Talent Development, Existential Philosophy and Sport

On Becoming an Elite Athlete

Kenneth Aggerholm

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138208346
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

'Why don't young athletes in sport just quit?' Starting with this question and drawing on existential philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics, Talent Development, Existential Philosophy and Sport seeks a deeper understanding of the experience of being a talented young sportsperson striving to become an elite athlete.

As an alternative to conventional approaches to talent development governed by a worldview of instrumental rationality, the book introduces key ideas from educational philosophy to describe talent development through the concept of elite- Bildung. It pursues an existential understanding of developing in sport as a process of freedom, self-transcendence, striving for excellence and building up habits.

The book highlights a range of ambiguous and intriguing existential phenomena – most prominently wonder, question, expression, humour and repetition – and reveals an existential layer of meaning within talent development in sport, which can facilitate the process of becoming an elite athlete and give young athletes a number of reasons not to quit.

By deepening our understanding of performance and development in sport, and the process of becoming an elite player, this book is important reading for any serious student or researcher working in the philosophy of sport, sports coaching, sports development, sport psychology or applied sport science.

Part I
Navigating in the landscape

1
The phenomenal field of talent development

What does it mean to pursue an existential understanding of talent development in sport? As the title of the book suggests this is my aim, but the notion ‘existential’ is not unequivocal. Therefore, in this chapter I will attempt to clarify the understanding of it that will guide the present pursuit. This will at the same time introduce the overall theoretical and methodological approach of the book, which is rooted in existential phenomenology. In the following I will describe what this implies and how this can contribute to a deeper understanding of the experience of being a young athlete developing in sport. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive account of the complex history and diverse approaches within existential and phenomenological philosophy. For the present purpose I am interested in how it can help in revealing and describing a phenomenal field of meaning in sport that is often overlooked. This field can also be described as the practical landscape of talent development and to navigate in this I will first illustrate how phenomenological method can be of assistance. Since the scope of this book is talent development in elite sport I will situate the methodological considerations in the context of modern sport and contemporary approaches to this in sports science, with the ambition of showing how a phenomenological attitude can allow seeing through the dominating rationality in this field. This will subsequently open for describing various aspects and structures of experience within this practical landscape. To prepare the analyses of this in the next chapters I will round off by outlining the general understanding of subjectivity in this book, which will lay the foundations for the subsequent attempts to better understand why young athletes strive to become elite athletes.

The natural attitude

A first and important thing to notice about a phenomenological method is that it involves a kind of philosophical reflection that attempts to suspend or bracket our natural attitude. This natural attitude describes our ordinary and common sense conception of reality, which seems so obvious that it can be hard to see how things could be different. It is the attitude of ordinary science, which is so “absorbed in its investigation of the natural (or social/cultural) world that it doesn’t pause to reflect upon its own presuppositions and conditions of possibility” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 22). This is the approach to practice for most athletes, coaches, experts and researchers in sport. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only natural. But at the same time it does not reveal the whole story about this field of practice. In our natural attitude we tend to overlook or forget the foundation of lived experience from which our rational and conceptual understanding, as well as the world of science, gets its meaning. It is therefore the aim of the present investigation to contrast the natural attitude with a philosophical attitude that critically questions and interrogates the foundation and the precondition for both scientific thought and experience. This foundation is the phenomenal field, but before considering this primary layer of meaning it can be useful to first take a look at a prevalent kind of natural attitude to sport today that reveals the world through instrumental rationality. I will use this broad notion to highlight a dominating set of values that arose in modernity and found its way into the practice and study of modern sport. By illustrating some general tendencies in contemporary approaches to sport that appear to reflect a worldview guided by instrumental rationality it is my ambition to present a contrasting perspective against which the existential approaches of the present book can be better understood.

