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Excerpt from the book ³Philosophy of Olympism´ (pub.2004) by Ljubodrag
Simonovi, Belgrade, Serbia. E-mail : comrade@sezampro.rs
OLYMPISM AND POSITIVISM
The positive thought of the 19th
century is the most important philosophical
source and foundation of modern Olympism. Coubertin does not try to develop a
positive philosophy, but to use its original spirit and postulates that could
contribute to an efficient struggle for preserving the ruling order. The "fullness" of
Olympism is not primarily determined by positive philosophy, but by new
"practical" challenges. In that sense, Olympism is not just an attempt to revive
positive philosophy, but it is also an attempt to give new positive answers, which
means to develop a more efficient mechanism of power, according to new class
relations, for holding the "masses" in submission. Modern Olympism is not just a
conception of the world, it is above all an active (conserving) attitude to the worldthat appears in the form of a struggle against those who want to see that world
changed. In spite of being a scribomaniac, Coubertin's basic intention was not to
develop a theory, but a political practice. His writings are a peculiar elaboration of
the strategy and tactics of the struggle against the working movement, colonized
peoples and women. Coubertin does not try to make the bourgeois more clever and
noble, but to stir the "lazy animal" in him, to develop his greediness and incite him
to set on new colonial exploits. That is why a fanatical conquering spirit became
one of the dominant features of Olympism.
Speaking of Comte's positive philosophy, Marcuse states: "Rarely in the
past has any philosophy urged itself forward with so strong and so overt arecommendation that it be utilized for the maintenance of prevailing authority and
for the protection of vested interest from any and all revolutionary onset. (...)
Positive philosophy is the only weapon able to combat µthe anarchic force of
purely revolutionary principles'; it alone can succeed in 'absorbing the current
revolutionary doctrine'." And he continues: "The lords of earth will learn, also,
that positivism inclines 'to consolidate all power in the hands of those who possess
this power - whoever they may be'. Comte becomes even more outspoken. He
denounces µthe strange and extremely dangerous¶ theories and efforts that are
directed against the prevailing property order. These erect an 'absurd Utopia'.
Certainly, it is necessary to improve the condition of the lower classes, but this
must be done without deranging class barriers and without 'disturbing the
indispensable economic order'. On this point, too, positivism offers a testimonial
to itself. It promises to 'insure the ruling classes against every anarchistic invasion'
and to show the way to a proper treatment of the mass." (1) Coubertin's relation to
the antiquity, Christianity, the Enlightenment, the guiding principles of the French
Revolution, the philanthropic movement, the democratic institutions and national
cultures, expresses his endeavour to remove from history everything that creates
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the possibility of developing a libertarian thought and stepping out of the existing
world. Olympism is more then a spiritual counterrevolution: it does not only deal
with the emancipatory heritage of the nineteenth-century civil society, but with the
cultural tradition of the West. Using Marx's "XI thesis of Feuerbach" , we could
formulate the following Olympic postulate: philosophers have only interpreted the
world - but the point however is to prevent it from being changed by all means andat all costs.
Among the scholars who have been concerned with Coubertin's work there
are those (Prokop) who hold that Coubertin did not have direct contact with
Comte, but that it was Frédéric Le Play who introduced him to the world of
positive philosophy. Either through Le Play or by reading Comte, Coubertin
adopted the basic methodological and doctrinaire starting points of Comte's
philosophy and with his Olympic idea and practice tried to realize Comte's idea of
"positive society". It can be said that international sport represents an attempt to
revive and institutionalize positive philosophy and to turn it into a global spiritual
(political) movement. Urlike Prokop rightly sees in international sport an"institution analogous to positive philosophy". (2) The Olympic philosophy and
sport appear as a unity of thought and practice in the construction of positive
society.
The basis of Coubertin's Olympic doctrine are the ideas which make the
corner stones of Comte's "social physics": the ''idea of order'' ("social statics") and
the ''idea of progress'' ("social dynamics").
Idea of Order
The starting point of Comte's theory is a social state characterized by a
"profound anarchy" (anarchie profonde), (3) springing from the revolutionary
turmoils in the end of the 18th
and in the beginning of the 19th
century, and an
attempt to insure a stable development of capitalism. What is needed after all is a
reconciliation (synthesis) of order and progress. Order exists in society when its
fundamental principles are stable and when almost all members of society are of
equal opinion. According to Comte, such a state existed in the period of feudalism
in places ruled by Christianity. Following Catholic counter-revolutionary thinkers,
Bonald and De Maistre, Comte deals with Protestantism as a "negative ideology"
(De Maistre) which creates nothing but an intellectual anarchy. With the
development of social science, as the spiritual framework, people will again think
in the same way and thus insure social stability. It follows that a positive education
is the necessary basis for the establishment of a positive order. Comte holds that
the French Revolution was indispensable, since the old order was founded on the
obsolete theological knowledge which, with the development of science, lost its
credibility. The French Revolution did not offer a possibility of reorganizing
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society, as it was "negative" and "metaphysical" in its demands. Hence a need to
create a new (positive) religion and new clergy which, like the Catholic Church in
the Middle Ages, will unite society. (4) A positive one-mindedness, which is
contrary to political pluralism, is the basis of Comte's political conception.
Starting from the changes introduced by the French Revolution, Comte
tries to deal with its radicalism by curbing its original power and to use it toconsolidate and develop a new order. He wants to "reconcile" the revolutionary
spirit, which eliminated from the historical scene the obsolete "metaphysical"
stage in the development of history, to the new "progressive" spirit of the
"victorious bourgeoisie" (Enthoven) and thus ensure a stable development of
capitalism and the establishment of the positive as the final stage in the
development of civilization. Although Coubertin claims that the rapid industrial
development, which deprived life of purpose, is the starting point for his
endeavour to offer an Olympic philosophy as a new integrative spiritual force of
society, the real reason is his endeavour to militarize the French bourgeoisie and
urge it to embark on new colonial exploits, as well as a fear of the ever stronger working movement and the new revolutionary (communist) thought. Frightened
by the Parisian Commune and the ever louder slogans of the French (and
European) proletariat, Coubertin does not even think of a "reconciliation" to the
revolutionary spirit that opens the possibility of overcoming the class society, but,
by his reforms, seeks to destroy the germ of a novum created in modern society. In
that context, his Olympic idea is at odds with the emancipatory impulses of
Comte's positivism. For Coubertin, the bourgeois is not only the advocate of
capitalism, but also a privilege of the rich "elite" acquired in the periods of slavery
and feudalism. Hence his political allies are the aristocracy and the Catholic
Church - the sworn enemies of the French Revolution and the emancipatoryheritage of the 19th
century; that is why the ancient world, in which demos did not
yet appear on the political scene, is the ideal world that should be sought for; that
is why Coubertin sought to reduce the relations between workers and capitalists to
the relation between feudal lords and serfs; that is why he concluded that with the
French Revolution "only the form changed, while the essence remained the same",
and claimed that the feudal order was "more democratic".
The fight between contradictions is excluded from both Comte's and
Coubertin's social order. They are dominated by a "spontaneous harmony"
(Gurvich) and not by the "integration of parts together with the existence of social
contradictions". (5) As a consistent social prophylactic, Coubertin has a holistic
attitude to society: society becomes an organic whole that functions in harmony.
Unlike Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx, who in the conflict between social groups
(classes) see the moving force of social progress, Coubertin, like Comte and
Spencer, holds that political conflicts threaten the health of the social organism
and slow down its (inevitable) advance, and therefore seeks to bring all (positive)
social phenomena into an organic unity and remove those (negative) that threaten
it. Coubertin rejected the struggle of the oppressed for freedom, equality and
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brotherhood - without which the history of mankind cannot be imagined. Conflict
is allowed only within the context of Social Darwinist evolutionism: the fight for
domination and natural selection become the basis of the "perfectioning" and
"progress" of mankind. This is what gives the internal dynamics to "social statics".
The starting-point of Coubertins conception is the "fact" that the "ruling classes"
(aristocracy and bourgeoisie) established an indisputable domination over theworkers and thereby ended the history of class struggles. It is no accident that
"reconciliation" is one of the key notions that Coubertin adopted from Comte,
creating from it a universal principle of his social theory. In his positive
philosophy Comte seeks to reconcile science and religion, and reconcile the ideals
of the French Revolution to the counter-revolutionary doctrine of his time.
Coubertin finds in "reconciliation" a magic formula that should "reconcile" the
new and the old, Catholicism and modern Olympic paganism, workers and
capitalists, women and pater familias, "lower races" and their colonial masters -
for the sake of social peace and the expansion of capitalism.
Comte departs from Aristotle's' thesis that man is zoon politikon. UnlikeRousseau's "social contract", according to which society is the result of people's
mutual agreement, for Comte, the "sociability of social order rests on people's
spontaneous instinct" - "sociability results spontaneously from human nature". (6)
Coubertin rejects Aristotle's conception of man as zoon politikon, Rousseau's
contrat social and Comte's theory. Man is a greedy animal, and society is the
result of natural evolution and thus represents the highest form of the organization
of the animal world, while the principle "might is right" is the chief integrative
force of society. The social structure corresponds to the structure of the animal
world: on the one hand, there are beasts ("master race"), on the other - ruminants
(working "masses"). The "relations" between "master race" and working "masses"correspond to the relations between vultures and ruminants, which are conditioned
by the way in which beasts ensure their survival: the "natural right" of beasts to
devour herbivorous animals becomes the "natural right" of the strong to plunder
and to kill the workers and members of the "lower races". Coubertin creates the
impression of a genetic predestination of the white race, embodied in the West-
European bourgeoisie, to rule the world and speaks of a "master race", and not of a
"master class", which in the course of evolution (fight for survival) acquired
certain qualities that make it "superior" to other races. It is interesting that even
Comte, in his later work "The System of Positive Policy" , refers to a "natural
order": "The material interests themselves, which the moral power should mix
with the political power, are guided by two universal principles that spring from an
accurate estimate of the natural order. On the one hand, men should feed women;
on the other hand, the active class should feed the contemplative class." (7)
According to Comte, the "industrial revolution" represents the "main
necessary basis of the great movement of elementary development that thus far
characterized modern society". (8) He acknowledges the "direct influence of the
industrial revolution on the changing of social phenomena and on the formulation
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of a new philosophical mode of thought", (9) and "recognizes the significance of
the division of labour for cooperation between people". (10) "Although Comte",
claims Ante Fiamengo, "did not devote much attention to the element of the
division of labour in his work, nor did he analyze the social division of labour, the
association of the notions of cooperation, social solidarity and sociability, which
he distinguishes from the family as a union based on the elements of compassionand sympathy, and his recognition of the significance of the division of labour in
comprising the whole of the human kind in a single social organism, represents, to
be sure, a bold participation of the ideas that were to some extent common to the
theorists of his epoch, and especially to Marx and Engels." (11) Coubertin relies
on the industrial development, but seeks to instrumentalize it and thus prevent a
direct influence of the industrial revolution on social affairs, which means the
realization of the emancipatory possibilities created by industrialization. He
completely devalued labour, not only as a means for creating social goods and
insuring existence, and as a means for gaining control over natural laws and for
developing man's productivistic power, but also as a factor conditioning socialstructuring. Unlike Comte, who saw the significance of the division of labour for
"comprising the whole of the human kind in a single social organism" and who
associates with the social division of labour the notions such as "cooperation,
social solidarity and sociability", (12) Coubertin reduces society to a biological
whole in which the tyrannical power of the rich "elite" is an indisputable
integrative force.
