Socrates Talks Tennis

With the U.S. Open Tennis Championships (August 27-Sept. 9) on the horizon, it’s time to think about tennis and philosophy. The problem is that it is rare for a philosopher to write about any individual sport. While the ancient Greeks celebrated the Olympic Games, Plato and Aristotle seem to have had nothing to say about any particular sport. Hegel is silent on hockey. What does Kant tell us about cricket? Crickets. However, at least one major philosopher of the past 100 years has written specifically about tennis. Hans-Georg Gadamer, who lived to be 102 despite having contracted polio at 22, played tennis into his 70s. In 1965 he wrote “A ‘Socratic’ Dialogue” for a jubilee at the Heidelberg Tennis Club, where Gadamer and his family were members. Gadamer is better known for his writing about play, in general, in his major work, Truth and Method (1960).

Philosophy does have a sub-discipline called the philosophy of sport. The anthologies for that sub-discipline consist mainly of often strained applications of philosophical theories to individual sports, rather than pieces about a sport written by, say, Seneca, Aquinas, Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche or Iris Murdoch. I suppose we could have had Arendt on vaping, if cigarette smoking qualified as a sport. Gadamer’s piece on tennis, therefore, counts as a rarity in the genre. The closest item to Gadamer’s essay in recent times might be David Foster Wallace’s 2006 attempt to bring religion and tennis together in “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.”

The most well–known piece about philosophers and sport must be the Monty Python sketch from 1972 in which Greek philosophers take on German philosophers in football/soccer. If you’ve not had the pleasure, park yourself in front of YouTube and watch the referee nail nasty Nietzsche for the first foul.

Gadamer’s dialogue is between Socrates and Fred (perhaps based on the tennis legend Fred Perry?) and begins as many Platonic dialogues do, with the question of where the interlocutor is going. In this case, Fred is off to the best tennis club. Socrates wants to know what Fred means by “the best.” Fred feels confident that the best club has the best players. Unfortunately, he is unable to explain adequately who qualifies as the club’s best player.

Seeking a different criterion for his club being best, Fred then spins the notion that his club is a dandy place for networking. When that falls apart under questioning, Fred claims his club has the best coach. Socrates makes Swiss cheese out of Fred’s statements about the characteristics of the best coach. Things devolve to the point that Socrates ends up asking: “Maybe the best club would be one where you don’t play at all?”

As is the pattern for several Platonic dialogues, the conversation between Socrates and Fred starts off equitably, but by the end, Fred is reduced to saying multiple times “it seems so” or “certainly,” followed by involved commentary by Socrates. Plato has a habit of stacking the conversational deck in Socrates’s favor, and Gadamer follows that tradition. Still, the passages toward the dialogue’s end highlight a picture of egalitarianism at the best tennis club as described by an unnamed person Socrates quotes:

“As I kept looking around the club, I thought I was in an upside-down world. When I came in, a half a dozen games were set up to test my ability. The coach would check up on things and would suggest new tennis partners for me. I saw for myself how he led the team in training and how he conducted individual lessons. He watched carefully, gave lessons on strategy, corrected strokes, combined pairs.”

This coach described by the unnamed person surprises Fred, who seems unacquainted with coaches who take an interest in everyone at the club, not just the highly rated players or teams. The unnamed person told Socrates that the coach’s egalitarianism was a general characteristic of life at the tennis club: “When one went to the club terrace, there seemed to be no distinct groups at all. Everyone spoke kindly to all the others, and not just to their faces.” Old and young players are treated equally well, and when people lose matches they don’t get into disputes but remain friendly. This ideal club includes members who play like “chess masters.” In fact, the comparison of tennis to chess comes up several times in the dialogue’s finale.

Like chess, tennis isn’t a game one plays alone. It’s a social activity, but one without a subjective component, as Gadamer describes it. A player’s aims and intentions are not the focus, but the game itself. Commentator Günter Figal puts it this way: “[A player’s] aims are only pursued in order to play the game. For tennis players, it is the movement of the ball that prescribes their activities; their activities unfold and develop in this movement, which cannot be controlled by them.”

In general, tennis audiences acknowledge the truth of Gadamer’s description when they applaud, say, a long, well-played rally that included some extraordinary shot-making. The audience isn’t absorbed in partisanship for one player or another but shows a capacity for appreciating the game itself.

Gadamer’s “A ‘Socratic’ Dialogue” shows its age at times. No one will be pointing to this dialogue as progressive when it comes to discussions of gender, for example. Fred can’t imagine women tennis coaches. Similarly, Gadamer’s reanimation of the Socratic dialogue form reproduces the problem of winners and losers that has plagued Platonic studies since The Republic, with its philosopher-kings and those who will be ruled by them. As much as Gadamer’s dialogue pushes egalitarianism, the game’s history, from jeu de paume to the awarding of the Wimbledon trophies by royalty, fights against it. Tennis cannot unknot its ties to war and aristocracy. It is, after all, known as the game of kings. The first mention of tennis in English around 1400 comes in a letter called In Praise of Peace from John Gower to King Henry IV in a poetic warning about the horrors of war. Gower associates immediately the word tennis with winning or losing (“Of the tenetz to winne or lese a chace” /in the game of tennis to win or lose a chase). Tennis’s origins might be French, but tennis doesn’t tolerate égalité, what Anglophones call ties. Just ask John Isner and Kevin Anderson.