try to make sure you always do it for its own sake and not the money: try to make sure it is always play, never work. I hope that is what I shall tell my children.

  There is another consequence of the way we think about value, perhaps slightly less obvious but equally pernicious: it makes it impossible for us to understand the value or meaning of our lives. In his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote: ‘Killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you … it is merely confessing that life “is not worth the trouble”.’ From this perspective, which I think is an illuminating one, the search for a meaning in life is the search for something that makes it worth the trouble. The idea that the value of anything in life must lie in its point or purpose makes it impossible to find meaning in life — at least, it makes it impossible given the way the idea of a purpose is usually understood. To see why, consider this, characteristically dense, passage from Heidegger:

  When an entity within-the-world has already been proximally freed for its Being, that Being is involvement … with this thing, for instance, which is ready-to-hand, and which we accordingly call a ‘hammer’, there is an involvement in hammering; with hammering there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein — that is to say, for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s Being … But the totality of involvements itself goes back ultimately to a ‘towards-which’ in which there is no further involvement … The primary ‘towards-which’ is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which.’ But the ‘for-the-sake-of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein.

  This passage is from Being and Time, published in 1927, the same year as Schlick’s short essay ‘On the Meaning of Life’. And despite some obvious differences between the two — Schlick is easy to read, Heidegger seemed to take great pleasure in being needlessly obscure — their interests overlap at this point. Suppose something can be valuable only if it has a purpose. Heidegger, in effect, shows us where all those purposes lead. ‘Dasein’ is his term for human beings — or, more accurately, the type of being that is possessed by humans. Humans see the world in terms of a network of instruments, and the purposes that ultimately unite this network all point back to us — Dasein. One hammers to drive the nail, to make something fast, to make the house more secure, to provide protection from the storm … to keep Dasein alive. Value derives from purpose, and this is where purposes end. So, if we were to take this model and employ it to try to identify the meaning of life, we would find ourselves trapped in a tautology. What is the meaning of life, what it is that makes life ‘worth the trouble’? The only answer we will find is ‘life’.

  Nothing that has a purpose outside itself is a candidate for the thing that makes life worth the trouble — for if you follow that purpose to its logical conclusion, you will simply find more life. There is a way out of this tautological circle, the only way out, as far as I can see: to find activities where the chain of purposes ends. If we want to find value in life, something that might be a candidate for life’s meaning or one of its meanings — then we must look to things that have no purpose. Put another way: it is a necessary condition of something being truly important in life that it have no purpose outside itself — that it be useless for anything else. Worthlessness — in this sense — is a necessary condition of real value. If the value of something were a matter of its utility for something else, then it would be this something else that is the locus of value.

  So, as Moritz Schlick also concluded many years before I got there, if we want to find what is valuable in life we need to look to things that carry their purpose — and so their value — within themselves. And, also courtesy of Schlick, it is clear what these things are.
The things we do that are valuable for their own sake are all forms of play. And running, at least for adult humans, is the oldest and simplest form of play there is. We can run for many reasons, and most of these are instrumental and so form the basis only of instrumental value. But the real value of running eclipses this instrumental value, and on its own makes running ‘worth the trouble’. The purpose and value of running is intrinsic to it. The purpose and value of running is simply to run. Running is one of the places in life where the points or purposes stop. As such, running is one of the things that can make life ‘worth the trouble’.

  The place that gave us the marathon also gave us philosophy. That place was the city-state of Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. To understand the ancient Athenians, one needs to understand at least three things: their gods, their philosophers and their athletes. Admittedly, by this time the Athenians could no longer bring themselves to believe in their gods, just as most of us today cannot bring ourselves to believe in the God of Genesis. But they still remembered the stories and, just as it was for the stories of Creation and Fall, it is the metaphysical truth of what they remembered, rather than the literal truth, that is important.