Comte's project of creating a positive one-mindedness by way of an
absolutized and systematized positive scientific knowledge was a failure. For the
new thought was not only meant to spiritually integrate the members of the ruling
class but, in order to achieve "social peace", it ought to have been "acceptable" for the working ''masses" that are the main "disturbing factor" in society. Coubertin's
Olympism in its original sense also seeks to become the integrative spiritual force
of the bourgeoisie. However, it can acquire its true value only when it becomes
one of the chief forms of integrating the oppressed into the spiritual orbit of
capitalism. By turning sport, as the embodiment of the basic principles of
capitalism in their pure form, into the fundamental and "cheapest spiritual food for
the masses", Coubertin created a possibility of realizing the basic intention of
Comte's positivism in establishing a positive one-mindedness that by its nature
resembles the medieval Christianity (Catholicism). At the same time, instead of an
absolutized and systematized positive knowledge, the activation of the ''masses''
according to the principle bellum omnium contra omnes and the elimination of
reason become the basic ways of dealing with a critical attitude to the present
world. Instead of Comte's attempt to create a positive one-mindedness by way of
an absolutized positive knowledge, Coubertin gives priority to the creation of a
positive character: sport, as a mindless agonal physical activism which embodies
the dominant Social Darwinist and progressistic spirit, represents the basis of the
creation of a positive character from which the corresponding positive conscious
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"spontaneously" develops. Comte created positive philosophy; Coubertin found a
way to revive it.
Idea of Progress
The industrial revolution in the 18th
and its development in the 19th
century
created a wave of optimism that was one of the foundations of the spiritual climate
which enabled the emergence of Olympism. The myth of the "limitless
possibilities of the development of science and technique" tacitly supports the
Olympic progress expressed in the famous maxim citius, altius, fortius - which is
the bearer of Comte's "social dynamics". The rapid industrial development and
scientific discoveries erase the borders in time and space and become a power that
in the hands of the bourgeoisie, as the "bearer of progress", becomes the means for
dominating the world. The expansion of capitalism imposes a need for establishinga global ideology which will enable its free development. The destruction of the
traditional pillars of spiritual integration (above all, religion) and its inefficiency in
the (spiritual) submission of the working "masses" create a need to build a new
integrative thought that will "bring order" in people's heads (in contrast to the
chaos that prevails in society) and will be efficient in dealing with the libertarian
mind. Coubertin was one of those who sought to turn that climate into a
philosophical program and create from it a universal project of human life.
Coubertin unreservedly accepts Comte's law of progress according to
which society inevitably develops in a positive direction. Progress is a necessary
law of evolution administered by way of abstract humanity. Starting from ascientific evolutionism, Coubertin identified the transformation of the animal
species with progress and based upon it his theory of progress. According to
Windelband, "the evolutionism of natural sciences, including the theory of
selection, can indeed interpret transformation, but not progress: it cannot establish
that the result of progress is a 'higher', i.e. more valuable form." (13) Coubertin
deprived the idea of progress of its purpose and meaning, which means that he
transferred it from a cultural time, which is the true "space of history" (Marx), into
a physical, "purely mechanical time" (Bloch), which is beyond history. (14)
Coubertin's idea of progress rests upon the thought, which arose in the Modern
Age, which regards nature as the object of a limitless exploitation and science and
technique as a means for controlling the natural forces, and thus makes man the
"master and owner of nature" (maître et possesseur de la nature - Descartes). It
deals with the conception that regards nature as man's living, aesthetical and
historical space. In that context, for Coubertin, the world is not a living and
spiritual whole, but provides resources and energy and thus is the living space of
European capitalism. The principle of utility is the indisputable basis of the
relation to the world. In Coubertin's Olympic doctrine there are no normative
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limitations to the established "progress", and thus the door is wide open not only to
the capitalist exploitation of nature, but also to its destruction: the absolutized
principle of utility becomes the principle of destruction. It appears in sport in the
form of the principle of "greater effort", expressed in the progressistic principle
citius, altius, fortius, which is a peculiar butcher's knife for man's self-mutilation:
Coubertin has the same relation to the human body as to nature. Simultaneouslywith the destruction of nature, man's cultural self-conscious is being destroyed.
With the destruction of nature and the creation of a surrogate life all the symbols
of life that characterized the traditional folk culture become alienated from man.
The tacit starting-point of Coubertin's conception of progress is the
development of man's productivistic powers that in the form of science and
technique alienate themselves from him and become the instrument of the ruling
"elite" for dominating the world. The alienation of industry and science from man
opened space for establishing a naturalistic conception of progress based on the
laws of evolution - which are regarded as a fateful power. Capitalism is not the
result of a historical development of society, which means the work of man, butthe highest form in which the laws of evolution appear independently of man and
dictate progress. What is "new" in capitalism is the fact that man is completely
immerged in the process of evolution, which means that all the things (reason,
norms, democratic institutions, human qualities) that mediate between natural laws
and man have been eliminated - and thus society entered a new "positive" phase in
its development that represents the highest possible level in the development of the
living world and the end of the development of humanity. Through the spirit of
capitalism, which acquires its purest expression in sport, there is established, in the
form of the bourgeoisie, a complete domination of the natural flow of events over
man: positive society represents a realized naturalism.The Olympic progress manifests the fatal course of the law of "natural
selection" that constantly makes choices, removing the "weak" and leaving the
"strong": the fight for survival and domination is the main driving force of
progress. War is the highest and the most drastic form of natural selection and thus
an indispensable lever in ensuring progress. It brings about the "perfectioning" of
man, nations and races, and thus the "perfectioning" of mankind. By virtue of war
the white race acquired the genetic properties that make it "superior" to other
("lower") races. As Coubertin reduces man to animal, his anthropological
conception only confirms his theory of progress. Coubertin bases progress on the
dialectic of nature only to deal with the dialectic of history and enable the
establishment of a global domination of the white rich "elite". What questions the
naturalistic character of Coubertin's doctrine is the absolutization of progress
based on the development of a dehumanized science and technique. Unlike the
animal, which is moved and restrained by its instincts, Coubertin's man is moved
and restrained by the bellicose and progressistic spirit of capitalism. In man,
natural evolution acquired a new quality (expressed in the principle of "greater
effort") which at the same time represents its "overcoming". Coubertin
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denaturalized even evolution itself and created from it an abstract force that
appears as a "natural" foundation of capitalist progress.
According to the "optimistic" character of his progressistic conception,
Coubertin opposes those theorists who reduce the nation to a biological organism.
In the final part of his speech which, in the beginning of his Olympic path, was
held in London, Coubertin sends to his compatriots the following message: "Iwould like to give you the true picture of our beloved country although I am far
from it. Among its children there are too many of those who love with a hopeless
love, who have lost faith in its future. They predict its decline because it has
behind it a very long past. They compare nations with individuals and believe that
they are doomed to decline and destruction just as inevitably as man is doomed to
grow old and die. This theory finds its justification in their instability; but, it is
merely a theory and Le Play, a great admirer of facts and a great enemy of
theories, triumphantly refuted it. He showed that the history of all peoples, old and
young, consists in successive changes that are not fatal at all. That is why we, who
are the bearers of this encouraging thought, can with a strong faith and not with ahopeless courage, utter the words which, to be sure, lie deep in yours as well as in
my heart: Long live France!" (15)
For Coubertin, the bearers of progress are not man's productivistic
(creative) powers, but the greediness of the bourgeois. Just as "meekness" is a
form in which the divine spirit appears in the oppressed, so is greediness a form in
which the spirit of the fight for survival appears in the ruling "elite". It is a new
quality in the development of the living world that is the result of a fight between
races and the exclusive quality of the "master race": greediness becomes the
anthropological basis of progress. Coubertin follows the dominant spirit of the
Modern Age: the possessing and accumulation of material wealth is the purpose of life and the basis on the "perfectioning" of mankind. "Get rich!" - are the words
that Coubertin addressed to the French bourgeoisie to encourage it to head towards
the (golden) Olympic heights. He appears here as a consistent dialectician: the
acquired wealth increases the lust for wealth and it continues to do so for ever -
progress never stops. A rich man who does not strive to get richer is not only a
traitor of its own class, but is irresponsible as regards progress since he breaks the
chain of acquiring wealth that represents the connective tissue of progress. At the
same time, from Coubertin's Olympic doctrine it clearly follows that the insatiable
hunger of the parasitic classes for material wealth is but a form in which their need
for a limitless power is expressed. There are not many ideologues of capitalism
who, like Coubertin, in such a clear and consistent way unmasked the looting logic
that guides the bourgeoisie and pointed to a direct link between greediness of the
ruling class and the workers' deprivation of rights. It is one more reason for
keeping Coubertin's "problematical" writings far away from the public eye.
