Gracious Movement

In 1984 Christopher Cordner offered a critical view on theories of graceful movement in sport developed by Ng. G. Wulk, David Best and Joseph Kupfer. In 2001 Paul Davis criticized his view. Cordner responded, rejecting all the criticism. More than a century before, Herbert Spencer and Jean-Marie Guyau had a similar controversy over grace. Both exchanges of opinion involve three positions: that grace is the most efficient movement and therefore something quantitative and measurable; that grace is expression of the wholeness of person and the world; and that grace is something which neither science nor philosophy can explain. To clarify these conflicting issues, this article proposes to examine the history of the notion which goes back to the Latin gratia and has root in the Ancient Greek charis, and to apply the concepts of cultural anchor and thin coherence, following John R. Searle's explanation that we produce epistemically objective accounts of ontologically subjective reality.