Back of the Net mit Martin Heidegger
(SA/2026)
I.
Did Heidegger like TV?
I very much doubt it ...
One strongly suspects that he would view it not for amusement, but with extreme prejudice; just another example of technology which enframes human existence at an essential level and which abolishes distance by bringing far away events into the living room on the one hand and transporting the viewer to far away places on the other, so that they are never really at home even when they are physically slouched in their favourite armchair.
The constant stream of news and entertainment communicates nothing and ultimately the medium alienates the viewer from their own life.
However, despite his philosophical objections to television, Heidegger was prepared to place his principles to one side when it came to football: the question of being and the overcoming of metaphysics mattered a very great deal; but the beautiful game mattered more ...
II.
Amusingly, because he refused to own a set of his own, Heidegger was obliged to visit his neighbour's house on match day and this he would frequently do if it was a major European Cup match or when the national team were playing and Germany's 2-1 victory over the Netherlands in the 1974 World Cup gave him a good deal of satisfaction and pride in his final years.
Heidegger was a huge fan of the German captain Franz Beckenbauer - der Kaiser - in particular and would often express his admiration for the latter's skill on the ball and the way in which he could take control of a game in his role as a centre-back sweeper. Beckenbauer, he said, was an inspired player [1].
Now, for some readers this will simply reveal Heidegger as a hypocrite.
Others, however, might defend his actions by referring to his concept of Gelassenheit; sometimes, in life, you just have to accept things as they are (let them be) and surrender to the world as it is (rather than as you would have it). And that means that, on occasion, even a committed Heideggerian can use mechanical devices whilst remaining troubled by the question concerning technology.
As this is the more generous reading of Heidegger's football-loving, TV-watching actions, I think I prefer to accept this line of argument.
III.
Heidegger, of course, was by no means the only philosopher to have loved - and
played - Fußball.
One immediately thinks, for example, of Camus and
Derrida who were also enraptured by the beautiful game, the former famously declaring that what he knew for certain about ethics and our obligation to others he had learned from football [2] and the latter once confessed that he would "rather have been known as an international footballer than a philosopher" [3].
Perhaps Simon Critchley is on to something when he suggests that football offers pitchside supporters and even TV spectators a shared and ecstatic experience that is at the same time authentic. It certainly provides a very different experience of time; 90 minutes in the world of football is strangely subjective and waiting for the final whistle can sometimes seem like an eternity, or an agony of extended duration, as Critchley writes [4].
IV.
In sum: if the philosophical question concerning technology (and the legitimacy of watching TV) remained essential for Heidegger, in his later life he was evidently just as preoccupied by whether Geoff Hurst's controversial extra-time goal in the Wembley final had or had not crossed the line ...
Notes
[1] See Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 428.
[2] Camus originally made the remark in an article he wrote for a sports magazine produced by his former club, Racing Universitaire d'Alger (RUA), in April 1953. He repeated the claim in an interview after he won the Nobel Prize (1957), saying: 'What little I know about morality, I learned it on football pitches and theatre stages - these were my true universities'.
See 'The morality of football and the philosophy of Albert Camus', on the website Scottish Sport History (4 Jan 2020): click here.
[3] See Michael Dillon writing on Derrida in Palgrave Advances in Continental Political Thought, ed. Terrell Carver and James Martin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 260. Cited by Matt Qvortrup in 'Philosophers on Football', in Philosophy Now, Issue 159 (Dec 2023 / Jan 2024): click here.
[4] See Simon Critchley, What We Think About When We Think About Football (Profile Books, 2017). Critchley amusingly uses Heidegger's concepts from Being and Time to understand
football's unique temporal flow, where objective time differs
from subjective experience.
More widely, Critchley argues football is more than merely a game; that it is rather a vital cultural
activity providing insights into memory, identity, class, and the human
condition and I would recommend this work, even if Geoff Dyer was less than impressed; see his rather scathing review titled 'Dead Ball Situation', in Harper's Magazine (Dec. 2017): click here.
For a sister post to this one - 'Lost in Space mit Martin Heidegger' (12 Jan 2026) - click here.