For Marx, the fight of the oppressed for freedom represents the driving
force of social progress. From it follows his "categorical imperative": "To destroy
all relations in which man appears as a humiliated, oppressed, abandoned,
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despised being..." While fighting fanatically for the survival of the order based on
the exploitation of workers, "colored peoples" and women, Coubertin sees in the
fight for freedom the worst form of social pathology. Freedom and progress are
not only inconsistent, but are also opposed. Everything from mankind's heritage
that can make the oppressed working "masses" conscious of the fact that they are
the bearers of social progress and can contribute to the development of their libertarian dignity, has been eliminated. For Coubertin, the driving force of
progress is not the divine will or the fight between classes, but the "will to power"
of the rich "elite". The spirit of capitalism is a form in which natural laws are
manifested, while the bourgeoisie represents the extended hand of their fateful
power on which social existence and progress rest, and at the same time the fist
with which progress eliminates the obstacles on its road. The tyranny of the strong
over the weak is the chief form in which progress is manifested: to oppose tyranny
means to get in the way of the fatal course of progress. Hence to be on the side of
progress means to be always on the side of those who ride with their unsheathed
swords, and always against those who fight for freedom.Coubertin's conception of progress deals with the modern idea of progress,
which involves not only quantitative shifts, but also qualitative leaps in the
development of society. Coubertin does not differ much from the old Roman
progressus that consists in a progression without a novum. Only (endless)
quantitative shifts are possible, a progression in the given spatial and time
dimensions - a progression without progress - which is the basis of the "Olympic
counting" of time. In Coubertin, what is ''new'' is that progression is reduced to the
elimination of every possibility of stepping out of the existing world. The basic
purpose of Coubertin's "control in heads" is to break the link between man's
productivistic practice and the development of his conscious of himself as a freeman and the creator of his own history. That is the essence of his progressistic
conception, expressed in the famous Olympic maxim citius, altius, fortius, which
can be called the theory of positive progress. Olympism represents the means for
creating the cult of capitalist progress: quantitative comparison becomes a
superhuman force to which man is fatally submitted. Horkheimer and Adorno
write about that the following: "Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It
makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the
Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one,
becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature. Unity is the slogan
from Parmenides to Russell. The destruction of gods and qualities alike is insisted
upon." (16) In sport, there does not exist a dialectical confrontation between good
and bad, freedom and slavery, old and new... Quantitative shifts without
qualitative leaps become an expression and a measure of progress creating the
illusion that capitalism is capable of "moving forward" for ever - at the cost of
destroying mankind and nature. Instead of being the result of man's liberation and
a condition of a true freedom, progress becomes a capitalistic way of Sisyphus'
curse, which in the Olympic Games acquires a spectacular form.
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Coubertin rarely misses an opportunity to point out in his writings and
speeches the superiority of the ancient over the present world: "the immortal spirit
of antiquity" becomes the symbol of a world that appears as an unrealizable ideal
of modern society. Unlike Coubertin, Comte realizes that in antiquity there did not
exist any idea of progress and that it is the product of the New Age (Turgot,
Condorcet). (17) Speaking about the ancient thinkers, Comte comes to theconclusion that clearly indicates the true nature of Coubertin's Olympic doctrine:
"None of them, not even among those most eminent and clever, were able to resist
the inclination, which was at that time widespread as well as spontaneous, to
regard the contemporary social state as radically inferior to the state of the past
times". (18) A mythologized past is the warrant of eternity of the ruling order: "the
immortal spirit of antiquity" becomes a means for dealing with the idea of future.
According to Comte, "social progress does not change man's nature but,
realizing that which is most noble in man (and it is the predominance of altruism
over egoism and of intelligence over emotionality), history realizes and perfects a
system that most fully develops and realizes man's nature." (19) In that sense, theevolution of human society is, according to Comte, measured by the development
of those human qualities that essentially distinguish human society from the
animal world: intelligence and sociability. (20) Coubertin does not insists on the
development of human qualities, but on a racial perfectioning that should enable
the white race, embodied in the bourgeoisie, to become the "master race": sport is
not a means for developing "intelligence and sociability", but for overcoming
man's "lazy animal nature'' and creating a super-animal in the form of the
bourgeois. Progress has a relative character and consists in the development of
such personal and physical features of the ruling "elite" that enable it to
consolidate its dominant position. Coubertin gives the most important role in therealization of progress to "great people", who are connected with progress with a
mystical bond and who appear as the incarnation of its active power. "A handful of
good men" (Coubertin), in the form of the ruling rich "elite", become the
indisputable bearers of progress, and the working "masses", colonized peoples and
women, the means of its realization. Coubertin supports the theory of "great
people", but according to him they are not the bearers of progress; they do away
with the ideas and forces that stop and slow down the (inevitable) progress and are
released from every responsibility, apart from that to progress. Man can either
accelerate or slow down the established progress, but he cannot stop it, let alone
create a new world. The highest form of a "free" activity is the "perfectioning" of
the present world and oneself as its inseparable part, while the basic purpose of the
Olympic pedagogy is to defend progress against any threats and convince the
oppressed to accept the unjust ruling order as something inevitable. Coubertin, like
Comte, did not resolve the conflict between determinism and freedom: if progress
is necessary and proceeds according to the fixed laws of evolution, then man's free
action is impossible. People are not the bearers of progress and thus the creators of
history, but are its tools: determinism and fatalism are the basis and framework of
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human practice. The basic aim of the absolutization of natural laws, as the leading
force of progress, is to deal with man's libertarian and creative self-conscious and
to completely and hopelessly integrate him into the present world. Natural laws
have the same role as the gods in the past: to immortalize the established order of
oppression by depriving the oppressed of the right to freedom, equality and
brotherhood. That is why Coubertin deals with man as a reasonable and creative being: instead of striving to create the world in his human image, man can only
adapt to the present world; instead of a totalization of society on the part of the
creators of social welfare, a totalization of society on the part of the parasitic
classes has been established.
As we have seen, for Coubertin man is a "lazy animal", while sport,
which is "not in the nature of man", should develop in him a combatant spirit and
the "will to power". It is through sport that man overcomes his animal nature (by
suppressing his natural and libertarian-creative being) and becomes a peculiar
super-animal. It is a new and highest level in the evolution of the living beings,
embodied in the form of "new people" who form the "master race". It is obviousthat the moment of will (hence such significance attached to the character) plays
the vital role in the realization of this evolutionary shift, while Coubertin, being
the incarnation of the active powers of "great people", has the central role.
Coubertin appeals to the "might is right" and natural selection as the principal
natural laws, but they appear in the form of a struggle for domination. As for the
will to domination (power), it is not a product of the natural course of evolution,
but is the result of the struggle between races for survival which acquires its
highest expression in the Hellenic racist, slave-owning and patriarchal order and,
in the Modern Age, in the form of Thomas Arnold's pedagogy and the modern
Olympic Games - which represent the "revival of the immortal spirit of antiquity".In spite of the importance he attaches to sport, Coubertin does not heroize
sportsmen, nor does he glorify their victories and results (records). They appear
primarily as the representatives of their race (nation) and thus as a symbolic
incarnation of the developing force of capitalism. Sportsmen are not the real actors
of the Olympic Games, but serve to realize the Olympic spectacle. The real winner
at the Olympic Games is the "progressive" spirit of capitalism, which, like the
ancient gods, by way of the muscular bodies of sportsmen, their fight and records,
confirms its supremacy and human worthlessness - and the true result is the
revival of the life force of capitalism and people's faith in its indestructibility.
Coubertin abolishes history and reduces it to life, which he further reduces
to a natural course of events. Man does not create his history, and life is a
sequence of natural laws that apply in the animal world, which is but one of the
forms in which the laws of evolution of the living world are realized. Through the
family, race and gender, man acquires the characteristics of biological entities,
which become the foundation of social structuring: instead of being the human
community, mankind is reduced to the animal world; instead of a dialectical
development of history, an evolutionary development of the living world is
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established. Hence it is not the cultural heritage of civilization, which man created
in his struggle for survival and freedom, which is the basis of human "self-
determination" and social integration, but it is the biological heritage of the race
acquired in the struggle for domination. Keeping to the evolutionary positivism,
Coubertin accepts both determinism and succession; however, he does not regard
positive society as a necessary consequence of the previous state, but as a peculiar reincarnation of ancient society. Unlike Comte, who has in mind the "theological"
and "metaphysical" stages in the development of mankind, Coubertin sees the
entire past at the same time level, so he can "take" from it everything he needs at a
given political moment. There is nothing of importance that can be an obstacle to
the bourgeois voluntarism, and everything created in history can be used in the
fight for survival of the existing order. Reducing history to the same time level
serves to prove that in history there have not been, and there cannot be, any
qualitative changes, which means that the strivings to step out of the existing
world are pointless. Past and future are contained in presence, just as thought and
work, theory and practice are united. The main driving force and the bearer of theinevitable and eternal progress is the "spirit of capitalism" embodied in the "sacred
rhythm" of the Olympic Games - which by no means must be interrupted.
Coubertin does not have the divine (Olympic) firmament which could give
"eternity" to the established capitalist order: the "sacred rhythm" of the Olympic
Games is the means for ensuring the continuation of the existing world without
any relevant changes. Coubertin does not advocate the doctrine of a cyclic
development of history, but of an endless openness of "future". The "sacred
rhythm" of the Olympic Games is a form of deification of the "progressive" spirit
of capitalism, the proof of its "greatness" and "permanency". At the same time, the
"sacred" four-year rhythm of the Olympic Games gives the dynamics to therevival of faith in the basic values of capitalism according to the ancient model,
which was supposed to meet the challenges of the dominant religious spirit. Hence
the four-year rhythm of the modern Olympiads represents an abstract course of
time that does not follow the dynamics of capitalist progress conditioned by the
dynamics of the capital reproduction - to which the dynamics of life is
subordinated, and which is evident in the establishment and development of new
global sports (and other entertaining) manifestations that fill the space between the
Olympic Games and acquire a status which, according to Coubertin, was
exclusively reserved for the Olympic Games. The dynamics of capitalist progress
has dethroned the Olympic Games, as the chief and only way of renovating the
young freshness of capitalism, in the attempt to create an ever more luminous
spiritual firmament that will blind man and on which the Olympic Games will be
but one star in the increasingly numerous cluster. At the same time, particularly
with the development of the "consumer society", the dynamics of capitalist
progress brought about a trivialization of the "Olympic mystery", which is,
according to Coubertin, the most important element of the Olympic cult that
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enables the establishment of a mystical bond between man and the spirit that
governs the world.
