Sport - Profound or a Waste of Time? - The Philosophers' Magazine

"…if philosophers neglect our physicality then they have only a partial picture of our natures...

https://philosophersmag.com/essays/73-sport-profound-or-a-waste-of-time

Bread and roses

Rebecca Solnit's "In Praise Of" chapter in "Orwell's Roses", from my Spring Break leisure-reading list, includes this spirited defense--echoed yesterday in the Times by Margaret Renkl--of our "right to live, not simply exist."

"If roses represent pleasure, leisure, self-determination, interior life, and the unquantifiable, the struggle for them is sometimes not only against owners and bosses seeking to crush their workers but against other factions of the left who disparage the necessity of these things. The left has never been short on people arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy oneself while others suffer, and somewhere others will always be suffering. It’s a puritanical position, implying that what one has to offer them is one’s own austerity or joylessness, rather than some practical contribution toward their liberation. Underlying all this is a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures and beauties are counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, decadent, indulgent, and the desire for them should be weeded out and scorned. Would-be revolutionaries often argue that only the quantifiable matters, and that human beings should be rational creatures content with what should matter and fit into how things should be, rather than what does matter and how things are. The roses in “bread and roses” constituted an argument not only for something more, but for something more nuanced and elusive—as Rose Schneiderman put it, “The right to live, not simply exist.” It was an argument that what makes our lives worth living is to some degree incalculable and unpredictable, and varies from person to person. In that sense, roses also mean subjectivity, liberty, and self-determination." "Orwell's Roses" by Rebecca Solnit: https://a.co/fnDCKCX

It's a misdirected solidarity with suffering humanity NOT to smell the roses while we can. And, it's a hopelessly confused "utilitarian" who scorns pleasure and happiness in favor of bread (here symbolizing mere survival). Take that bread, says Solnit's next chapter, and make buttered toast. Live a little. Enjoy life's little breaks. That's no betrayal of suffering humanity.