  One of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines emanated from the mouth of the Duke of Gloucester, shortly after he had been blinded by Lear’s daughter Regan: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ For the ancient Greeks, the connection between gods and their sport was indeed a close one. The reasons for this are far from accidental. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller — the eighteenth-century German philosopher, historian, poet and playwright — wrote:

  For, to declare it once and for all, man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly man when he is playing. This proposition, which at the moment perhaps seems paradoxical, will assume great and deep significance when we have once reached the point of applying it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny; it will, I promise you, support the whole fabric of aesthetic art, and the still more difficult art of living. But it is only in science that this statement is unexpected; it has long since been alive and operative in art and in the feeling of the Greeks, its most distinguished exponents; only they transferred to Olympus what should have been realized on earth. Guided by its truth, they caused not only the seriousness and toil which furrow the cheeks of mortals, but also the futile pleasure that smoothes the empty face, to vanish from the brows of the blessed gods and they released these perpetually happy beings from the fetters of every aim, every duty, every care, and made idleness and indifference the enviable portion of divinity; merely a more human name for the freest and most sublime state of being.

  One does not have to believe in the gods of Olympus to see the significance of this passage, any more than one need believe in the God of the Old Testament to understand the significance of the book of Genesis. God or gods — they are metaphysical distractions. In each case, it is what the story shows rather than what it says that is important. There is an important truth embodied in this passage, but also an equally important error.

  First, there is the truth. The Greeks ‘transferred to Olympus what should have been realized on earth’. The life of a god is a representation of what an ideal human life — a life ‘freest and most sublime’ — would look like. The ideal life is one released from ‘every aim, every duty, every care’. What would one do to fill a life such as this? To spend this life working, one would have to be a god touched by madness. Anything you might obtain through work, you can now obtain through a click of your divine fingers. The gods did not work — they played. They were immortal — what else were they going to do?

  Well: I suppose sex springs to mind. An immortal creature released from every aim, duty and care — surely they would spend a lot of time having sex? It is well known that the gods were not averse to sexual encounters with each other and with mortals. But even these they tended to turn into a game. The eye of Zeus, let us suppose, has been taken by a comely mortal — Alkmene, Antiope, Danae, Dia, Elare, Europa, Eurymedousa, Kallisto, Kalyke, Kassiopeia, Lamia, Laodameia, Leda, Lysithoe, Niobe, Olympias, Pandora, Protogeneia, Pyrrha, Phthia, Semele or Thyia. Zeus had a lot of time on his hands, and his eye was frequently taken by comely mortals. There are certain advantages to being the most powerful of the gods, but also certain disadvantages. Zeus would not experience the thrill of the chase, or the agonizing of the will-she-won’t-she variety. Yes, she will, if that is what he decides because he is the most powerful of the gods and she will ultimately have no choice. Consequently, Zeus turned many of his sexual encounters into games. He seduced Alkmene by disguising himself as her husband. He assumed the form of a satyr to seduce Antiope. For Europa, he took on the form of a bull — though the game here was hardly one of seduction. He assumed the form of a fellow Olympian, Artemis, in order to seduce Kallisto. The form of a swan was his preferred vehicle for the seduction of Leda. Most idiosyncratically of all, he assumed the form of an ant to impregnate Eurymedousa. She bore him a son named Myrmidon — ‘ant man’. In his seductions, conquests and, it has to be said, rapes, Zeus liked to adopt an inefficient means of achieving his desired goal. He voluntarily chose to make things difficult for himself. As Bernard Suits would have put it, Zeus brought a lusory attitude to the achieving of his pre-lusory goals. Zeus liked to play, and the reason is clear: once you took away the game, all that would remain for Zeus in his sexual encounters would be a pleasant sensation in the loins. That is not to be dismissed, I suppose, but neither is it something to be making the cornerstone of one’s immortal existence.