It is well known to most sport scholars how Guttmann (2000) in his analysis of modern sport pointed to how the logics of modern sport are dominated by a particular means-end rationality that resembles Weber’s (1978) analysis of instrumental rationality. From this, Guttmann described how the beginning of our modern obsession with quantification and the passion for precise measurements and statistical permutations in sports are related to the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century and the popularisation of mathematical discoveries during the eighteenth century. Guttmann therefore proposed that modern sport is intimately related to the instrumental attitude of modern science: “The emergence of modern sports represents the slow development of an empirical, experimental, mathematical Weltanschauung” (Guttmann 2000, 256). It is also well known how he narrowed the implications of this worldview down to seven distinguishing and interrelated characteristics of the social and historical phenomenon of modern sport: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialisation of roles, rationalisation, bureaucratic organisation, quantification and the quest for records (Guttmann 1978, 15–55). Homo mensor reigns in this domain, as Guttmann noticed, and “modern sports are characterized by the almost inevitable tendency to transform every athletic feat into one that can be quantified and measured” (ibid., 47, his emphasis).

Within the philosophy of sport these instrumental aspects of modern sport have been widely discussed in relation to topics such as ethics, doping, performance enhancement, health, embodiment, fair play and many others. Especially Loland (2000; 2001; 2009) has been influential in his critique of these instrumental norms and values that dominate modern sports and form a social logic that aims for a linear quantifiable progress within this domain: “Through the quest for standardisation and objectivity, scientific and technological know-how is applied to control the uncontrollable, to eliminate chance, and to measure performance improvement in an increasingly more accurate way” (Loland 2000, 42). Whilst it is only natural to find this kind of rationality in the scientific study of sport within physiology and biomechanics, there can be reasons to be concerned when it spreads to other areas. As Hoberman (1988; 1992) has argued at length, this ‘technological image of man’ that governs modern high-performance sport can degenerate into an unsustainable psycho-engineering of athletes as it enters the field of modern sport psychology, which he regards as “the ultimate sport technology” (Hoberman 1988, 206). He calls it a “manipulative psychology” and a form of “psycho-doping” because of its primary task, which is to “get the last reserves out of you” (ibid.). In this way the modelling of mental processes to shape and strengthen the (equip-)mentality of athletes conforms with the instrumental rationality and as Hoberman sums up his reflections on the matter:

sport science treats the human organism as though it were a machine, or as though it ought to be a machine. This technologized human organism comprises both mind and body, for which there are distinct sets of strategies. The implicit demand of these strategies, in my view, is a streamlined and decomplexified image of the human being.

(Ibid., 206–7)

Today, over 20 years after he proposed this sombre diagnosis, it can be hard to find evidence that he was not right. Nesti (2004; 2007; 2011) has for example insistently pointed to how sports science and especially areas of sports psychology is still characterised by research methods derived from natural science. This makes it possible to consider both performance and development as a kind of hard science, seeking causal and measurable relations between intervention and effect. The result is that scientific approaches to elite sport within this field of research are to a still larger extent occupied with quantification, measurement, monitoring, objectification, statistical permutation, etc. With few exceptions this is also reflected in recent anthologies that present a range of the most common approaches to performance and development in contemporary sports science (Baker et al. 2012; McGarry et al. 2013; Williams 2013). Here the instrumental rationality can be found not just in the chapters concerning physiology and biomechanics, but also in other approaches that deal with the environmental factors, game analysis, skill-acquisition, game intelligence, mental skills, etc. Apart from the characteristics highlighted by Nesti above these reveal an orientation towards seeking mechanistic principles, objective variables, profiles and standards that can explain performance and development. The recent special issue of Talent Development and Excellence (Phillipson and Vialle 2013) on new directions in the study of talent and creativity, some of which concern development in sport, is another good example of how this rationality can lead to an eagerness for objectifying the process through systems and models. The issue contain no less than 18 models, all of which are well suited for empirical test of the specific variable they have found it relevant to focus on.

