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Anamnesis Journal
The David Foster Wallace Redux: Sports,
Aesthetics, Religion, and Rule-Following
by Chris Barker
In 2006, David Foster Wallace wrote a well-regarded literary appreciation of Roger Federers tennis
genius. Written when Federer, then twenty-five years old, had won thirty-nine singles titles and eight
Grand Slams, Wallaces piece skillfully evoked Federers old-school stoicism and mental toughness and
good sportsmanship and evident overall decency.
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According to Wallacethe successful novelist and
skilled amateur tennis player, and yet also someone willing to slum as a comic foil to athletic genius
Federers self-mastery induced a religious experience in the observer, one where you standor sit, or
sprawloutside your own body, ecstatically, an emotional spectator of another persons superhuman
achievement.
Wallaces account is engaging enough to have worked its way into a philosophical text as one example
of what it is to have a shining moment. Philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly (of
Berkeley and Harvard, respectively), laud the whooshing up that sports cause us to experience.
Dreyfus and Kellys shining moments are examples of fully embodied joys, ones in which we are
capable of luring back the gods so that we are taken over and directed by the situation rather than by
our own will.
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Despite their admiration for David Foster Wallace, whose writings (including the article on
Federer) they interpret at length, they find Wallaces own notion of the sacred nihilistic. Wallaces
sacred is something we impose upon experience . . . For Wallace anything . . . can be experienced as
sacred if I choose to make it so.
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Writing specifically about Federer, they themselves think that the
religious experience inspired by full-embodied athletic grace cannot be uncovered through control
and will and confrontation, as Wallace understands it to be.
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This romantic praise of whooshing up has been criticized trenchantly (and accurately) by critics of All
Things Shining.
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But the experience of transcendence, as Dreyfus and Kelly relate it in their last chapter,
is less about superhuman achievement than about community. For example, a baseball game gathers
people together and focuses them on what is best about the season, the community, the game, and
themselves.
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The experience of watching the 2012 London Summer Olympics (replayed on television
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each evening for an American television audience who already knew the outcome of many of the
events) fits their description. When the Ethiopian runner and gold medal winner Meseret Defar
removed a picture of the Virgin Mary from her track suit after winning her race, she showed this spirit in
miniature.
More than seven years after Wallaces piece, Federer now has seventy-six singles titles, seventeen
Grand Slams, and the all-time record for weeks as the number-one-ranked mens tennis player.
However, Federers preternatural kinesthetic control and the satisfaction that it brings to the spectator
are nearing a terminus. In comparison, Andy Murray, who recently bested Federer in the Olympic mens
singles final and won the US Open over Novak Djokovic, offers far less satisfying kinesthetic control and
harmony of action and much more evidence of striving. Still, the sport does not necessarily suffer
because of Federers decline. Sport can be about participation and striving as well as achievement.
Competitive sport can offer a chance for the celebration of nationality, or it can even be a way of
redeeming past traumas (such as, the Dunblane shooting that put Murrays hometown on the map). It is
possible to assign many values to competitive sports, but another way to defend (and to understand)
sports as cultural practices is in terms of how they uniquely show us how the imposition of rules and
necessities are (counter-intuitively) liberating, rather than constraining. Since the rules of games are so
clearly enunciated and enforced, sport provides a unique cultural venue where the average citizen can
learn about the virtues of following arbitrary rules. This is more true of sports than, say, a symphonic
recital, where specific roles are mapped out beforehand in scripts. If this sort of distinction holds, the
rule-boundedness of sports offers an alternative to the Dreyfus/Kelly (and, to a lesser extent, to
Wallaces) suggestion that sport offers a way to feel religious ecstasy without religion. Instead of
thinking of sport as providing a situation in which one feels an ebullition of emotion at supernatural
grace (like religion), one should view sports as providing a path toward seeing rule-following (and
subordination to laws) as a reasonable proposition, even or especially if the laws themselves are not
entirely reasonable.
It ought not to be assumed that when we distinguish sporting events from cultural events, like the
symphony, we do so for the right reasons. Sports give concrete evidence as to when it is acceptable or
unacceptable to act as an individual; and sports provide a context for (some of) the rules we accept,
situations when we should follow them, and reasons for breaking them. In some cases, the rules of the
game trumpor are interrupted or trumped bysocial rules about lying, harming others, and giving up.
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At other times, games reinforce existing social norms and also show the value in following rules and
creating norms.
