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Dissecting Kyrgios’ Kantian passion

Nick Kyrgios has a great chance of becoming a top ten player. (Photo: AFP)
Expert
17th January, 2017
13

No matter how Nick Kyrgios performs at this year’s Australian Open, thousands of pixels will continue to be dedicated to trying to figure out just what is ‘wrong’ with Australia’s number one tennis player.

Many of these opinion pieces focus on Krygios’ lack of passion for tennis. But what exactly are passions and what if the problem isn’t with the young man from Canberra, but is with our contemporary meaning of passions?

Leading a life where our passions are followed and fulfilled saturates our relationship with living in the early twenty-first century. It seems that almost everywhere we turn we are encouraged to follow our passions. After all, this is the key ingredient to the success of reality television shows such as MasterChef.

Further to this, is the notion that professional athletes are successful because they have worked hard and followed their passion. This is the established and very powerful narrative that frames how we engage with sport.

It is in this sense that we are encouraged to believe following our passions is the best path to personal fulfillment and to breaking free from the shackles of our mundane existences.

This view of passions as a motivating force is how Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, understood passion, which is contrasted by fellow Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s argument of passion as a disease.

Our modern interpretation of passions as offering freedom and fulfillment by motivating us has similarities to the philosophy of Hume.

But passions have not always been so positively viewed as they are now.

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, passion comes from the Latin term, pati, meaning to suffer and its early associations with the Passion of Christ reinforced this meaning. Christ’s passions represent the final suffering he endured in his last week on earth. Hence passion has not always been aspirational and celebratory.

While it is unfair to say that the meaning of passion has been hijacked by our technologically-driven world, which facilitates constantly seeking personal fulfilment, it is fair to say that how passion is interpreted shifts throughout time.

For Kant passions are a malady and the antithesis of reason, which he described as “cancerous sores for practical reason”.

Kant also argues that passions are akin to folly, and really, what greater folly can there be than following a fury little yellow ball around a tennis court for a living?

Rather than trying to read Kyrgios as a spoilt brat or as a young man who is not grateful for his talent, perhaps we should read him through Kant’s understanding of passions.

His life is a life that many of us envy and wish we could have, but there also is a sense of madness to professional, and especially highly paid sport. Ultimately these people are not curing cancer or bringing about world peace. They’re travelling the globe chasing a bouncing ball.

These athletes are the privileged few that are paid millions of dollars to do what is entertainment for us mere mortals who will never know what it is to walk onto centre court at Wimbledon.

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By attempting to apply the philosophies of Kant to explain the behaviour of Nick Kyrgios we see not only a possible explanation for behaviour many of us are baffled by, but we are reminded that our modern viewpoint on passions is quite narrow and perhaps even simplistic.

There is no guarantee that passions are a gateway to greater fulfillment and happiness. It is also a fallacy to think that talent also equals a passion for something.

What we see in Kyrgios is an example of someone who does not fit our early twenty-first century mythology of passions.

In this sense Nick Kyrgios is doing pointing out a very Kantian definition of passions in a world that has moved to a Humean interpretation of them, even if he is not consciously aware of doing so.

Nick Kyrgios will play his second round match today at the Australian Open against Italian Andreas Seppi.

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