On Creativity in Sporting Activity: With Some Consequences for Education

Abstract

This paper proposes a definition of sporting creativity that is based on a phenomenological account of sporting experience. Taking philosophical cues from the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, it argues that creativity in sporting activity is the ability to respond to the physical challenges encountered in the practice of sport in spontaneous and imaginative ways on the basis of carefully cultivated physical and mental—or bodyminded—habits. This definition involves several key Peircean notions such as imagination, spontaneity, habit, and the continuity of body and mind, which are expounded one by one (section I). Some examples then illustrate the proposed definition (section II). This is followed by a more detailed discussion of the relationship between imagination, bodyminded skill, practice, experience, and the conception of possibilities in order to enrich the phenomenological description of creative sporting activity (section III). The paper then turns to consider some reasons why sporting creativity is of philosophical interest to sporting communities and, especially, for the integral education of the bodyminded person (section IV). These reasons are finally recast in terms of possibilities for creative self-realization in sport, highlighting the upshot of an education for creativity (section V).