Today I am to talk to you about whether “the communication of Olympism by athletes’ role models [could] make a difference in community”. I could give you a very short and possibly demoralising answer to that question. Instead I plan to demoralise you in a completely different way. Let me begin with a well-known Greek myth, as retold by Albert Camus.

Sisyphus

In his interpretation of Sisyphus, Camus argues against something he calls “philosophical suicide”. This is the response that many of us have to the Absurd, which he describes as the mismatch we experience between ourselves and the universe. The natural world is indifferent to us and will continue whether we are here or not and will (probably) survive in some way through all the damage we do to it. No matter how astounding our achievements as individuals (or as a species), no matter how kind or how evil, how influential or insignificant, we will each of us die and be forgotten; even our planet and our sun, all will pass away and become nothing. The Absurd exists as our human response to this mismatch (p. 462)¹, inciting us to then seize on something, anything, to give meaning to our existence. There is the danger that we then seize on the Absurd as itself the meaning of existence, thus insisting on there being a meaning after all. Maybe the universe does have some higher meaning, from the “gods-eye view”, but what good would that do us? We are human; we can only understand things in human terms, and we must live on human terms. Life, Camus declares, can be better lived if it has no meaning: “that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge” (p. 477)¹.

In Camus’ retelling, Sisyphus rolls his rock up the mountain everyday, sees it roll back down, and sets to rolling it back up again – forever. And yet imagines Sisyphus happy. To us, this task seems like torture – to day after day repeat something so meaningless, so pointless, that can never succeed or be completed. And yet... that is what we do everyday. We go to work everyday, study or train, in hopes of producing something at least decent, maybe wonderful, even though we may never be noticed or remembered – or maybe just because the task itself is something we would choose to do regardless. Nothing we achieve will last. This is also true for sport. What does any given game or competition actually decide? Team A defeats team B in football. But that does not put an end to football. If Usain Bolt or Mo Farah sets a new record, does running stop? We win or we lose in some sporting event, but then we go do it again the next day. Nothing is settled by playing other than the conviction that we will play again. And while we can bring all kinds of interpretations to bear on what has been played, these are overlays on the playing, which comes into existence and vanishes, just as music does, until we play again; it is the playing that matters.

So, is Sisyphus our sporting role model? Well, it’s not that straightforward. We need to think a bit more about what role models are and about what humans are.

Being and Becoming

For existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, human beings are both being and negation, or facticity and transcendence. What this means is this: most of the things in the world have being-in-itself, things like rocks, tree stumps, and bicycles. They are things whose being is, in a sense, complete; they can, on their own, only be what they are and, as such, they have each their own essence. Humans, in contrast, have consciousness and thus their being is being-for-itself. Because of consciousness, there is a negation at the heart of our being, we are what we are not. A slightly simpler way of saying this is that we are conscious of our being and that ability to pose questions about our being means that we are not opaque being –we are separated from our own being, and thus we can make our own being, by making decisions about it– we are free. We are not being, but becoming. And thus the question for us is always less “what am I?” and more “what shall I become?” Not essence but existence.

We are not, however, each of us alone in the world; we encounter others who are also conscious and so being-for-others refers to the way in which we exist outside of ourselves as an object for others. Finally, facticity is the way in which we are not only for-itself (consciousness) but also have an objective existence – there are facts about ourselves, where we were born, how tall we are, what languages we speak, and so on. A perpetual challenge for us is balancing these: our facticity is unavoidable but we must not allow ourselves to be reduced to this, because we are always also consciousness, with all that entails: freedom and the need to choose and to take responsibility for our choosing, because we will choose, no matter what.

For Sartre, without consciousness, the world has no meaning – meaning is a product of consciousness alone which projects it onto the world. So, I find myself in some situation in the world; I determine for myself what that situation means for me, what significance it has for me in terms of my being as someone capable of projects and free choices. Consequently, the world, though it is in one sense something alien to me, in other sense it is intimately my own: it cannot exist as having the sort of significance that it does for me, without me there to create it as such, through my choices².