Sports, then, are cultural events, as the movie Bull Durham argues when it analogizes baseball to a
church. But they are also games, and it is as games that they are distinct from theater, symphonies, and
the ritual practices of religions. In philosopher Bernard Suitss analysis of games, one of the constitutive
elements of game-playing is the lusory attitude, which involves accepting constitutive rules just so
the activity made possible by such acceptance can occur.
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This is a penetrating insight that explains why
Wallace, Dreyfus, and Kelly are incorrect to imagine there to be little difference between games and
religion, or between a hail Mary pass and a Hail Mary.
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Church membership has rules, observances,
and practices, but these rules ultimately present themselves as divinely willed and thus as righteous and
non-arbitrary.
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Sport, in contrast, works perfectly well when the rules present themselves as arbitrary
conventions that function to make achieving a designated goal more difficult.
If sports, religious practices, and symphonic performances are all cultural events, reflecting the way that
particular groups have developed their natural inclinations, only sports are actual games, and only they
should be treated as such. In Suitss utopian celebration of the lusory attitude, games are the only
activity that a truly autonomous person would value, just for their own sake and not for any
instrumental or productive end. (This assumes that our material needs are taken care of, and we have
the leisure to pursue whatever activities we want.) The suggestion that we would voluntarily agree to
arbitrary rules and spend our leisure performing actions to better conform to these rules is an odd (and,
as Suits says) a utopian idea. Yet there is evidence for this in our non-utopian world, where sports are
precisely the fora where even the very rich and the very famous are noticeably and obviously imposed
upon by necessities, and they choose to suffer under those conditions in order to cultivate their will and
sense of control in response to necessities imposed under the rules of the game. In the quote of the
2012 sporting year, Kobe Bryant captured this thought when speaking about winning in the NBA play-
offs:
Its one of those things where psychologically you have to put yourself in a predicament, in a position
where you have no other option but to perform. You have to emotionally put yourself with your back
against the wall and kind of trick yourself, so to speak, to feel that theres no other option but to perform
and to battle. When you have that, when you put yourself in that mind state, then your performance
shines through.
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In Bryants quotation we find one exposition of the athletes felt experience (the shining moment) and
one justification of his choice to impose arbitrary and even imagined rules upon himself to enable his
achievement to shine through. It is just this choice of will and control over situational loss-of-control
that Dreyfus and Kelly criticize. (In an amusing confluence of approaches, some NBA statisticians have
come to agree with the [Heideggerian] prioritization of the situation over the atomic, willful individual:
imposing your individual will on a game is often not the best way to win a game in a team sport, and it
may not even be the best way to win an individual competition, because the unchosen situationthe
flow of the gameprovides the ground upon which the individual finds him or herself as an individual
or a team member.)
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Necessity, as noted, is a funny thing: we impose it upon ourselves, and (oddly)
we choose to observe rules and to suffer penalties when we break them. This is one thing that games
teach: the utility of following rules that the participant did not generate but that are not externally
imposed against the will of the participant.
Since we cannot choose the given rules of biology and the historical social order, games and life are
different. How different they are is disputed. To a certain degree, my analysis of games, their
procedures and rules, and their ends borrows from but ultimately parts ways with Bernard Suitss
definition of a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
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In Suitss view,
there is no essential value in the telos of the task that game players undertake, and the importance of
game-playing lies instead in the lusory attitude whose main feature is accepting the arbitrary rules that
complicate the means to achieve a pre-lusory end, such as putting a ball in a hole.
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I retain the
teleologists sense that the choice to play games is not arbitrary, and that the rules of the games we feel
disposed to play are in some basic sense advancing us toward an unchosen goal. The connection
between dance and war and between sports and war suggest that game-playing, like Nietzsches
discipline of history, is used (and abused) to advance the goal of living. For his part, Suits mounts a
persuasive attack on the instrumentalists position,
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arguing that we think that autonomous individuals
do serious, socially useful things with their time while children play only because most of us feel the
need for an un-lusory narrative in which we are useful members of a social whole progressing toward a
goal. Once we instead accept that we live in a universe without such a teleological order, we can drop
the pretense of seriousness and get back to playing whole-heartedly and without guilt. The teleologist,
in contrast, argues that there is a definite destination to which human nature points, and that the
political unit (the whole, as Aristotle says, in which we are all parts) is the vehicle by which we achieve
such an end.
