In this week’s issue of IDEAS, Pierre-Edouard Deldique invites Jean-Luc Marion not for a conversation on phenomenology (his specialty) but to talk about sports. With “La raison du sport” (Grasset, 2026), this major figure in French philosophy and phenomenology, a member of the French Academy, offers us an unexpected and personal essay.
Far from his usual areas – such as donation – our guest turns to a practice he knows: running, long-distance and middle-distance running. This theme allows him to pose a simple and dizzying question: what are we really doing when we engage in sports?
During the interview with Pierre-Edouard Deldique, much is said about the great champion Michel Jazy (whom we hear from in the archives), a star of the 60s. A role model for the philosopher who had the opportunity to meet him.
From the first pages of the book, Marion makes an observation that everyone can verify: sports have become a universal phenomenon, omnipresent in contemporary societies, yet it remains a mystery.
Why do we run? Why join the anonymous crowd in a marathon? Certainly not, he writes, to outdo a stranger or to impress loved ones. The act of sports responds to a deeper necessity: to prove to oneself that they still exist, to break away from the ordinary, to open up to the world, to unify the body and soul into one flesh.
Sports thus appear as an existential experience, a passage to another world, truer than that of daily life.
In the interview, he explains. For Jean-Luc Marion, the athlete seeks less to defeat others than to reach himself. This idea stems from his personal experience, which he begins his book with: the physical effort is a test of oneself, a way to prove one’s finitude and transcend it in the very movement that attests to it.
The philosopher also warns us about the transformation of athletes into images, or worse, into icons, and the conversion of spectators into consumers. This spectacular drift, linked to a market – including doping – threatens to denature the original sports experience.
Modern sports are thus caught between two regimes: inner asceticism and spectacular competition. “So why do we run? And for how much longer?” he asks.
The philosopher mobilizes phenomenology to think about the sports body. Drawing on the distinction between “machine-body” and “flesh-body,” he shows that sports cannot be reduced to a performance mechanism. No, the athlete is not an instrument-playing his own body: he inhabits his body, he is his body.
The effort, the suffering, the abandonment, the repetition, the asceticism – all dimensions that Jean-Luc Marion describes accurately.
The thinker, known for the rigor of his philosophical texts, adopts a more free and incarnated language here, sometimes lyrical. He evokes the champions he has admired, or the races he has experienced.
At the end of his investigation, he poses a decisive but rarely asked question: what spiritual experience takes place in sports?
By unifying the soul and the machine, by exposing the subject to its own finitude, by opening it up to a truer world, sports could well be a pathway to the spiritual, in the broad sense – non-confessional – of an experience of surpassing oneself and opening up to reality.