Coubertin's conception of progress has an instrumental character and is
based on the development of science and technique - whose bearers are the
working "masses" deprived of their rights - which become the exclusive means of
the ruling parasitic class for the realization of their interests: man becomes theslave of his own productivistic (creative) practice. The Olympic progress is
founded on positivistic scientific reason, which departs from maxim savoir pour
prevoir, prevoir pour agir , and that means that the planning of future, as the
indisputable privilege of the ruling "elite", is the alpha and omega of Coubertin's
theory of progress. The instrumental character of Coubertin's conception derives
from the strivings for a rational planning of future, which involves the prediction
of obstacles that can jeopardize the established "progress" and the means of their
efficient elimination. The International Olympic Committee is a peculiar service
of the bourgeoisie for "planning the future". In this context, we can understand the
symbolic significance of Coubertin's entrusting his entire written legacy to the Nazis and his wish that the Nazi Germany be the guardian of his Olympic idea: the
keys to "future" are handed over into the hands of the Nazis.
The "negative" starting-point of Coubertin's doctrine represents the truth
that man is capable of creating a world in his human image. This gives both
theoretical and practical significance to Coubertin's conception and constitutes its
dramatics: the greater the objective possibility of stepping out of the capitalist
world, the more aggressive Coubertin's conception is. The essential part of the
planning and carrying out of progress is the creation of the illusion that it is a
spontaneous ("natural") process to which man is fatally submitted. Coubertin
abolished the subjective (libertarian) practice of the workers in order to absolutizeand deify the subjective (oppressive) practice of the ruling class. Coubertin's
"subjective practice" comes down to the elimination of every possibility of
developing in man a "negative" conscious that would enable him to confront the
ruling order. At the same time, he "forgets" that his doctrine is also a product of a
long struggle of the coming bourgeois class against feudalism and that it is an
integral part of its Social Darwinist and progressistic evolutionism. Coubertin
himself stresses the importance of people like Thomas Arnold for "transforming
the British Empire" and, emphasizing the importance of the "elite" for the
development of society, insists on the authoritarian establishment of IOC.
However, if progress is inevitable, it means that he completely excludes the
possibility of man's independent judgment and relation to the existing world.
Consistently following Coubertin's Olympic doctrine, man cannot jeopardize, let
alone stop, the fatal course of progress, and thus the strivings to "save him from
jeopardizing it", by way of the Olympic doctrine and practice, are useless. Here
Coubertin faces the same problem as the Church, especially in the Modern Age: if
God's will is "omnipotent" and "omnipresent", then the struggle of the Church to
preserve faith in God is meaningless. Coubertin's conception is tacitly based on the
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dualism of the spirit of capitalism, which is the incarnation of progress dictated by
the laws of evolution, and man's "lazy animal nature''. His "utilitarian pedagogy" is
the means for inseminating man's animal nature with the spirit of capitalism and
creating a "new man" who will ensure continuous progress. That is why Coubertin
attaches such significance both to the "immortal spirit of antiquity", which is, in
fact, the spirit of capitalism under an ancient veil that should give it the aureole of "eternity", and to the pedagogical reform that should be carried out through sport
and Olympism. It should enable the bourgeois to develop and become aware of his
"true" (animal) nature and thus become a "conscious" bearer of progress. It is a
fanatization of the bourgeoisie through the development of a ''Messianic''
conscious that releases the bourgeois of any moral responsibility for his action,
only to make him take full responsibility for progress (the ruling order). Hence, to
be the "bearer of progress" means to be free from "scrupulous rules" (Coubertin)
that apply to "ordinary people". Nothing must stop the course of progress, namely,
the self-willingness of the ruling "elite". The authoritarian structure of IOC is,
among other things, based on the following: the members of IOC are notresponsible to anyone - they are, according to Coubertin, the "trustees" of the
Olympic idea, (21) and thus the highest guardians of the "progressive" spirit that
governs the world and on which the survival and "perfectioning" of mankind is
based.
Coubertin, similarly to Comte, distinguishes between the ideas of
"development" and "perfectioning". However, in Coubertin, "development" is
reduced to a fatal course of evolution, while "perfectioning" is a form of the
subjective practice of the "elite" (white race), a peculiar polishing of the world and
the elimination of any obstacles to the fatal course of progress. The positive state
becomes an unrealizable ideal: we are constantly approaching it, but we shallnever reach a perfect positive state. For Coubertin, this does not involve the
strivings to attain a certain ideal of value, but a complete integration of man into
the established order, while a combatant and progressistic activism becomes an
indisputable integrative and ruling force which constitutes life and on which the
world is based. Instead of advocating a change in social relations, and a
development of productive forces and man's creative powers, Coubertin advocates
the creation of a new "master race", in the form of the parasitic classes, which will
efficiently deal with the emancipatory heritage of mankind and libertarian
movements. Coubertin here approaches Spencer: "perfectioning" is based on the
dying out of the improper and on the survival of the proper functions of the social
organism. (22) Since man is the tool of progress and not its creator,
"perfectioning", as his "subjective practice", is possible only as the acceleration of
progress, and this becomes the main "feature" that distinguishes man from animal.
In his original Olympic doctrine, Coubertin regards sport as an area in which "the
best representatives" of the white race, representing their nations, fight for primacy
- which leads to the development of their conquering (oppressive) character and
thus to the "perfectioning" of the white race. At the same time, the "perfectioning
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of the world" involves the destruction of a critical conscious and the workers'
pacifying. Sport becomes the chief political instrument of the ruling class for
depolitizing the "masses" and creating from the workers the objects of the
dominant (self)willingness and "sheer" working force: the public (political) sphere
is the privilege of the ruling "elite". The struggle for the "perfectioning" of society
is, according to Coubertin, reduced to a pedagogical reform that should enable thecreation of a uniform character of people and a uniform world view: instead of
changing the world, "perfectioning" comes down to the creation of "positive man"
(mankind). The ultimate end of "perfectioning" is a complete destruction of a
critical-changing conscious and of the idea of future, that is to say, the realization
of the ideas of "order" and "progress" through the establishment of a complete and
final domination of capitalism over man (mankind). The stadium, as the space
where a complete domination of the (belligerent) positivistic one-mindedness is
established, is the most authentic symbol of the world to which Coubertin strives:
it represents a capitalistic temple where reason and libertarian dignity are
destroyed and man is inseminated with the Social Darwinist and progressisticspirit of capitalism.
The ideal of "perfection" that man should strive for was already created in
ancient Greece. Instead of the idea of future and the struggle for a more humane
world, Coubertin wants to lull man in a romanticized idyll of the ancient world.
The "perfect world" is not the matter of man's free choice and the result of his
creative practice; it is rather a datum appearing in the form of an idealized picture
of the Hellenic world in which everything that modern man should and can strive
for was attained. The Hellenic world becomes the embodiment of the ideal of a
harmonic world in which people "died happily". Tacitly, since it is contrary to the
logic of his evolutionism, according to which progress is inevitable, Coubertinsuggests that Christianity moved man backward and that the basic goal of
Olympism is to return him to his original roots and make the world similar to the
one in ancient times - when mankind "was able to smile". It is the time when
demos did not yet appear on the political arena of polis, and before the self-
willedness of the ruling aristocracy was forced to face the universal principle of
humanism, which applies to every free man (Hellene) and which will reach its
highest expression in the moral philosophy of Socrates, while in the Modern Age
was expressed in Kant's "categorical imperative". Coubertin sees in the ruling
bourgeois "elite" the "master race" capable of returning humanity to the road taken
in the antiquity, and that will be achieved through a final combat with the
emancipatory heritage of mankind and the idea of future. The restoration of the
"sacred" counting of time should serve the purpose of restoring humanity to the
"right road". Future does not appear as a detour from the present world and the
creation of a novum, but as a continuous development of the present world and its
"perfectioning". Bearing in mind that, according to Coubertin, the whole past of
mankind stands at the same time (unhistorical) level, only what is "good"
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("positive") should be taken and all that is "bad" ("negative") should be rejected -
and thus a "positive world" will be established.
Unlike the precursors of the Modern Age who sought to be visionaries
(More, Campanella, Hobbes, Bacon, Owen, Fourier«), Coubertin seeks to destroy
the vision of future and the visionary mind. He deals with a "fantasy" associated
with the idea of future that involves the overcoming of the capitalist world, tryingat the same time to turn the Olympic Games into a fantastic manifestation of the
principles on which the existing world is based. More precisely, the Olympic
Games, as the highest cult of the positive world, represent the climax and the end
of fanaticizing. Coubertin also "overcomes" Leibniz's theodicy: the established
world is not "the best of all possible worlds", it is the only possible world. In the
preface to the second volume of Comte's "Cours de philosophie positive" Jean-
Paul Enthoven says that Comte's work foresees "the end of utopia" (la fin de l'
utopie). (23) Coubertin has before himself a far more difficult task: Olympism
does not only confront the idea of utopia, but also the possibility of its realization.
Sport is a means for preventing the objective possibilities of freedom from becoming the real possibilities of man's liberation. The "reconciliation" of people
deprived of their rights to the established order represents conditio sine qua non of
a "new beginning" in the development of society advocated by Coubertin, except
for the fact that Coubertin does not strive to create a new civilization, but a "new"
barbarism. Coubertin's conception "unites", in the form of the bourgeoisie,
absolutized voluntarism and absolutized progressism. He abolishes the dialectic of
history and the dialectic of nature in order to impose such "laws of evolution" that
give the ruling order the legitimacy of being the only possible and eternal order.
The world in which an indisputable and eternal domination of the white (West-
European) bourgeois "elite" over the workers, "colored peoples" and women isestablished - that is the highest goal of the Olympic progress and the climax of a
positive social state. It represents the end of evolution based on the Social
Darwinist principles: instead of a conflict - "reconciliation" and "perfectioning"
become the basis of social life. The principle of competition is abolished by the
principle of domination.