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To render this analysis persuasive, Suits relies on a utopian ideal in which all of our physiological needs
are instantly met, and only play retains its valued status as non-instrumental. If we still played games in
that society and did not simply rest in torpor, or instrumentalize our play by playing at increasingly life-
threatening games to provide an aim to an aimless life, then Suits would be correct. However, it is not
true that we can choose to play games in utopia if we wish, given that the change in material conditions
envisaged by Marx and others would not at the same time transform the nature of humans. We would
still be encumbered by our biology (if not our sociality) with reasons to compete, to fear God, and to
love with exclusivity; we would just have nothing and no one to compete over, to fear, or to love
exclusively.
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Given that we have strong, instrumental reasons for joining games, and non-instrumental reasons for
continuing to value and to play them, but (as far as we know) permanent limitations on the adoption of
the pure, lusory attitude, what do games tell us about ourselves? David Foster Wallace focuses on the
kinetic beauty of bodies at work, and his 2006 article is very strong on the actual mechanics of successful
tennis and about the changes in the mens game from power serve-and-volley to power baseline play.
He loves the game, and, acknowledging the rule-following elements of games, he argues by analogy that
the experience of watching the most skillful execution of actions under arbitrary rules is akin to the
experience of a religious mystery: how did the communicant go from A (in the back court, dead) to B
(volley winner, resurrected) by merely human means? Wallace thus answers the aesthete who sees only
biology in sports, and, in contrast, only imagination in the arts. In the radical expression of this
position, in which sport becomes either petty entertainment or mere biology, the unfettered
imagination roams free from constraint in the true arts, which, unlike sports, present rule-less games
of the imagination. But, as Suits correctly argues, even games of the imagination have rules that allow
players to coordinate their actions, or to coordinate themselves under the logic of their own thoughts.
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While granting the importance of situations that allow us to shine forth and to be the best that we can
be, it is hasty to say that we can achieve this transcendent end by divesting ourselves of will and control
in order to receive the divine aristeia of the gods, just as it is hasty to argue that our desire for control
implies an unfreedom of will, whether as biological alphas or betas or anyone else. It is better to argue
that what game-playing shows us is that real, non-utopian communities work somewhat like games,
connecting participation, rules, and achievement through specific examples of reward that variously
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encourage participation, or effort, or performance. Even the more concrete aspects of games tell us
something about ourselves by focusing our attention on the times that one is forced to take control of a
match, or on the way that the winning team members are required to speak about their contribution to
the victoryoften in deliberately understated (read: egalitarian) terms, a truth expressed very
beautifully in the 1988 film, Bull Durham).
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One of the virtues of Suitss book is that it allows us to
assign a definition to games, and then to assess the reasons why a pursuit is not a game, and also to
understand those cases where extrinsic goals are imposed to instrumentalize games. To make a rather
bad pun, the scripts imposed upon game players in the non-utopian world often cannot be avoided,
even for a moment. That is, the true game player does not play for or enjoy shining moments like
the spectator does; insofar as he is playing a game, he cannot adopt a purely lusory attitude, because, as
with everything else we do, the rules of a game are constituted by the social ends of societycontrol,
organization, liberty. Thus, agreeing with Suits, it is best to conclude that games are constituted by an
attitude and by rules that complicate the achievement of a goal that can be specified in terms outside of
the game, and (with Suits) that there may be purely lusory activities in a counterfactual world, but
(against Suits) no purely lusory players in this one, now or in the future.
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To sum up: Agreeing with Suits, there is something very valuable in the lusory attitude, and, in an
environment where (we think) we have reasons to love, lust, acquire, steal, lie, and honor, games tell us
something about the boons of following socially coordinated rules rather than simply bonking other
people on the head to get our way. In a contrary-to-fact environment where there are no causes to act
in the manner just described, games would probably not be played at all, as all activities would lack
worththere would be no reason for rules to be maintained, just as there would be no reason to direct
ones attention to such rules. All social coordination would be for merely vestigial (and therefore, in
Suitss account, prohibited) reasons. Unlike the utopia in Suitss account, this world could not come,
because it would require a denaturalization of human beingstheir differences in gender, intellectual
capacity, prenatal environment, education, and rearing would have to disappear entirely from memory.

Unlike Dreyfus and Kellys account of our shining moments of pagan inspiration, sports are less spookily
authentic, and yet they have importance and value. Sports rely upon cultures of agonism and
confrontation, and upon the pressures that push us to value equality and hierarchy. Sport is not religion,
under a charitable conception of both concepts, and even spectator sports do not offer an experience
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interchangeable with and indistinguishable from the religious experience. The value of sports and game-
playing is not diminished by distinguishing between two different phenomena (sport and religion), and
the separation should serve to enhance our understanding of both.

