Philosophy and rugby league: What would the great thinkers make of the greatest game of all?

Monty Python’s ‘Philosophy Football’ is a wonderful piece of absurdity.

After a lengthy period of contemplation during the showdown between the philosophers of Germany and Greece, the gun Greek mathematician and midfielder, Archimedes, has a revelation and initiates a flowing passing move finished by his compatriot, Socrates. After which, things get very philosophical.

Rather than simply enjoying the fine work of the Python when it popped up on my browser – you know, like a normal person – I wondered what some of our finest philosophers would make of rugby league and how they’d relate to it?

So, apropos of nothing, here’s a view of rugby league through the prism of some of the world’s great thinkers.

On coaching: Aristotle

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The ancient Greeks – where would we be without them? If Aristotle hadn’t left us more than 2000 years ago, I’m sure he’d currently be coaching Greece at the World Cup.

Aristotle is the original author of the much-repeated maxim about the nature of the whole. The idea that led to the more modern concept of synergy, of working together but with a guiding force creating something exponential. We might not have coaches, or even rugby league, without the original Greek god.

For Aristotle, the teacher was most virtuous, a guide toward living a good life. He didn’t quite anticipate Machiavelli, or Craig Bellamy.

On the laws of the game: Douglas Adams

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

There’s a limit to everything, and once rugby league players and coaches became full-time professionals and started deconstructing the game, the laws would always become passé.

Where they didn’t find loopholes, they found gaps in the will to enforce the laws. After a while, they found fed-up administrators with the inclination to start enforcing laws, just not the determination to keep doing it.

They eventually found Peter V’landys who was willing to change the laws, replacing them with something new and stranger. Where once the penalty for a defence disrupting a team’s attacking play was territory and maybe points, it became nothing more than an extra tackle or two in roughly the same spot.

Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter Vlandys. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

Just as it seemed we were near consensus that belting people around the head was an absolute wrong, we started quibbling about whether sanctions should depend on where and when the belting occurs.

We discovered the nature of the problem and why it exists, and then it all disappeared in a puff of illogic.

On the Bunker: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses.”

Rousseau’s finest work was all about how sophistication corrupts and undermines our natural instincts and the natural order of things. I suspect he’d have preferred rugby league in the days when a minor bobble or a defender falling over the shadow of a decoy runner didn’t prevent a try.

Nature has taken its course; it’s a try unless you insist on the most pedantic, complicated and unnecessary interpretation of the laws.

The great Adams put if better than I could: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools”.

On teamwork: Arthur Schopenhauer

“Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties”

Old Artie Schopenhauer was quite the pessimist, positing that we’re all largely slaves to our biology and social conditioning, and we suffer as a result. Which is not to say there isn’t pleasure and reward to be had.

I reckon ‘the Schopster’ would’ve appreciated league had he come from Glebe rather than 18th century Gdansk. To be part of a team is to enter a contract, to forfeit some autonomy and take on responsibility in the hope of something greater.

The reward, though, is never equally shared, with only the ‘genius’ fully appreciating and benefiting from collective triumph, while the majority toil away in obscurity as mere observers of the aesthetic. In other words, life’s unfair. I suspect ‘bustling’ Bill Dunn and Josh Jackson are Schopenhauer devotees.

Josh Jackson: Philosopher. (Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)

On competition: Friedrich Nietzsche

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”

“Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a charging steed we let fall the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians – and attain our state of bliss only when we are most – in danger”

The wild steed of Saxony, Freddy Nietzsche, would’ve loved rugby league, especially in the 1970s and ‘80s. State of Origin would’ve made complete sense to him.

Nietzsche wasn’t the type to ask for permission or forgiveness and, of course, he was famously booked in Monty Python’s sketch for accusing Confucius of having no free will. Before illness robbed him of his physical faculties, he’d have run harder than Mark Carroll on amphetamines.

Had he been a rugby league player, Freddy would’ve appeared at the judiciary every other week and refused to accept the premise of the institution on the grounds that it had no moral authority, or even objective reality to exist in.

On media and reality: Bertrand Russell

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes”.

Yes, that’s pretty much how certain tabloid publications cover rugby league. The non-existence of something doesn’t mean it can’t be conjured, and if you repeat something often enough it starts to become a subjective reality.

Russell might’ve enjoyed the rugby league rumour mill, especially the November silly season when certain players and clubs become the china teapot in orbit, only observable to those who placed them there.

On commentators: Federico García Lorca

“I can’t listen to you. I can’t listen to your voice. It’s as though I’d drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along – and I know I’m drowning – but I go on down”.

Isn’t that what we all think when listening to Phil Gould or Michael Ennis?

On rugby league jerseys: Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”

I don’t claim to understand much of what big Ludwig was on about, but from what I can gather he was all about signs and signals; that what we project into the world is what we are.

I’m certain he’d be perturbed by rugby league teams running out in a new jersey almost every week, or just not having a good default jersey to begin with.

The Wests Tigers have historically never been able to settle on a jersey and, by extension, an identity. Manly have a great jersey, but the rainbow thing wasn’t their only alternative in 2021. Maybe there’s a deeper malaise.

Wittgenstein also argued that “If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done”. When it comes to jerseys, I’m not sure I agree, Ludwig.

On virtue, speech and rugby league: Søren Kierkegaard

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

Kierkegaard would’ve had a mighty chuckle at the imbroglio involving Manly’s good intentions, some slightly different coloured pieces of fabric and the ugly fallout that ensued a few months back.

The great Dane was a deeply religious man who nonetheless drew a line between religion and personal ethics. One can inform the other without limiting it, without recourse to relativism. He was in no way opposed to freedom of expression, he just preferred it to be informed by a broad community and the freedom of thought it engenders.

It’s a tradition that goes back to Plato and a reminder that our modern internet message board skirmishes are nothing new – people have been thinking about and disputing these things for millennia. As the Platonic one said: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something”.

Des Hasler walks onto the field during Anzac Round. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

On full-time: Albert Camus

“Time is an awkward inconvenience between football matches.”

There’s considerable doubt about whether Camus actually said this.

I prefer to believe he did. Amen, brother.

On endings: Ron Swanson

“I regret nothing. The end.”