By abolishing a critical distance to the positivity of the "factual", Coubertin
created from Olympism Anpassungsideologie of capitalism and thus made them
inseparably connected: the destiny of capitalism becomes the destiny of
Olympism. By perching a distorted ancient tradition and Social Darwinist laws on
the progressistic principle citius, altius, fortius, Coubertin paved the way for the
absolutization of the capitalist principle of performance whose development
brought about not only a dehumanization, but also a denaturalization
(robotization) of man. In that context appear the principle of "greater effort" (as
the basis of "overcoming" the animal in man) and the principle mens fervida in
corpore lacertoso, which are founded on the criteria of estimation based on
quantitative comparison. The record is not only the "measure" of man's alienation
from his human being, but is also the "measure" of man's destruction as a living
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being. Unlike the Olympism in the end of the 19th century, which had an
antilibertarian character, today's Olympic progressism has an ecocidal character
that comes from the destructive nature of capitalism - which culminated in the so
called "consumer society". In Coubertin's Olympic doctrine there do not exist any
reasonably established obstacles to the ruthless Social Darwinism and destructive
progressism. Not only does it open the possibilities of mankind's destruction, but itseeks to be in the forefront of the struggle against the emancipatory heritage of
mankind and against reason which is capable of establishing a critical detachment
to the processes of destruction and of designing a new way of social development.
A "reconciliation" of man to the established world, the chief demand of
Coubertin's "utilitarian pedagogy", does not only involve a renouncement of the
hope of a better world and a fatalistic abandonment to a dehumanized and
denaturalized progress, but also a cooperation in the destruction of the world. "The
end of utopia", in the form of capitalism, does not appear only as the end of
history, but also as the end of life.
Olympism and Science
Coubertin's methodological starting point is based on Le Play's principle:
"We are concerned with social facts, with exact observations and not with a priori
theories". (24) Speaking of Le Play, his intellectual idol, Coubertin emphasizes
that his chief merit was his being a "great friend of facts" and a "great enemy of
theories". (25) This principle acquires its real meaning in the context of Le Play's
view, stated after the July Revolution in 1830: "I dedicated my life to thereestablishment of social peace in my country." (26) Not a theory, but the interests
of the ruling class and a corresponding political practice - that is the basis of Le
Play's, as well as Comte's, positivistic apriorism. In that context, (positive) science
becomes a political tool for a study of social reality and an efficient and prompt
action to preserve the established order. That is the true meaning of the maxim
savoir pour prevoir, prevoir pour agir , which is meant to guide the scientists, who
are reduced to "social engineers", in their studies of society. It should be said that
Coubertin does not follow Le Play's "sociographie microscopique" , which,
according to Emile Durkheim, represents a "mindless compilation of undigested
facts, unconducive to generalization to broader social structure". (27) Coubertin is
guided by Le Play's fanatic determination to devote his whole life to defending the
established order. Marcuse says on that: "The independence of matters of fact was
to be preserved, and reasoning was to be directed to an acceptance of the given. In
this way positive philosophy aimed to counteract the critical process involved in
the philosophical "negating" of the given, and to restore to facts the dignity of the
positive." (28) And he continues: "The positivistic opposition to the principle that
the matters of fact of experience have to be justified before the court of reason,
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however, prevented the interpretation of these "data" in terms of a comprehensive
critique of the given itself . Such a criticism no longer had a place in science. In the
end, positive philosophy facilitated the surrender of thought to everything that
existed and manifested the power to persist in experience." (29)
The problem is that the world of the "factual" contains culture, critical
conscious, political movements that strive for a new world, as well as theemancipatory heritage offering a possibility of stepping out of the existing world.
In other words, the world of the "factual" is filled with the things that represent the
negation of the present order - the negative. Coubertin ceases to "respect the facts"
the moment he is faced with the facts that question the established order and he
becomes their radical critic - precisely from the point of view of the aristocratic
and bourgeois evaluative horizon. He does not advocate the established world,
which contains the possibilities of its transformation, but the ruling order. Hence
Coubertin and his Olympic fellow soldiers primarily attack the emancipatory
heritage of the Enlightenment, the guiding principles of the French Revolution, as
well as the democratic rights and institutions established in the second half of the19
thcentury. Those are not the "facts" from which we should depart, but the facts
which, departing from the interests of the ruling class should be dealt with. "The
unity" of positive reason with the existing world is but an illusion. In the creation
of his Olympic doctrine Coubertin himself does not depart from the existing world
as a positive, but as a negative basis upon which he develops his theory - starting
from an idealized Hellenic world. "The immortal spirit of antiquity" appears as a
"herald of the past centuries" that should bring light in the gloom of everyday life,
which is reined by a "futile effort" and which has forgotten the meaning of
happiness. Underlying the positivistic relation to the world is not a conflict with
the critical thought as such, but only with the critical thought that questions theexisting order. Olympism is guided by a rigid evaluative scheme that is critical of
everything that leads to a change (overcoming) of the existing world and which is
a landmark for determining its concrete action and a criterion for the assessment of
its efficiency. Coubertin's positivism presupposes the existence of a spiritual
(elitist) centre of power that determines and directs Olympism to the
accomplishment of the strategic interests of capitalism, which means a normative
horizon that cannot be questioned. The basic role of the International Olympic
Committee, which is a self-appointed, authoritarian and anti-democratic
institution, and as such the meeting point of the most devoted and militant
representatives of the ruling class, is to maintain and broaden that horizon. "We
are self-recruiting and our mandates are not limited" - points out Coubertin and
proclaims the members of IOC the holy guardians of the original source of
Olympism. (30) The authoritarian structure of IOC is a symbolic expression of the
untouchability and unchangebility of the basic principles on which capitalism is
based. Coubertin's "originality'' lies in his endeavour to "eliminate" the "excess of
the factual'', which contains the germ of transformation, by controlling people's
mind, and not by transforming social relations. Hence the credo of his "utilitarian
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pedagogy", which he recommended to the Nazis with great enthusiasm, is the
"control in heads". In order to achieve that, Coubertin, unlike the Nazis, does not
burn books, but seeks to destroy, by way of sport, everything that offers a
possibility of man's critical confrontation with the existing world. In this context,
we can understand in the right way the assertion that sport is the modern "opium
for the people" with which a mental control over people is established. Advocatingsport as a means for establishing a direct domination of order over man, through
the establishment of "control in heads", ensures, for Coubertin, respect for the
masters of the world and gives such importance to sport. Metaphorically speaking,
sport is a police baton in man's head with which the ruling order deals with his
critical and changing thought. Coubertin's universal methodological concept is: to
cripple the emanicipatory possibilities of progress and use them to deal with
people's libertarian struggle. The "practical" Coubertin seeks to utilize everything
at his disposal in order to prevent the "advance of masses" and preserve the
domination of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.
Coubertin's Olympic doctrine radically deals with the emancipatoryheritage of modern science. If we compare Coubertin's doctrine with the
philosophy of Francis Bacon, a predecessor of modern science and positivism, we
shall see that they both are in favour of "facts" and reject the spiritual authority as
a criterion for determining the correctness of thought and action. In that sense,
Bacon, unlike Coubertin, negatively views both the appeals to the antiquity and
the appeals to future. According to him: "...truth is to be sought for not in the
felicity of any age, which is an unstable thing, but in the light of nature and
experience, which is eternal". (31) The aim of science is not to create the spiritual
but the material wealth, i.e. not spirituality, but technique, since control over
nature becomes the chief indicator of human powers and the basis of "mankind's perfectioning". Instead of a pursuit of truth and wisdom, prevails the pursuit of
knowledge that will increase productivistic (technical) powers of man which are
used to control nature. In Bacon, we already find the idea of a world civilization as
well as the idea of using science (reduced to a skill by which man could gain most)
so that man can "use its right over nature". Bacon strives to a "Great Instauration",
while technique is reduced to a modernized magic by which all that is "in the
nature of things" is used to develop human powers. Bacon's "new science" should
not only broaden man's knowledge of nature, but should offer him a possibility of
controlling it and thus create a better life. Mihailo Markovi says on that: "The
way in which human life can be enriched by new inventions and powers consists
in broadening human knowledge of this world. People should cease to fight
between themselves and should unite their efforts against their common enemy -
the disobedient nature. They should join hands in searching for the knowledge of
causes and secret movements of things." And he continues: "The road to
knowledge is primarily to liberate the spirit of all the prejudices and fixed
preconceptions (Bacon calls them Idols), followed by a humble observation of
nature, always with a deep respect for everything it can teach us." We can come to
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love nature only if we listen to it first". (...) Nature should be discovered through
inductive observation. Man should become its 'servant and interpreter', but only to
eventually conquer it for its own ends." (32) The true value of human knowledge
consists in its usability: usability becomes the chief attribute of science. In his
"Novum Organum" Bacon argues for the knowledge of the causes of phenomena
and occurrences in order for man to adequately act so as to increase his power -and this principle was to become one of the corner stones of Comte's positive
philosophy. In Coubertin, Bacon's scientific principle "to know in order to predict,
to predict in order to act" becomes the supreme political principle: the cognitive-
productivistic power of man becomes the oppressive power of the ruling class
concentrated in the hands of the capitalistic monopolies. In his doctrine, science
and technique, as the ways of controlling natural laws, become the means of the
bourgeoisie for dealing with the emancipatory heritage of mankind and human
powers, and for subordinating society to the structures and laws that rule the
animal world. Unlike the animals, a bourgeois is not subordinated to natural laws,
but uses them to establish such an order in society that corresponds to the relationsestablished in the animal world. Instead of striving, like Hobbes, for a "domination
of modern natural science over the natural law", (33) Coubertin seeks to establish,
through natural science, a domination of the natural law in society, which,
however, does not acquire the status of "reason" in relation to the "common law",
as is the case in Bacon, but is an embodiment of the abosolutized (self)willedness
of the "master race".