Bad Faith

A classic example of this is Sartre’s discussion of bad faith, which is also directly pertinent to today’s question. Bad faith is something that we do to ourselves as an outcome of an unwillingness to accept either our facticity or our freedom in relation to it. This underlying reluctance then skews how we weigh the available evidence for our belief; in effect, we resolve to be persuaded by lousy evidence. This is a kind of self-deception but it concerns these deep issues of whether we are prepared to accept responsibility for our fundamental relation to ourselves as both: physically situated and able to choose how we respond to that situation. For Sartre, bad faith manifests as an attempt to take advantage of the circumstance that we are both being and something that can contemplate our being: yes, I have a physical presence, a history, there are facts about me that stretch into the past, but I am also a consciousness that can stand outside these facts and decide for myself what they mean for me. Bad faith makes use of this circumstance of human being and attempts to blur the distinction while exploiting it, so that when the individual is confronted with a situation which requires a response with regard to their facticity which they do not want to face up to, they retreat to their own identification of themself with transcendence, or the reverse. Thus, Sartre gives us two famous examples of the woman in the café (who avoids acknowledging her physicality and what it means for her and others) and of the waiter (who in perfecting his waiter-ness avoids his freedom to be other than a waiter)³.

These two cases involve individuals responding negatively to their situation, in that both are evading responsibility, one for their concrete situatedness and one for their self-determination. Bad faith affects everyone, but, as these examples show, a key area in which bad faith can arise is in that of identity (“who/what am I?”). Another is where we see events unfold in a way that causes us unease but we refrain from overt response because we think that we cannot or must not do so (“I can’t do anything”). Bad faith arises to give us permission to avoid being agents in our own lives.

Ethical Ambiguity

In The Ethics of Ambiguity⁴ Simone de Beauvoir argues a point that appears in different ways in different existentialist authors and which amounts to a skepticism about our motives for certain kinds of moral assumptions. She points out that hidden within all moralities is an assumption of human failure. After all, morality is supposed to prescribe for us certain kinds of conduct; but why do we need to have conduct prescribed for us unless there is some chance that we might not do what we ought? An ideal is then put forward that we must find some way to conform to: a template for right action. Our becoming is directed toward achieving a certain kind of being which represents the moral ideal. Morality only applies to us because of this separation between ourselves and our being (p. 11)⁴. That is, morality is an issue for us because we are not identical with being as such (as a stone or a tree-stump is). We are able to consider our own being, and to attempt to alter it. This separation from being is what makes us human. The lack of being at the heart of human being “has a way of being which is precisely existence” (p. 13)⁴. So, an existentialist ethics will still require that a human being become his being, but that being is the being of not-being, that is, of consciousness.

De Beauvoir makes the following statement: “To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (p. 24)⁴. How can I will myself free if I already am free, if freedom is inherent in the nature of human being? This question, however, only makes sense if freedom is supposed to be a thing or quality, which a person either has or does not have. But de Beauvoir wants to argue that freedom is not a thing like that: freedom only exists as the activity of freedom, and not otherwise. And in acting I must continually re-engage my past acts (my facticity) into my future projects, not letting myself become a finished thing. What is important is not what I have accomplished, but what I do next.

According to de Beauvoir, authenticity requires that one not recognize any absolute, unconditioned value – an end for our existence which is externally defined for us, and defining of us. When we do this it is because we are looking for some external authority to change our existence into being, instead of accepting the lack in our being. This is trying to make ourselves into being, instead of accepting our separation from being and using it to transcend ourselves. It is a mistake to look for the standard of value for existence outside of existence itself; nothing can give value to existence save existence itself. Existence is itself the beginning of value (p. 15)⁴. Nevertheless, we do often want these absolute and indisputable values subsisting outside of us, as absolute authorities, telling us what to be and how to behave. It gives us a certainty that existence itself cannot have, and it absolves us of the responsibility that we do not want and from which we flee into bad faith.

