From Sophocles to SmackDown: The Deep Philosophy of Pro Wrestling
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So.
I’ve begun what I expect to be a long, serious project: the first philosophical study of professional wrestling. Not a book of commentary or pop culture reflection, but something closer in ambition to Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music. I want to treat wrestling not as a lowbrow curiosity, but as an art form—a subgenre of drama—deserving of philosophical and aesthetic reflection.
To do that, I need to start with drama itself. What is it? What is its structure, its history, its form? Why does it ever matter, and why does it still matter?
To that end, I’ve just started Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama, and it is, frankly, not an easy read. Szondi, writing in the 1950s, set out to understand how the structure of drama had changed in the modern period. He was convinced that the classical conception of drama—one which assumed a stable moral universe, coherent characters, and the possibility of resolution—could no
longer, and does in fact not, hold. The modern world had changed, and the forms of drama had to change with it. Szondi does not weep for that loss, but he does treat it with a kind of tragic seriousness. The classical form is not rejected so much as it is outlived.
His predecessors and sources include Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, Walter Benjamin’s Origins of the German Tragic Drama, and Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music. So my reading list has continued to grow, but I believe a serious look at professional wrestling as a subgenre of drama is worth the effort to come.
Roger Scruton, somewhat in contrast to Szondi, wrote out of a deep and often explicitly conservative aesthetic sensibility. He was not stodgy, nor did he fail to appreciate innovation, but ultimately he is an exegete and champion of the Western musical tradition. In his magisterial The Aesthetics of Music, he defends the classical tradition of Western tonality—not just as a technical system, but as a meaningful order, one that allows for beauty, intelligibility, and the disclosure of human feeling. Scruton mourns the collapse of musical form, particularly in the face of kitsch and irony. Where Szondi diagnoses and defines a historical shift, Scruton laments a civilizational rupture.
But the two are not at odds. They both believe that form matters, and that when form collapses, so too does the possibility of meaningful expression. They both understand that content without form is chaos, and that form without content is dead ritual. They are each, in their own way, grappling with how art can still carry meaning in an age that no longer trusts meaning itself.
(Let me note that this is how I am reading Szondi so far. If I progress through his work and need to come back and correct my reading, then I will do so.)
And then there is my T. S. Eliot.
T. S. Eliot stands, as he so often does, at a strange intersection—classical and modern, theological and fractured, ritualistic and ironic, precise but not pedantic. He mourns like Scruton. He diagnoses like Szondi. But unlike either, he tries to rebuild. The Waste Land does not simply describe and inhabit a ruined landscape—it assembles fragments, half-remembered rituals, ghosted voices, and shorelines of memory. In Four Quartets, Eliot embraces liturgical rhythm, theological time, and poetic musicality to build a poetic form adequate to the modern soul.
And it is Eliot, I think, who best helps us understand why professional wrestling is worth thinking about seriously. And for saying that, let me apologize in advance both to Eliot and to Scruton. (I would like to think that Szondi would like this project, but I don’t know that for sure.)
Let me clarify early on that wrestling is not born of drama. Its roots are in combat and sport, as far back as the gladiatorial games. Then in America, its roots are in carnival and in showmanship. It was never a theater of ideals. Once professional wrestling was separated from combat sport by its organizers, it was a work—a con, a trick, a show. The organizers knew it was scripted, but the audience didn’t. What has grown from those roots is a dramatic form unlike any other: a genre built of conflict, moral gesture, bodily risk, myth, and audience participation. Its matches are ritualized struggles. Its characters are masks that sometimes fall away. Its stories are often absurd, sometimes profound, and occasionally tragic. At its best, the stories are surprising and unpredictable, but eventually, at least for a moment, satisfying. And always, somewhere just beneath the surface, is the crowd, shaping the story as it unfolds.
In no meaningful sense is wrestling fake. Rather, it is profoundly real. It’s just not a competitive sport. It’s, well… it’s drama.
But it’s an interesting form of drama. Pro wrestling is American folk opera. It’s not elegant, but it is rich. It remembers its history even when it mocks it. It stages betrayal, redemption, revenge, sacrifice, failure, pride, and laughter in ways that resonate with something ancient. The best storylines can span ten or fifteen years, and even generations. The very best storytellers are very meticulous.
The WWE—whatever one thinks of it as a company—has understood this, at least in flashes. It acknowledges and returns to its roots in the carnivals. It honors its lineage and presents its own history as myth, complete with saints, villains, martyrs, and miracles. And like Eliot, it constructs meaning from fragments.
Wrestling is fragments shored against ruin.
It is one of the last great popular spaces where the physical body still carries symbolic meaning, where the crowd still gathers for a shared experience of moral drama, and where the fourth wall isn’t just broken—it’s moved, toyed with, transgressed, and restored again. At its best, wrestling allows us to participate in the form itself. It gives us a place to see good and evil (and everything in between) played out, not as philosophical abstractions, but as human struggles carried in the body.
I don’t expect everyone to see wrestling this way. But I think it’s worth arguing. And if I’m going to make the case seriously, I need to understand the full history of drama, from Aristotle to Szondi, from Sophocles to Beckett. I need to reckon with Scruton’s sense of form, and Eliot’s instinct to rebuild it. Wrestling didn’t start as drama. But I believe it has become a dramatic form. And I believe it might be, in its own strange and broken way, one of the last places where we still act out the human story. And that is exceptionally important.
In this I will also be drawing on another source that has long shaped my view of the human person and public meaning: the philosophical anthropology of Karol Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II. In his view, it is through action—particularly embodied action—that the person is disclosed. The body is not a mask or instrument, but the visible expression of the invisible self. In At the Center of the Human Drama, Kenneth L. Schmitz explores this idea with clarity and depth, showing how Wojtyła’s vision affirms the dignity of performance, sacrifice, and witness. Wrestling, in its best moments, is a secular liturgy of the same truth: persons and personhood revealed through bodily struggle, conflict, and moral decision, witnessed and affirmed by a crowd.
So this is where I begin. With Szondi, Scruton, Eliot and Wojtyla—not because they ever wrote about wrestling, but because they understood that form matters, and that when we lose it, we lose something human. Our dramatis personae will grow, but let’s begin.
And maybe—just maybe—wrestling, in all its madness and myth, helps us get a little of that back.
