The Fisherman’s Friend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football” -Albert Camus

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team” -Jean-Paul Sartre 

(via philosophyfootball.com) 

Now, where was I?

Playing football, of course. When you’ve got nothing to say, go out and play. As has been said, the body knows what the mind discovers, and off season gossip and tabloid revelation is a poor substitute for your own clumsy, leaden, sometimes skilful and ultimately exhausting attempts at playing the game at your own level.

John-Paul Satre and Albert Camus, two old partisans-cum-existentialists, once had an argument over the same semantic point. Satre said “to be is to do”, while Camus begged to differ, saying “to do is to be”. 

I’m with Camus on this one, and it is no surprise to learn that he was once a football player too. Sport is, at it’s core, existential in nature - for all our love of it, it is still the aestheticising of will with effort and nothing more. Whether it be the in pleasure of experience, or in the experience of pleasure, the playing or the watching, the beauty of it all is that it can mean both everything and nothing. Pretty much like art really, when you make it.

Back soon.