De Beauvoir is opposed to the notion that it is the business of ethics to give us a catalogue of actions that are right and those that are wrong. There are no recipes, she says, only methods (p. 134)⁴. But although she thinks that we cannot say beforehand, in abstraction, what sorts of actions are ethically valid, we can set at least one condition as one that must be met by any possible action for it to be valid. We must treat the other “as a freedom so that his end may be freedom” (p. 142)⁴. Acting concretely in real situations, we will in each case be forced to invent an original solution–we need to be creative, as well as free. We also have to recognise that as we will freedom, we cannot only will our own. De Beauvoir is emphatic that the freedom of others can only enhance my own possibilities.

And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbour into prison (p. 90-1)⁴.

In the end, the only freedom we are called upon to respect is that which seeks to expand the possibilities of freedom itself – not that which denies itself, flees itself, or resigns itself, which is what it does insofar as it seeks to deny freedom in another, just as much as if it seeks to deny it in the individual himself.

Role Models and Moral Exemplars

Before tackling the question of existential role models it would be advisable to look to a very useful analysis by Randolph Feezell⁵. Feezell points out that in talking about role models we use the term in a narrow and in a broad sense, the former of which is largely descriptive while the latter has a normative (moral)

import (p. 21)⁵. In the former case, we can speak of someone being a role model for the acquisition of certain kinds of technical skill: if you want to be a good skier or tennis player it would be reasonable to emulate the practices of someone who is already very good at that activity. But that doesn’t mean that you should imitate such persons in every aspect of their lives. For example, while I admire enormously the wit, intelligence, artistry, and sheer philosophical chops of Søren Kierkegaard, I really don’t think he offers a good example of how to behave in general (he was a misogynist and rather a jerk). The point is that when we talk about the importance of people behaving as role models what we usually mean is that they should be role models in the broad sense, in other words, moral exemplars. We don’t tend to keep this distinction in mind but, as Feezell argues, “[t]here is no reason to think that role models are necessarily moral exemplars, or persons whose lives as a whole are worthy of imitation...” (p. 21)⁵ and moreover that “[t]here is nothing intrinsic to being a celebrated athlete that merits the status of being a moral exemplar” (p. 22)⁵.

It is a common view that athletes do have such an extra obligation that the rest of us do not have, just because they are in the public eye and may influence others by their behaviour. But does that public scrutiny in fact entail a further obligation that the rest of us do not have? Feezell points out that there is an incoherency in this demand. “If someone has a moral reason to do x,... it seems superfluous or redundant to say she has an additional moral reason to do x. Or, to put it in the language of virtue, if someone has a good reason to be a virtuous moral agent (overall), it seems superfluous to say the agent has an additional moral reason to be virtuous” (p. 24)⁵. Moreover, Feezell suggests, the athlete-as-moral-exemplar rule invites a kind of dishonesty (or hypocrisy), insofar as we demand that they act as moral exemplars (“role models”) whether they really are or not, because they are celebrated athletes, although celebrated athletes are not, simply insofar as they are celebrated athletes, worthy of moral emulation (p. 24-25)⁵.

This is an analytical objection to treating athletes as moral exemplars; there are some deep existential problems here, as well, not to mention that the practice presupposes that we agree on what constitutes good moral practice–we should know by now that “universal fundamental ethical principles” very rarely are⁶. Bad faith is the major existential risk here. To identify oneself with either a moral doctrine or with a social role is to abandon one’s identity as a free consciousness. To take on the role of exemplar, even more than simply trying to “do the right thing”, is to attempt to make oneself a facticity, a thing, just like the waiter in the café. Likewise, for the onlooker to attempt to adopt the identity of the exemplar, as if one could be just like them, is to attempt to evade their responsibility to determine themself in their own situation. Sport already makes bad faith-inducing demands of athletes in encouraging the taking on of totalising identifications wherein they can only see themselves as hockey player, rower, gymnast, runner, etc. The demand to be a moral exemplar is not just dishonest in the way Feezell describes, but a socially mandated bad faith on the part of the athlete and a kind of theatre that feeds the bad faith of the audience, who want athletes to be their moral stand-ins.

