Abstract
I argue that bodybuilding should not qualify as a sport, given that at the competition stage it lacks an essential feature of sports, namely, skillful activity. Based on the classic distinction between Leib (the lived body) and Körper (the objective body) in phenomenology, I argue that bodybuilding competition’s sole purpose is to present the Körper, whereas sports are about manifestations of Leib. I consider several objections to this analysis, after which I conclude that bodybuilding is an endeavor closer to both beauty competitions and classical sculpture rather than to any other known sports.
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Notes
I say mere motionlessness, because I can imagine sports where one needs to stay motionless against some mechanical force, hence, involving a real skill of resistance.
Cf. Gallagher (2005, ch. 1) on body schema as opposed to body image; I will come back to this point in the last section of the paper.
Sartre, in, Part 3, chapter 1 of Being and Nothingness, offered an extensive discussion of how awareness of oneself as a subject as well as intersubjectivity arise from one’s awareness of The Look, that is, of being stared at by another subject. I will come back to this phenomenon in the last section of the paper.
For instance, interesting, aesthetically pleasing, expressive, depending on the purpose of the pose, as in photography, modeling for painting or fashion shows, or beauty contests.
Many thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this point.
Though not everyone agrees. More recently, philosophers such as Ellen Fridland (2014a, 2015) and Barbara Montero (2010) have convincingly argued that skilled behavior in fact requires some form or other of conscious, even intelligent control. Not much depends, for the purposes of this paper, who is right since, if I am right, bodybuilding (the competitional stage) is far removed from the cases of highly skilled behavior that these authors consider.
It is worth noting that whereas in skilled performances there is a possibility of choking, in bodybuilding competitions this is excluded since, arguably, it is precisely attentional focus on the feedback from muscle fibers, tendons, and skin receptors that help a good, complete flexing performance. In other words, focusing on one’s flexing helps this performance.
No less so the more specifically competition linked dehydration and fat burning processes.
One is reminded of Franz Kafka’s short story “A hunger artist”, which I interpret as an irony vis-à-vis such extensions of the concept or art that would include some trivial bodily function (here feeding and hunger) raised to an extreme level implementation, or lack of it thereof.
Though, to be fair, I do think beauty contests deserve more to have been considered a sport, given that there is a lot more skill involved in them than in bodybuilding competitions. It is hence even more paradoxical, or unfair, that beauty contest are not recognized as sports, while bodybuilding is.
A further argument that bodybuilding is not a lived-body activity is worth noting here. Obsessive preoccupation with muscle mass is a pathology connected to the world of bodybuilding, leading to self-injury and psychosis (Hameed et al. 2016), and it is in many ways a kind of reverse anorexia nervosa, a condition in which the subject becomes obsessively preoccupied by the goal of losing weight. As pointed out by Dorothée Legrand (2010: 194): “anorexics seek the preservation of their body-as-subject by destructing their body-as-object”, which means that the object of obsessive attention in anorexia is the Körper. By analogy, then, since excessive bodybuilding activity is the mirror image of anorexia, bodybuilding is truly an activity directed to the body image rather than to the body schema or anything related to the lived-body.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
Since performance philosophy is an emerging field, there is no current agreement on anything like a definition, or a gloss. However, there are prgramatic discussions (e.g. Kirkkopelto 2015) where the focus on art performance and, more narrowly, on performance arts is present.
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Acknowledgments
I wrote this paper during my research fellowship at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Cognitive Evolution, Ruhr Universität Bochum, October 2016 – March 2017. Many thanks to Albert Newen and Shaun Gallagher for making this visit possible!
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Aranyosi, I. Body, skill, and look: is bodybuilding a sport?. Phenom Cogn Sci 17, 401–410 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9513-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9513-3