Bacon insists on people using science to control nature and create a better
life; Coubertin insists that science and technique become the exclusive means of
the ruling class for holding man in submission and creating a new order of
privileges. In Bacon, science appears as a way of developing human powersrelative to the dominant authority whose power is founded on a dogma; in
Coubertin, the development of science and technique becomes the development of
a progressistic and expansionist power of the order and a means for dominating
the world. In order to understand the true nature of Bacon's thought, we should
take into consideration the time in which it appeared - in which man's active-
changing powers that offer him the possibility of creating the world at his own
measure developed. This is also the basis of Coubertin's conception, but Coubertin
seeks to use man's active powers to stop social progress. Coubertin entirely
follows the expansionist spirit of monopolistic capitalism: it is a monopolization
of science and technique in the hands of the new "master race" and a globalization
of its power. To control the laws of nature becomes the means for man's complete
submission to the interests of the bourgeoisie and for stopping history. From being
the subject, man becomes the tool and the object of a dehumanized science.
Olympism becomes a peculiar utilitarian science, while sport becomes a specific
technique for controlling people. Much more important than the scientific
methodology is Coubertin's endeavour to make the principle savoir pour prevoir,
prevoir pour agir an exclusive means in the hands of the ruling class which,
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ultimately, serves to predict the future by way of its creation. The activation of the
bourgeoisie in the struggle for creating a positive society and the social
marginalization of the working "masses", "lower races" and women represent one
of the most important tasks of the Olympic doctrine and practice.
Bacon seeks to create a new world (in that context he writes "New
Atlantis" ) with a corresponding "new philosophy", while Coubertin seeks to createa new philosophy that should preserve the existing world. Bacon defines the "new
philosophy" as the "Active Science'' (34) whose "true and lawful goal is none
other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers".
(35) Unlike Bacon, Coubertin seeks to create a new dogma as the tacit foundation
of his positive relation to the world - which is the embodiment of the expansionist
and totalitarian spirit of monopolistic capitalism. In that sense, he seeks to use
science and technique as a means for mystifying the world and transforming the
human powers into an antihuman force. In Bacon, reason appears as the symbol of
the arousal of man's productivistic forces that are capable of overcoming the
existing and creating a new world. Coubertin deals with reason bearing in mindthe "fact" that an appeal to reason was, as a rule, also an appeal to release man
from the bonds of the existing world and to create a world according to the
principles of humanity.
In Coubertin, there is a conflict between progress based on the
development of science and the endeavour to set up a social order at all costs - by
eliminating the emancipatory possibilities of science. For the development of
science involves the development of human powers that search for new realms. It
is precisely science that should question the existing "facts" in order to come to
new questions and answers, which means that there is no progress without
questioning the existing and seeking to create (discover) a novum. In addition, theresults of scientific reason are boundless and represent the heritage of mankind.
The conflict between the strivings to reduce science to a political instrument for
stopping the social development and its emancipatory potentials appears as a
conflict between an operationalized (dehumanized) and a critical reason. It is a
dynamic process that Coubertin seeks to stop by destroying, through sport and
physical drill, man's creative potentials and libertarian dignity. At the same time,
the development of industry and science involves the development of
interdependence, affinity, solidarity - on a global scale. The eli- mination of the
emancipatory possibilities opened by the collectivistic character of the industrial
production and science is one of the chief tasks of Olympism.
Coubertin's doctrine is based on the development of productivistic powers
of modern man, as well as on the development of his conscious as the creator of
history - resulting in his dealing with the Christian dogma and the world to which
that dogma gives a divine legitimacy. However, Coubertin does not deal with the
divine authority in order to liberate man, but in order to submit him to the "state of
nature" and thus enclose him in a new cage which he will never be able to leave.
That is why Coubertin devalues the productivistic activism of the working
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"masses", which involves the creation of the material and spiritual wealth, and
turns its results into the basis of the development of the conquering and oppressive
activism of the ruling parasitic class. The "victory" of the worker over nature
becomes the victory of the bourgeoisie over the working "masses". Underlying
this conception is an order based on the distinction between the creation and
acquisition of wealth, the acquisition of wealth (through conquering andoppression) becoming the basic way of gaining social power and of dealing with
its creators. Coubertin seeks to turn Olympism into a mechanism which will
prevent the development of man's productivistic powers as well as the
development of men self-conscious as the creator of social wealth, the bearer of
progress and the creator of his own history. It is no accident that Coubertin never
mentions the "sports achievements" at the Olympic Games, nor does he name its
actors, which is characteristic of the antiquity. The true winner at the modern
Olympic Games is the "progressive" spirit of capitalism which is incarnated in the
combative character and muscular bodies of sportsmen.
The contradiction in Coubertin's conception consists in that it reduces manto a "lazy animal" while at the same time instrumentalizes science and technique
in the hands of the ruling class, which represent man's victory over the natural
forces and their subjection to unnatural ends. Coubertin, in fact, makes the
existential logic which dominates the animal world independent and seeks to
insure its continuation in society, while man's domination over natural forces
appears only as a means for realizing natural selection. More precisely, the
development of science and technique represents man's domination over natural
forces which, in the hands of the ruling "elite", become a way of submitting man
to the laws that dominate the animal world and a way of devaluing progress.
Instead of a relation between man and nature based on man's domination over natural forces through the development of man's productivistic forces that should
liberate him from his submission to nature, the relations of class domination,
embodied in the "animal order", come to the forefront. The liberating forces and
man's practice become an anti-libertarian power - man becomes the victim of the
development of his own productivistic (creative) powers. Instead of religion,
which was the exclusive means of the nobility for submitting the serfs, science
becomes the exclusive means of the bourgeois class for submitting the working
people: a positive conscious becomes the image of a dehumanized science in
people's heads. In antiquity, man was "Gods¶ toy" (Plato); in modern society, he
becomes the toy of capital in the form of "natural laws" which apply "social
engineering" - and which are but one of the tools of the ruling "elite" for holding
the working "masses" in submission. "Social physics" becomes a natural science
applied to society, which means that society (man) becomes the object of natural
science. Olympism is one of the forms in which man's alienated creative power
turns into the means of his submission. It is a "pure" ideological product based on
the results of (capitalistically instrumentalized) science and a dehumanized reason.
Coubertin is not interested in the development of man's creative powers (since it is
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a tacit "fact" on which the survival and the development of capitalism is based),
but in their control and direction towards fulfilling the interests of the ruling class.
That is why Coubertin insists on a "utilitarian pedagogy" which should create a
"positive" character and a "positive" conscious, i.e., a "positive" man.
Guided by the principle of efficiency (in insuring the stability of the
established order), Coubertin strives to use all he can to plan the "future" and carryit out. "The prediction of future" - based on the maxim savoir pour prevoir,
prevoir pour agir - becomes its "creation" through the destruction of the
emancipatory heritage of mankind which opens a possibility of stepping out of the
capitalist world. It represents an active relation of the ruling class to future and an
endeavour to increase the certainty of survival of the ruling order. As the working
movement that opens the possibility of abolishing (overcoming) the established
order of injustice becomes more developed, the strivings of the ruling "elite" to
use science for preserving the order become more and more aggressive. If
Coubertin's Social Darwinist conception were true, everything he strove to realize
with his Olympic doctrine and practice would be pointless. Coubertin's endeavour to control people's mind by (ab)using the results of science and technique tells us
how much he really believed in the conception he so fanatically advocated.
Coubertin's Olympic doctrine also deals with the emancipatory heritage of
sophism. Above all, it deals with its endeavour to establish the "principle of
subject" as a "source of philosophical consideration". (36) Furthermore, it
renounces its "critical and investigating spirit". The sophistic emphases on the
"authority of facts" does not have a positivistic and objectivistic character, but
refers to an "ethico-political problematic" and "has lost none of its relevance".
Thirdly, the sophists not only "measure all things with rational standards", but they
teach of the "duplicity of all things and confutability of each assertion", so they,"arise and develop an antithetic spirit". At the same time, sophistry "strives for
clarity, distinction and consistency in thought". Consequently, it helped, through
Euripides' tragic art, to liberate Hellenic society from "mythical romanticism" and
to subordinate the mythical world to a "religio-moral and ethico-political
problematic of sophistry". In addition, "the sophists strove not only to educate the
young people from the master class but also to influence broad masses of people,
the whole community, and demanded that what was good for social community
also be realized" - and it is, as we have seen, in opposition to Coubertin's elitist
conception. (37) Here we should say that, in Coubertin, the dominant conscious is
not primitive but an instrumentalized scientific conscious with which the
emancipatory results and possibilities of modern (scientific and philosophical)
reason are to be eliminated. For Coubertin, the logic of "circumstances", which
means "the state of nature", is the basis of people's behavior, the normative
conscious being replaced by a fanatical faith in the existing world resulting in an
idolatrous relation to it.
According to Coubertin, politics is a technique for dominating the "masses"
without any humanistic content and is primarily guided by the interests of the
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ruling class. It has nothing to do with the ancient art (techne) of ruling that
involves virtue (arete), which means a normative (religious) framework providing
the criterion for assessing the right conduct. In Coubertin, there is no right action,
more precisely: only such action is right which is guided by the principle of
efficiency. Politics, as a dehumanized technique of ruling, becomes the form in
which positive science, which conditions the nature of sport as a tool of politics, isrealized: it symbolizes the triumph of a dehumanized science - transformed into a
technique for manipulation and destruction - over people.