Is this a problem? Could it not be argued that in the realm of elite sport, where all that counts is winning, every non-instrumental approach is merely an unwanted diversion? Here instrumental rationality, with its focus on the most efficient means to achieve a specific end, is obviously a useful approach. But from an existential perspective it also holds a range of dangers and I think it is worth questioning how the apparent hegemony of this kind of rationality affects the experience of young athletes in sport. To do this it can initially be useful to look towards how Heidegger, one of the main philosophical critics of instrumental rationality, attempted to reveal the essence of modern technology in his essay on The Question Concerning Technology. His concern was not so much directed at the technology or technique understood as a means to an end or as productive human activity, which in sport could be the skills involved in kicking, throwing, jumping, etc. Technological inventions play a big role in talent development, where sport technology is to a still larger extent a means for enhancing performance and refining methods for optimising training. This is rather obvious and technology can hold a danger of objectifying the performance and development of athletes. But it is not only these appearances of technology we should look for if we want to understand the true meaning of technological and instrumental rationality in the domain. In fact Heidegger argued that if we conceive of technology as the tools, machines and other kinds of ‘instrumentum’, we may miss out on the essence of technology. He therefore pursued the essence of technique by taking a step back from these phenomena to describe how the original meaning of technique (techne) was not just manufacturing or a mere means to an end. It was related to a process of bringing-forth (poiesis). So technique was from the beginning intimately related to art. Both describe a way of revealing (Entbergen). But what has this got to do with the essence of technology? Heidegger’s short answer to this is: everything. The reason for this is that it allows to see technology as a more general approach to reality, a way of revealing. The Greek word for revealing was aletheia, which translates into ‘truth’ and Heidegger uses this connection to argue that techne, more than a particular craft, a special use of instruments or means of production, is a way of knowing. It is a way of ascribing meaning to the appearances and therefore reflects a general worldview that can, as mentioned, become a natural attitude.

This throws a different light on the general understanding of instrumental rationality because the problem is, according to Heidegger, that the kind of revealing related to technology has changed with modern technology. He clarifies this change by noticing that modern technology is also a revealing, but: “the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern]” (Heidegger 1977, 14). Instead of a bringing-forth, techne has become a ‘challenging-forth’ and to Heidegger this describes the worldview of modern technology and this is what he calls enframing (Gestell). He defines this in the following way:

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.

(Ibid., 20)

Enframing describes a way of revealing reality (e.g. nature and human beings) as a standing-reserve (Bestand) that can be ordered (Bestellt) and where this challenges (Herausfordert) both the soil of the field and the resources of humans because this “expediting [Fördern] is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense” (ibid., 15). What was before a tract of land, is now revealed as for example a coal mining district and in our age of ‘human resource’ it is not hard to see how this way of revealing has found its way into human relations as well. Modern sport is of course no exception and here the exploitation of resources is even more evident as athletes are conceived as resources or reserves available for use. This means that an analysis of the increasingly instrumental approach to athletes and the objectification of their bodies is not sufficient. In this perspective athletes at the same time become a standing reserve that can be ordered. What does this mean for talent development? Once, as Heidegger noticed, to ‘set in order’ meant to take care of and to maintain (ibid., 14–15). This was the job of the peasant cultivating earth. Now the soil is challenged to produce as much as possible because agriculture is ordered by a mechanised food industry. Would this apply to the work of talent developers as well? Heidegger also uses an airliner in the runway as an example. This can surely be regarded as an object, but:

Revealed, it stands on the taxi strip only as standing-reserve, inasmuch as it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation. For this it must be in its whole structure and in every one of its constituent parts, on call for duty, i.e., ready for takeoff.

(Ibid., 17)

If we translate this into for example football I think that this description has some value in sport as well. A football player in the field stands by as a standing-reserve, inasmuch as he or she is ordered to ensure the possibility of participating in winning the game. For this, his or her body must be ‘on call for duty’, i.e. ready for kick-off. Heidegger also describes how man belongs even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve. He uses a forester as an example of the change that has come about with the ‘enframing’ of modern technology. The forester may do the same things as his grandfather did, but today he is ordered to do so by the profit-making lumber industry. In the same sense, whilst they may play the same game as earlier generations did, football players and athletes in general are today ordered by the sport industry. They have a value on the market and on a smaller scale it is a daily aim for players to prove their value in order to be ordered (selected) to play. If you play well enough you are not only selected, you can get ordered to play for the national team or sold to play for a ‘bigger club’ and thereby promote y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Navigating in the landscape
• PART II Moving in the landscape
• Acknowledgements
• Index