  Second, there is the error contained in Schiller’s claim. Zeus is a moral monster and the same is, in general, true of his fellow Olympians. The error in Schiller’s claim is to suppose that the alternative to a life of work is ‘idleness and indifference’. To play is, of course, hardly to be idle. But Zeus does exhibit a notable indifference or callousness in his dealings with others. His moral failures all stem from an inability, or perhaps an unwillingness, to see intrinsic value in all the places it exists. For Zeus, intrinsic value is to be found in the game. Mortals have value to the extent they play a role in his games. Apparently, he had his moments — brief and terrifying flashes of illumination they might have been for him — when he suspected that mortals might be more than this, and at these times he would go to great lengths to protect a mortal consort. But by and large they were merely pawns — they had instrumental value only.

  Today, it seems we have travelled a very different path, a mortal furrow that the gods of Olympus would find difficult even to understand. We are happy to recognize that mortal humans have intrinsic value. And we are, of course, absolutely right to do so. Some think — I am one of them — this recognition should be extended to some mortals that are not human; but the individual human being is the clearest locus of intrinsic value. The fundamental assumption underlying the ethical and political systems of the West is that all human beings are born equal: they are all equally valuable, and this value is intrinsic to them. People should not be treated as pawns in a game, merely a means to an end. People are, as Immanuel Kant — the eighteenth-century German philosopher — put it, ‘ends-in-themselves’. Play, on the other hand, is typically thought of as a relatively unimportant aspect of life. Of course, one should make a little time in one’s life to play: but not too much, and only when one has taken care of life’s more important and pressing demands. This is not simply due to the contingencies of industrial and post-industrial life where, for most of us, it is necessary to work in order to live. The attitude runs deeper than that. Hard work is something for which a person might be legitimately praised. Play is something one merely does. To spend one’s life playing — if one is fortunate enough to never have to work — is something that would draw disapprobation. We might say, of such a person, that they ‘never grew up’ — and that would be intended as an insult. Hard work is edifying, ennobling. Play
is merely a distraction. We are, undoubtedly, morally better than the gods of Olympus. Nevertheless, at the same time, we have forgotten something that the Greeks knew, just as we came to forget what we knew when we were children. The Greeks understood that in Utopia we would play games. In Utopia, it is play that would redeem life, would make it ‘worth the trouble’. But utopia is, when it is accurately portrayed, the best life a human can live. It seems we must conclude that the Greeks regarded play as an essential component of the best life a human can live. It is play, and not work, that is intrinsically valuable in life and so play, and not work, that makes life ‘worth the trouble’.

  Plato was the pre-eminent philosopher of the first half of fourth-century-BCE Athens and arguably the greatest philosopher ever. The safest general characterization of Western philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead once claimed, is a series of footnotes to Plato. Plato built his entire philosophical system around the existence of what he called eidos, or what today tend to be known as ‘forms’. The form of something is its essence — what it really is. Today we talk about someone’s running form — their technique. This is an echo of Plato: the better your form, the closer you are to the perfect runner. In a slightly different sense, we might describe an athlete as being in good or poor form, or in form or out of it. Plato is very much with us today in the language we use. Even on my good days — when I am ‘in form’ in the second sense — I am a very long way from the form of a distance runner. Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, to take two obvious examples, are both much closer to this form — indeed, of all humans, living or dead, these two might be as good approximations to the form of the distance runner as anyone. But even Gebrselassie and Bekele, Plato would claim, are not perfect. Nothing in the physical world is. What makes anyone a runner is their resemblance to or, as Plato often put it, their participation in, the form of the runner. Their status as a runner is dependent on the relation in which they stand to the form of the runner. But the form is what it is — it depends on nothing for its status. This is true more generally. Everything that exists in our world is what it is only because it bears certain relations to one or more forms. I am a man because of my (imperfect) resemblance to the form of the man. Hugo is a dog because of his resemblance to the form of the dog, and so on. But there is no converse dependence: the forms do not depend on the things that instantiate them for their existence.