Olympism and Reason
Coubertin follows one of the basic intentions of modern (positive) science:
to deal with religion and thus with metaphysics, philosophy, i.e. with ethics and
critical reason. The point is to "curb" reason by means of empiricism andquantification and reduce it to an instrumentalized ratio free from "evaluative
prejudices" and pursuit of truth. Milan Kangrga says on that: "This lack of
distinction between reason and intellect - where intellect, as the organ of
theoretico-scientific cognition based on the method according to mathematico-
geometric construction in purely and exclusively quantitative terms, becomes not
only superior to reason but absolutely dominant - turns out to be ominously
epochal for the whole historical (theoretico-practical) development of the Modern
Age. Intellect, in its purely instrumental-pragmatical-calculatory form and sense,
becomes the exclusive tool of a scientifico-technical domination not only over
nature but also over society and man, and thus the tool of the politico-ideologicaldomination over the world and the method of its controlling. As a pure means of
something else (and not of man), by its extensivity, i.e. direction only to the outer,
that line of rationality necessarily loses ground, since it moves in the vacuum of
the human and meaningful, and thus ends in pure irrationalism, as the ferment of
anti-humanism." (38)
Coubertin does not only strive to eliminate from people's conscious, by
way of Olympism (sport), the emancipatory impulses of the European culture and
create a positive one-mindedness, but seeks to destroy (critical) reason itself and
man's playing nature that directs him to other people and to create a uniform
character. That is why Coubertin insists on upbringing without education. The
basis of social integration becomes not the adoption of certain knowledge and
views, based on natural sciences, but a "spontaneous" mindless combatant
physical activism, dominated by the knowledge of the world through its direct
experience. In that sense, Coubertin emphasizes that the highest quality of the
Hellenes was the fact that they were "little given to contemplation, even less
bookish". Instead of an absolutized knowledge, a positive life becomes the
foundation and origin of positive one-mindedness. Olympism is not only the
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production of the ruling ideology in the form of a positive conscious, but above all
of the relations between people according to the principle homo homini lupus and
of the relation of man to himself (the principle of "greater effort" with the
corresponding principle citius, altius, fortius). In the form of the production of
competitions and records ("the development of human powers") it is the
production of a positive character and a positive conscious in "pure" sense.Coubertin seeks to establish a positive life reduced to an agonal physical activism
that is beyond the questions of truth and lie, of appearance and essence, of good
and evil, of freedom and slavery, of justice and injustice ... Sport becomes the
symbolic model of a mindless agonal life activism, which corresponds to the
tendency of man to live without thinking of the purpose of life, of his social
position, of future, and thus is the prototype of a positive life. Olympism is not
only a political theory of sport, but above all the philosophy of a positive life.
Modern Olympism deals with man as a self-conscious being and abolishes
man's conscious relation to the world. Since utilitarism is the indisputable starting
point and man is fatally subjected to the laws of evolution, self-conscious, likemoral conscious, becomes a burden that prevents man from focusing on the
acceleration of progress. Olympism rejects any strivings for questioning, dialogue,
truth... Coubertin is not the creator of a "new mindfulness" but of a new
mindlessness, more precisely, a dehumanized and instrumentalized ratio becomes
the means of the ruling "elite" for creating a mindless world. Olympism follows
the original intention of positive philosophy that seeks to politically
instrumentalize reason. The turning of philosophy by way of science into a
positivistic discipline presupposes the turning of science into a technical means of
a dehumanized and repressive politics. To abolish philosophy by way of science is
possible only when science is deprived of its creative and progressive nature andacquires a manipulative (technical-executive) character as the instrument of the
ruling class for planning the "future" and carrying out "progress". Coubertin
placed philosophy between the hammer of positivistic science and the anvil of
"positive religion" (modern paganism). Science becomes the means for purifying
philosophy from everything that offers the possibility of a critical relation to the
existing world from the point of view of the emancipatory possibilities created in
civil society, and from the point of view of the idea of future that involves the
creation of a new world. At the same time, Coubertin "overcomes" philosophy
with "positive religion" by depriving it of reason and criticism, namely, by
depriving it of its essence and thus of the reason of its existence. "Positive
religion" represents the end of philosophy. Speaking of Comte's dealing with the
"theologico-metaphysical philosophy", Marcuse points out the essential element of
Coubertin's conception: "The positivist repudiation of metaphysics was thus
coupled with a repudiation of man¶s claim to alter and reorganize his social
institutions in accordance with his rational will. This is the element Comte's
positivism shares with the original philosophies of counter-revolution sponsored
by Bonald and De Maistre. (...) The 'revolutionary spirit' was to be checked by
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spreading another teaching, that society possesses an immutable natural order to
which men will must submit." (39) Coubertin abolishes metaphysics, but creates
from sport a metaphysical curtain with which he seeks to hide the true nature of
capitalism. Horkheimer and Adorno say about that: "That the hygienic shop-floor
and everything that goes with it, the people's car or the sportsdrome, leads to an
insensitive liquidation of metaphysics, would be irrelevant; but that in the socialwhole they themselves become metaphysics, an ideological curtain behind which
the real evil is concentrated, is not irrelevant." (40)
Coubertin is not an agnostic: the truth is in the existing world of "the
factual" (and not beyond or above it), and its original and "holy" essence is in
ancient Greece. It is neither searched for not created, but is given with the existing
order. By absolutizing the world of "the factual" Coubertin absolutized the truth.
Man does not get to know the truth, he directly experience it every day through a
mindless and antireasonable combatant activism: "the knowledge" of the truth (the
world) has a direct empirical character. Experience is not the basis of a mindful
reasoning, from which follows a (reasonable) relation of man to the existing worldin his endeavour to create the world according to his (human) measure, but an
instrument in the fight for domination (survival). Underlying the knowledge of the
world (the truth) is not a need for a change and the creation of a new (just) world,
but a need for its preservation. At the same time, upbringing before education
involves an evaluative apriorism that becomes the basis of a cognitive apriorism.
Only the impressions that help us to survive and proceed are accepted.
Experiencing the truth (the world) involves the crippling of personality and thus
denies man the possibility of comprehending and experiencing the fullness of the
world and creating his whole personality and a critical-changing relation to it. A
reduced and instrumentalized sensibility becomes the basis of the Olympicepistemology. Coubertin's Olympic doctrine is par excellence anti-intellectual. It
rejects the principle nihil est in intelectu quod non fuerit in sensu . There is not a
direct link between senses and intellect, but between senses and character:
sensuality is reduced to the reception of those impressions that do not hinder the
creation of a positive character - and that is the basis and limitation of the relation
to reality and the creation of a normative conscious. Coubertin is the precursor of
the modern spectacle: the most important thing is to dazzle man and penetrate into
his subconscious and thus win him over from the depths of his being - by
excluding reason.
The principle savoir pour prevoir, prevoir pour agir represents the
supreme cognitive principle of Coubertin's positive gnoseology which does not
rely on the authority of science, but on the authority of the ruling power that uses
science as a means for strengthening the class order. Coubertin rejects from
science the "evaluative judgments" and seeks to turn it into an exclusive political
tool of the ruling class for dealing with the emancipatory possibilities of civil
society. A scientifically based "objectivism" becomes the mask for a political
(class) voluntarism expressed in the maxim auctoritas, non veritas facit legem. In
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that context, sociology is reduced to "physique sociale" (Comte) and the latter is
reduced to politics as a dehumanized technique of ruling. Coubertin eliminates
from science the strivings for the truth and for a novum, and reduces it to the
political practice of the ruling "elite". "The truth" becomes the product of an
instrumentalized positive reason and is deprived of the libertarian, moral and
aesthetic dimensions. Ultimately, Coubertin seeks to put under control of theruling will every segment of life and to abolish all the spheres that can limit it: the
absolutistic and totalitarian voluntarism is the essence of his Olympic doctrine and
practice.
Olympism and Mysticism
Unlike Bacon, Coubertin does not use the inductive method but departs
from a given political goal, and in that context selects the facts, giving them aninterpretation and coming to such conclusions that should enable its realization. At
the same time, Coubertin does not use the methods that offer the possibility of an
empirical verification and rational proof, but puts forward his thought in the form
of peculiar sermons with which he tries to reach people's subconscious and win
them over from "the depths of their souls". He does not address the public as a
scientist, but as a "Messiah" who should carry out a "holy mission": to forever deal
with the libertarian dignity and the libertarian struggle of the oppressed. Coubertin
does not strive to create reasonable people who are capable of making their own
judgments, but sects of loyal followers who obediently execute what they are told.
That is why, with his "utilitarian pedagogy", he above all seeks to create thecharacter of a loyal and usable subject to whom he would attach the corresponding
positive conscious. Not the development of a scientific, but the creation of a
fanatical religious conscious - that is the basic purpose of Coubertin's dogmatic.
Hence irrationalism and mysticism become the main characteristics of Coubertin's
Olympic rhetoric and practice. The Olympic doctrine seeks not only to repress
reason, but to open the road to its destruction: fanatism and idiocy are the ultimate
results of the Olympic irrationalism.
Coubertin uses the Olympic spectacle to blind man by reducing his
capability of reasoning, and thus draw him into the spiritual orbit of the existing
world. "The Church or the fair" - cries out Coubertin in his opposition to the
professionalization of sportsmen that threatens to devalue religio athletae, the
main symbol of the Olympic religiousness, and trivialize the Olympic mystery.
Coubertin rejects the logic of panem et circences and opts for the principle of
bread and pagan festivities, having as a model the "great world exhibitions" and
pompous monarchist manifestations that were meant to arouse admiration of the
oppressed for the ruling order. The spectacular Olympic ceremony becomes a
mythological picture of a "happy world" committed to the spirit that governs the
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world. Instead of a naive cheerfulness, Coubertin's Olympic Games are dominated
by a fanatical commitment to the ruling spirit; instead of the "love of God",
dominates the "love" of the existing order. In spite of trying in his later writings to
be close to the Nazis, Coubertin does not strive to build the "collective
unconscious" (Jung) in the dark labyrinths of the subconscious by means of the
ancient myths. Guided by the principle savoir pour prevoir, prevoir pour agir Coubertin carefully tries to keep things under control and instrumentalize them for
his political goals. The subconscious is, in any case, the main Coubertin's ally in
the creation of positive man, and sport and physical drill are the basic ways of
achieving it. That is why Coubertin, in his "utilitarian pedagogy", insists on an
upbringing without education. He seeks to remove ambiguity in man resulting in
the "confrontation of two intentions". (41) Uncontradictoriness of man's character
is based on a sublimated activism where the suppressed can be fully realized.