This brings us back to Sisyphus and whether we should look at him as a kind of athletic-existentialist role model or moral exemplar. In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling⁷ the pseudonymous character Johannes di Silentio is trying to get his head around how Abraham could be a religious exemplar, while having been willing to slaughter his own son, completely contrary to universal ethical principles. He never really sorts out this paradox but his example is meant to indirectly communicate to the reader the need, not to imitate Abraham (as child-slaughter isn’t really what is required), but to think through Abraham’s example as a window into understanding how each individual has to confront alone the problem of existing. The question is not “how do I do what that one has done?” but “what shall I do now, here, myself?” He is an existential role model, like Sisyphus, but all that gets you is the imperative to embrace existence and its absurdities. For Camus, unlike Kierkegaard, this also means affirming the lack of pre-determined meaning and enjoying existence because of it–like play.

Finally, to come back to our starting question about athletes as role models for Olympism. There are good philosophical reasons, including, but not only, existentialist ones, to reject the notion that athletes should attempt to be role models, any more than anyone else, or at all. No one can live my life but me. If we mean what we normally mean by “role model” there is only bad faith and hypocrisy. There is, however, another way of looking at this. Modern sport emphasises wins, records, and medals. Athletes become instruments in advancing commercial and national aggrandisement and are developed and discarded as means to the accumulation of results. The use of athletes as role models to sell sport fits into this objectifying project. But, as suggested earlier, none of these things has the objective permanence that we seek in them. The entire project of being in modern sport remains both futile and absurd in Camus’ sense. The athlete then is faced, like Sisyphus, with the question of whether to look for a meaning that justifies it, to deny the self for “the sake of something bigger” (to commit philosophical suicide), or to refuse to be made a thing, to retain their freedom, and to just play because choosing to play instead is the most human thing. The solution is not to acquiesce in the project but to resist by playing to play–that is an authentically Sisyphean role to take on.

Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

[p. 489] The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock up to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to why he became the futile labourer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Ægina, the daughter of Æsopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Æsopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

[p. 490] It is said also that Sisyphus, being near death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones, and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is as much so through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy, yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That [p. 491] hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my advance dage and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well”. Sophocles’ Oedipus, like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What! by such narrow ways--?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a [p. 492] mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well”, says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with\ dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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References

1. Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”. In Marino, G. Basic Writings of Existentialism. New York: Modern Library, 2004: 489-492.

2. Jean-Paul Sartre: “Existentialism”. In Marino, G.: Basic Writings of Existentialism. New York: Modern Library, 2004: 341-367.

3. Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. See Part One, Ch. Two, esp. 96-103.

4. Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. N. York: Philosophical Library, 1976.

5. Feezell, R.: “Celebrated Athletes, Moral Exemplars, and Lusory Objects”, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 32, 1 (2005): 20-35.

6. See R. Feezell: “Sport, Religious Belief, and Religious Diversity.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 40, 1 (2013), 135-162, and S. Loland: “A Well Balanced Life Based on ‘The Joy of Effort’: Olympic Hype or a Meaningful Ideal?”, Sport, Ethics, and Philosophy, 6:2, (2012), 155-165.

7. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Trans. Hong and Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

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Howe Leslie A., "Sisyphus and Olympism:  An Existentialist Approach to Role Models", in:K. Georgiadis (ed.), Challenges an Olympic Athlete faces as a Role Model, 58th International Session for Young Participants (Ancient Olympia,16-30/6/2018), International Olympic Academy, Athens, 2019, pp.111-122.

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