Hoizinga's Argumentative Essay

On Thursday, I found Hoizinga’s argument that play must be free activity and the five categories of sport to be interesting. Both advance the premise that play cannot be about material gain. The five categories of sport are play is voluntary, extraordinary, autotelic, absorbing, and fun. According to these philosophies sports must be an end in themselves to be play. I agree with this, not just for sports but for anything one does in life. If an action is done as a means to an end than it has diminished value as there is always something greater than it. Whereas if something is treated as an end in itself it is the highest good. This is an important distinction to make because it incorporates the different meaning of sports to everyone. People play for pleasure, fame, money, and the game itself. There are also some who don’t want to play even when they can. As can be most recently seen by Calvin Johnson’s retirement despite all his recent successes. The one question that last class raised was why does Hoizinga argue that play must remain inside a certain set of

He argues, “One sits in them surrounded by ghostly ancestors, as at the Mass one is surrounded by the hosts who have since Abraham celebrated a Eucharist” (Novak 131). Novak compares the ghosts of sports past to the Eucharist here. Again, Novak provides a thought provoking argument that goes too far. I agree with him that sports are religious like when he states that both sports and religious places of worship have a metaphysical importance. His comparisons throughout the section of being traded and rookies’ first games to religious worship are clear and logical. However, when he uses them to call sports a religion he overreaches his bounds. I could use these same comparisons to call war a religion. Battle sites have a higher meaning than the plot of land they were thought on, they hold ghosts of the