Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Skiing

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

As Spring is upon us after a long winter, we may not want to think about the cold months behind us. Certainly the noted Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was not sorry to see the cold season go; and certainly he has no love for winter sports. He wrote recently on an online platform: “The worst thing about winter is the pressure to go out and participate in the imbecilic rituals called ‘winter sports’. It is difficult for me to imagine something more stupid. Think about skiing: is it not the closest human equivalent you can get to a hamster running on a wheel? You climb (or are dragged) to the top of a hill – why? To come back down on your skis…”

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) did not have a Substack, nor did he share Žižek’s aversion to winter sports. Beginning in 1934, Sartre and his philosopher partner Simone de Beauvoir would go skiing in the Alps every winter. Sartre apparently became fond of what he called faire le ski after being a student in Germany. In this (and in other ways) he was heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only lectured on existentialism, but occasionally did so wearing his skiing outfit, ready to hit the slopes after his lecture.

Heidegger did not call his book Skiing and Time, and Sartre did not call his own opus Skiing and Nothingness. But he might as well have done, since he waxed lyrical in it about the freedom of slaloming downhill, and noted that “the feeling of skiing is my ability to be the master of the snow” (Being and Nothingness, p.643).

Sartre famously fell out with his friend Albert Camus (1913-1961). A recent article concluded that “The philosophical argument between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be summarised in their conflicting accounts of skiing” – with the author of La Peste being dismissive of racing down la piste (‘Swimming and Skiing’, Andy Martin, in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2010).

So far we have dealt only with Continental philosophers. Perhaps the British did not write about skiing because we simply don’t have enough snow. But that would not be true for American thinkers. And, sure enough, John Rawls (1921-2002) was an avid and talented skier (as well as being a wrestler and an American football player while at Princeton). Apparently the egalitarian political philosopher and author of A Theory of Justice was somewhat embarrassed by his passion for the winter sport. Norman Daniels, the main custodian of his work, noted that his mentor was concerned that “skiing is a common behaviour of the rich but not of poor working people” (see ‘Rawls’ Complex Egality’ by N. Daniels in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, p.241).

Anyway, you don’t need to worry about all that now. Winter is over.

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is now available in Spanish as Grandes Mentes Y Pequeñas Cosas.