Dr. Chris Barker is a Fellow in the George Washington Forum, Ohio University.

1. David Foster Wallace, Federer as Religious Experience, New York Times, August 20, 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html.
2. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean R. Kelly, All Things Shining (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2011), 197,
199200.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Ibid., 198.
5. Ibid., 201. Compare the critical response of Garry Wills, Superficial & Sublime?,New York
Review of Books, April 7, 2011,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/superficial-sublime/.
6. Unless Dreyfus and Kelly are guilty of smuggling in an appeal to control and will, which is very
possible, it is difficult to understand how we can celebrate the greatness of our community and
ourselves without affirming the routines of practice, control, concentration, and development
that (partially) distinguish successful and non-successful competitors. But clarity concerning the
conditions of excellence and achievement is not the aim of All Things Shining.
7. Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press,
2005), 54.
8. Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining, 193.
9. The identification of righteous and non-arbitrary depends upon how one solves the so-called
Euthyphro paradox. See, for example, Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of
Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which argues that modernity moves
us from a morality of obedience to one of self-governance.
10. Quoted in David McMenamin, Bryant Stomachs Illness in Game 6, ESPN, May 11, 2012,
http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/7918159/kobe-bryant-stomachs-illness-lead-
los-angeles-lakers.
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11. One example: Henry Abbott, Hero Ball, ESPN, August 13,
2012, http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/7649571/nba-kobe-bryant-not-money-think-espn-
magazine.
12. Suits, Grasshopper, 55.
13. Michael Sandel uses the case of PGA Tour Inc. v. Casey Martin (S. Ct. 2001) to pose the question:
Does a sport have an end or telos that commits the player to using only some means to achieve
that end and not others? Like Suits, Justice Scalia argues that the incredibly silly question put
to the Court should not be answered by it in the affirmative, and, since it is the very nature of
a game to have no object except amusementit is quite impossible to say that any of a games
arbitrary rules is essential. See Michael Sandel, Justice: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 30114, quote at 312.
14. Ibid., 133.
15. See Thomas Hurka, Games and the Good, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Sup. Vol. 80
(2006): 21735. Hurka takes a different approach in his defense of games as part of the good
life. I think Suits could respond that he (Suits) is arguing primarily to defuse my inauthentic,
instrumentalist objections to the lusory attitude. Suits might respond to Hurkas charge of social
irresponsibility by replying that it is not perverse to honor Garry Kasparov over Nelson Mandela
as soon as we understand that politics and medicine are enthroned as intrinsic goods only by
scarcity and lack. When this is seen to be so, the decision to honor a Kasparov, who is useless, if
not vicious, at least when judged from the perspective of the city of scarcity and lack, may make
sense if freedom means something other than participating in the shared attempt to free
everyone from material scarcity. For Suits, once we see this, we may choose to honor games and
game-playing, even in an environment of material scarcity. In this respect, Suitss argument
tracks the defense of the useless or even vicious philosopher in Platos Republic, whereas the
instrumentalists argument more resembles Nietzsches celebration of superabundant
vitality.
16. Suits, Grasshopper, 8587, 92. For an account of Bloomsburys related error, see John Maynard
Keynes, My Early Beliefs, in The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary,
ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4864, at p. 58, 63. My
thanks to Craufurd Goodwin of Duke University for pointing this out during the Center for the
History of Political Economys 2013 Summer Institute.
17. Ethnographic evidence of the egalitarian language-game that social beings are forced to play
can be found in Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian
Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 45. My thanks to Jerry Gaus for
pointing to this wonderful evidence in his keynote conference at Ohio Universitys Equality and
Public Policy Conference, November 14, 2013.
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18. Such an approach may also move even conservatives and right libertarians toward accepting or
celebrating Title IX or less intrusive and more liberal ways of extending the boon of coach-ability
and means-ends analysis to young girls. Over 150 years ago, first-wave feminist John Stuart Mill
characterized women as hanging a dead weight on mens public conscience. Putting young
women under the yoke of coaches, team discipline, and (from one standpoint) arbitrary goals
may not be something they necessarily want to do, as sex-differences proponent Steven Rhoads
has argued, but it may be a useful thing to do. See John Stuart Mill, Speech of the Late John
Stuart Mill at the Great Meeting in Favour of Womens Suffrage, Held in the Music Hall,
Edinburgh, January 12, 1871 [London] : London Society for Womens Suffrage, [1871?]. This
pamphlet is held in the Newberry Library, Chicago, to which I give thanks for research
assistance. See also Steven Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2004), 15990.