Coubertin's positive man is fully united with himself for he is completely
submitted, through the conquering (oppressive) activism, to the spirit of
"progress".Coubertin is not a mystic. Modern Olympic mysticism has an instrumental
character and is thus the means of the ruling oligarchy for controlling the
"masses". It is grounded in positive reason which adopted all the results of modern
thought (modern rationalism) that can serve to create a positive man and positive
society. Mysticism is not an expression of the mystery of life to which the ancient
man was totally submitted, but becomes a means of the mystification of the spirit
of capitalism. It is not an integral part of the Olympic mystery, as it was in
antiquity, but is a technical means for "producing" the Olympic spectacle:
Olympism becomes one of the distorted mirrors of capitalism that gives it a
mysterious image. The main role of the members of IOC, as the highest Olympic priests, is to give the spirit of capitalism, by way of the Olympic Games and the
Olympic mythomania, the character of the "deepest mystery", which means an
indisputable and untouchable force to which man's being and destiny are totally
submitted. Not mystical religious ceremonies, but great economic world
exhibitions, as a spectacular demonstration of the progressistic and expansionist
power of capitalism, are the models for Coubertin's Olympic Games. They do not
symbolize the closeness and finality of the ancient cosmos, but the "endless
openness" of the capitalist universe. Coubertin was explicitly against the
professionalization of sport and the commercialization of the Olympic Games,
because he realized that it inevitably led to the banalization of the Olympic
mystery and the destruction of its religious spirit.
Like Huizinga and other theorists of bourgeois society, Coubertin tries to
preserve capitalism by instrumentalizing irrationalism and thus preventing the
creation of a rational alternative to capitalism as an irrational (antilibertarian and
antiexistential) order. Olympism becomes the highest and the most efficient form
of the instrumentalization of irrationalism, and a mindless and operationalized
reason becomes its chief tool. The main role of the International Olympic
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Committee is to "mediate" between capitalism and man, and by way of the
Olympic mysticism and mythology destroy a reasonable relation of man to the
world and his critical-visionary conscious. A lack of ability to distinguish between
myth and reality, as well as between historical facts and the picture of the "past",
represents one of the main features of Coubertin's positive man that makes him
close to the ancient man. A mystification and mythologization of the present worldand a destruction of reason are two sides of the Olympic positivism.
In his strivings to control man, Coubertin cannot rely on his fear of natural
powers. In the Modern Age science represents the "victory" of man over the
natural forces - the basic source of the ancient mystery and deification of nature
(life). Coubertin seeks to deprive man of that heritage realizing that liberation
from nature becomes the objective possibility of liberation from the alienated
centers of social powers, and seeks to turn the "victory" of man over the natural
forces into the victory of the bourgeoisie over the workers. Coubertin deals with
the demystificatory power of science in order to (ab)use it for the production of the
modern Olympic mystery. Science becomes the means for producing the modernOlympic mystery, in the form of the Olympic spectacle, which should deify the
ruling principles of capitalism and arouse veneration. Instead of the ancient unity
of life and mystery, there is a political manipulation of the ruling "elite" that tries,
by way of science, to cover with a "mysterious" Olympic veil the primitive
(worldly) power of capital and enter people's subconscious. Olympism becomes
the means of mystifying the world in which man's creative powers were
superseded by mystical "superhuman powers". To prevent man from changing the
social relations and his (submitted) position in society by developing the
productive forces and his creative powers, that is to say, from gaining self-
conscious as the creator of social goods and the capability to take over the controlof social processes from the parasitic classes in his own hands - this is Coubertin's
aim. That is why he so ardently seeks to cut the emancipatory historical roots: the
destruction of man's self-conscious as the universal creative being of freedom
represents the main task of Coubertin's "utilitarian pedagogy".
The ancient (as well as the medieval) cosmos and its mysterion are alien to
capitalism. The "mystery" of capitalism does not spring from a life dominated by
the natural forces that acquire a divine and thus a fateful character, but from a life
ruled by irrational and evasive laws of the market (the Stock Exchange as the
meeting point of mysterious forces or the modern Pythia's cave) and the
corresponding institutionalized public sphere, which became the laws of the
capitalist cosmos and thus the fateful power between man and life. The task of the
modern Olympic paganism is to illuminate that power with a divine light and thus
hide its class character and worldly vulnerability (transience). The Olympic
Games are not the crown of the mystery of living with which man is faced every
day, but a peculiar hypnotic séance appearing in the form of a "spectacle" that
should blind man and prevent him from becoming aware of his own powers.
Bearing in mind the Olympic ceremony and the importance Coubertin attaches to
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it, it becomes obvious that mysticism, and not reason, represents the umbilical
cord that connects Coubertin's man (citizen) with the existing world.
In Coubertin, evolution, embodied in capitalist progress, is the bearer of the
Olympic mystery. In it, a mystified force appearing in the form of the "war of all
against all" and the law of natural selection are created and developed. With the
development of his conquering-oppressive power man is immerged in evolution,which is symbolically expressed in the explosive muscular strength which
embodies the developing forces of evolution (progress). Similarly to antiquity, the
real things occur in the sphere which preceded man, which created him and to
which he is hopelessly subjected. Since man is by his nature a "lazy animal",
Coubertin had to envisage an additional power that offers the possibility of man's
"overcoming" his inherited "lazy animal nature", but which does not offer him the
possibility of a critical-changing attitude to the existing world. He appeals to the
"immortal spirit of antiquity" that becomes the scepter in which is concentrated the
activist (conquering-oppressive) power of evolution, which with its light should
inseminate the "lazy animal nature" of man (the bourgeois) and thus beget a positive man.
At the closing ceremony of the Berlin Olympic Games Coubertin states in
his final words that "understandings" at the Olympic Games are "stronger than
death itself" (42) and thus indicates one of the basic moments in the creation of the
Olympic mystery: the Olympic Games symbolize the revival of the vital force of
capitalism and the continuity of the life force, with which the capability of an
eternal self-reproduction of the existing world is affirmed, making the Games the
"festivity of spring" and "youth". The "sacred rhythm" of the Olimpiads becomes a
symbolic expression of an unbreakable chain of births and deaths to which man is
fatally submitted. A readiness to die represents an expression of man's totalsubmission to the ruling order based on natural selection - which as a fatal power
appears in the form of the Olympic cult and becomes a means of man's spiritual
insemination. The Olympic Games symbolize man's final "reconciliation" (Comte)
to the present world.
The development of capitalism brought about a complete trivialization of
the Olympic mystery: "mythology has entered into the profane" (Horkheimer
/Adorno). (43) What Coubertin was faced with from the very beginning of the
Olympic Games has come about: instead of the "Church", the Olympic Games
have become a "circus"; instead of becoming a symbolic incarnation of the
"progressive" spirit of capitalism, sportsmen have become the "circus gladiators".
From the very beginning Coubertin undertook a fruitless work: he tried to rescue
the Olympic Games as the highest religious ceremony dedicated to the
glorification of capitalism - from capitalism itself. Coubertin's Olympic idea ended
on the altar of the God of money. Still, the most important thing was preserved:
the Olympic Games were and still are a guillotine - a modernized form of the
Procrustean method of execution - for the libertarian spirit.
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Footnotes
(1) Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution,345-347.p.
(2) Urlike Prokop, Soziologie der Olympischen Spiele,83.p.Cursive U.P.
(3) Auguste Comte,Physique sociale,15.p.Hermann,Paris,1975.
(4) Ante Fiamengo, Saint-Simon i Auguste Comte,107.p.Naprijed,Zagreb,1987.
(5) Compare : Ante Fiamengo,Ibid,143.p.Foot-note.
(6) Ibid. 146.p.
(7) In : Ante Fiamengo,Ibid.344.p.
(8) In : Ante Fiamengo,Ibid.167.p.Cursive in org.
(9) Ante Fiamengo,Ibid.167.p.(10) Ibid.137.p.
(11) Ibid. 149. p.
(12) Ibid. 149. p.
(13) W. Windelband, H.Heimsoeth, Povijest filozofije, Knjiga druga, 243,p.
Curs.W.W.
(14) Compare : Danko Grli, Estetika III tom, 261. p. Naprijed, Zagreb, 1974.
(15) P. d. Coubertin, "U ne Conférence a Londres", In : John MacAloon, This
Great Symbol, 93. p.
(16) Theodor Adorno/ Max Horkheimer,Dialectic of Enlightenment,7,8.p.Verso,
London/ New York, 1989.(17) Ante Fiamengo,Ibid.156.p.
(18) In : Ante Fiamengo,Ibid.156.p.
(19) Compare:Ante Fiamengo,Ibid.158.p.
(20) Ibid.159.p.
(21) Compare:P.d.Coubertin,The Olympic Idea,18,19.p.
(22) Compare: W.Windelband,H.Heimsoeth,Povijest filozofije,Knjiga
druga,244.p.
(23) Jean-Paul Enthoven, Préface:Auguste Comte,Physique sociale,3.p.Cursive
J.P.E
(24) In : J.MacAloon,This Great Symbol,85.p.
(25) P. d. Coubertin,Un Programme,6.p.
(26) In : J.MacAloone,Ibid,84.p.
(27) In : J. MacAloon, Ibid.Foot-note.305.p.
(28) Herbert Marcuse,Reason and Revolution,326.p.
(29) Ibid. 327. p. Cursive H.M.
(30) P. d. Coubertin,The Olympic Idea,19.p.
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(31) Francis Bacon,Novum Organum,In:John M. Robertson,The Philosophical
Works of Francis Bacon,269.p.Freeport,New York,Reprint,1970.
(32) Mihailo Markovi,Filozofski osnovi nauke,34.p.SANU,Beograd,1981.
(33) Compare:Arthur Kaufmann.Preface:Thomas.Hobbes,Naturrecht und
allgemeines Staatsrecht in den Anfangsgrunden,VI.
(34) Francis Bacon,Novum Organum,248.p.(35) Ibid.280.p.
(36) Milo Ðuri,Istorija helenske knjievnosti,504.p.
(37) Compare:Milo uri,Istorija helenske knjievnosti,505.p.
(38) Milan Kangrga,Praksa,vrijeme,svijet,40.p.Cursive M.K.Nolit,Beogad,1984.
(39) Herbert Marcuse,Reason and Revolution,344.p.
(40) Theodor Adorno/Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Introduction,xv.
(41) Compare : Sigmund Frojd, Uvod u psihoanalizu, 85.p.Kosmos, Beograd,
1964.
(42) P.d.Coubertin, "Speech by Baron de Coubertin at the Close of the BerlinOlympic Games" , In: P.d.Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 136.p.
(43) Theodor Adorno/Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28.p.
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