Customer Reviews

Sport (Art of Living (McGill-Queen))

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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).