Whether it's conkers in the schoolyard, kicking a football in the park, or playing tennis on Wimbledon Centre Court, sport impacts all of our lives. But what is sport and why do we do it? Colin McGinn, renowned philosopher (and kiteboarder), reflects on our love of sport and explores the value it has for us and the part it plays in a life lived well. Written in the form of a memoir, McGinn discusses many of the sports he has engaged in - from pole-vaulting and gymnastics to windsurfing and tennis - and describes the athletic experience from the inside, as a participant, articulating what is uniquely valuable about sport as an activity. Sport, argues McGinn, takes us to our fullest potential as human beings, it's what we fling at mortality to keep it at bay, a holiday from the Unbearable Heaviness of Being. "Sport" expresses our nature, it bears upon our self-realization. If a happy life consists in one that expresses fully our natural faculties, then sports must play an essential role in our lifes. Mind-body unity, the nature of practical knowledge and physical skill, success and failure, the ethics of competition, peak experiences, the spectacle of professional sport, aesthetics and death, McGinn discusses these and many other issues while telling of his own sporting mishaps and adventures. To use the vernacular of philosophy, "Sport" captures the phenomenology of sport - what it's like to do it - and in doing so shows how sport is a way of expressing and understanding who and what we are, way beyond whether we are a good sportsman, a bad loser or a team-player. For anyone who has ever thought that there must be less humiliating ways to enjoy yourself than being thrashed on the tennis court, "Sport" will reassure you that it's time not wasted.
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Editorial Reviews
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"In consistently engaging and occasionally inspiring prose, McGinn chronicles his dogged mastery of waves, wind and even the 'shivering vortex of malefaction' that used to be his tennis serve, and there emerge some refreshingly weighted philosophical observations." Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Colin McGinn is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He was previously Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His recent books include The Making of a Philosopher (2002), The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (2007) and Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (2006).
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Middle-aged man learns new tricks,
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This review is from: Sport (Art of Living (McGill-Queen)) (Paperback)
This small book is a bagatelle, one in a series labeled "The Art of Living," whose advertised aim is to open up philosophy to a wider public by addressing the question "How should we live?" (other volumes in the series are titled Clothes, Hunger, Illness, Pets, and Work, for instance). On the evidence of Sport, apparently one of the requisites of achieving broad accessibility is to go light on the philosophy. It consists chiefly of the biographical reflections of an enthusiastic amateur sportsman, although it is not wholly incidental that Colin McGinn happens to be an excellent philosopher as well.McGinn is a good teller of (often self-deprecating) stories about his widely various sporting experiences, so Sport will hold readers' attention and likely amuse at times. A partial sample of the many sports he has indulged in is reflected in the inventory of equipment he once kept at his Long Island summer home: seven kayaks, three windsurfers, two surfboards, a table tennis table, a mountain bike, two traction kites, two skateboards, roller blades, a discus, a javelin, a pole vaulting pole, a pair of air rifles, several tennis racquets, a boogie board, and more. McGinn sees sports as a form of knowledge, entailing both knowing how to perform an activity ("practical knowledge") and knowing what it feels like to do it ("phenomenological knowledge"). Each sport has its own phenomenology, he believes, its own specific rules, skill demands, equipment, and so on that shape the experience. He says he continues to take-up new sports for this reason, that they expand the self. He certainly has been intrepid in his willingness to experiment, becoming a kiteboarding enthusiast in his mid fifties, for example. "Sport is a workshop of risk management," McGinn contends. "[I]n sport we learn how to assess, and work within, our capacities. We learn what we can do and what we can't do." The judgments he offers along these lines seem sound enough. In general, however, when given philosophical openings McGinn refrains from pursuing them at any length or in any technical detail. He commits about three pages to an argument for the legalization of performance enhancing drugs, primarily on libertarian grounds. He just touches on "play" as a universal in human culture, pointing out that in sports the play activity itself makes us happy, independent of the possibly good consequences (better health, etc.). He references "peak experiences," "being in the zone," and "the feeling of flow," without developing the concepts further, missing opportunities to explore how modern neuroscience may inform our understanding of these phenomena. He introduces an intriguing reflection on the moral nature of the relationship between sports coaches and their "students," but contains it to a single paragraph. The most significant void, in my opinion, is that teams are missing; virtually all of the activities McGinn describes are individual sports (a few ice hockey games with his young nephews excepted). Individual and team sports may belong to the same family, but I believe that this short volume could have benefitted from consideration of genus distinctions between the two. Because I would have preferred a heavier dose of philosophy, Sport fell somewhat short of my expectations (three stars on this ground). But it was fun to read and generally wise, so those who come to it better informed than I was about what to expect will likely be pleased by it (four stars in this case).
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