Der Sport als Institution der Produktion ästhetischer Erfahrung

Starting from the current legitimation crises in sport in the civil society of Germany and in particular high-level sport, this article questions the sense from which the value of sport activities originates and which defines their authenticity as sport activities. Analogous to the pedagogical justification discussion of school sports lessons and coupled to the philosophical core question how the“peculiar subject sport can be defined as a special activity” (Schürmann) and differentiated from other activities, attempts will be made to trace the specific aesthetic potential of contest-oriented competitive sport with the aid of an institutional theoretic abstraction basis. Along the line of the key points of the title (institution, production and aesthetic experience) the term institution according to Gehlen will be presented and critically investigated for possibilities of connections to a theory on aesthetic experience . The results of this analysis will then be transferred to the genuine characteristics of the institution sport. This reveals that sport per se does not contain a truly specific sense, but as an institution can be interpreted as a medium for the production of an extraordinary sense by those experiencing it. In this context a sensibly adequate interpretation of the term production is of decisive significance. The competitor needs the institution of sport in order to produce a sense. A sense per se cannot, however, be attributed to the institution of sport, except that activities within their own sphere only make sense when they are experienced aesthetically. Exactly this is referred to in the title of this article, that sport is an institution for the production of aesthetic experience. Finally the possible yield of the considerations for an educational aesthetic self-reflection of the institution of sport in a civil society will be discussed.