My grasp of the academic discipline of philosophy is rudimentary at best, it all being too abstract for my literal mind.
But being a
Scotland supporter at rugby, football and indeed other sports teaches me to be
philosophical. This year more than ever. It started with comment about
whether this might be the year for the Scottish men’s rugby team to challenge
for a Six Nations title. Yet the prospects were seriously dented at the outset
on a rainy February day in Rome and killed off a few weeks later in Dublin.
Then we had
the men’s football team’s first appearance in the World Cup finals for 28 years
and dreams were alive for qualifying from the group stage for the first time
ever. Given that it only needed a strong third place out of four to achieve
this it seemed genuinely possible. Yet once again Scotland crashed out without
even a single good performance.
The trauma
of this led me to seek consolation in philosophy, or at least in reading the volume on Søren Kierkegaard, the
nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, in the Very Short Introduction series,
together with his
entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Given his nationality and
how Scotland had qualified for the World Cup, it was hard to claim that he
would have derived any posthumous pleasure from their participation in last summer’s
tournament.
Yet from
what I knew of his work it seemed to resonate directly with the experience of supporting
Scotland. His most famous idea seems to be the ‘Leap of Faith’, that is deciding
to commit to a cause or course of action despite the uncertainty of the outcome.
That seems to sum up our plight every match other than those where we seem doomed
to defeat. Qualification for major tournaments is never certain, always involves
anxiety and even when it happens leads to more pain. Yet we continue to
believe.
Kierkegaard
also speaks to Scotland supporters in his notion of despair as the gap between
where we are and where we wish to be. That gap widens and narrows, but it is
always there. There are other elements too - finding meaning in commitment, however
absurd, in the personal choice to commit and continue supporting the teams,
despite being let down in the past, in the renewed hope each time despite previous
disappointments. It is not too far fetched to say we Scotland supporters are
the epitome of Kierkegaardianism.
I’d like to
say that this reading helped me to up my own intellectual game and devour the works in
which I gather Kierkegaard set out these ideas: Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death and Repetition, and went so far as to borrow an anthology
of his writings from the library. But in common many a Scotland team I froze under pressure of my own expectations and the book was recalled to the library unread
by me.
Still, even
knowledge gained from reading summaries of his works has fortified me as hopes were
dashed during the autumn of the football team’s fortunes being boosted by the arrival of a
new manager or of the rugby team finally beating the New Zealand All Blacks.
And over this long weekend, I will tune in again, in Kierkegaardian spirit, to
watch the men in dark blue in different codes take on variously North Macedonia,
Switzerland and Australia to see if there might be some consolation victories
in football’s Nations League and rugby’s Nations Championships, hoping that my continuing
leaps of faith may be rewarded.
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