Resilience and sport: transforming life horizons

This paper offers a philosophical interpretation of resilience through the lens of sport. Moving beyond psychological and educational models, it frames resilience as a phenomenological, ontologically informed phenomenon. Drawing from Plato’s idea of inner harmony and discernment of true danger, and Aristotle’s notion of virtue as a cultivated mean between extremes, resilience is understood as a lived moral disposition. Modern existential perspectives (Camus, Frankl) further situate resilience as a response to suffering and absurdity. Building on John S. Russell’s view that sport is a space for moral reflection, the paper develops a phenomenological account of resilience as a transformation of life horizon. Drawing on the phenomenology of horizon (Husserl, Patočka, Heidegger), resilience is ultimately approached as a transformation of one’s life-direction and interpretative structures—an ontological process of expanding the self’s possibilities through physical exertion, overcoming and embodied meaning-making. Sport thus can be understood as a cultural domain of existential experience, where resilience is not learned as a skill but lived as a process of becoming.