Skillful Coping in Everyday Life and in Sport: A Critical Examination of the Views of Heidegger and Dreyfus

Breivik, Gunnar

doi:10.1080/00948705.2007.9714716

Cited by 68 publications

(54 citation statements)

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“…This means for instance that "the expert players were more aware of the positions and movements of the players 'off the ball'." (Williams et al1999:160) 7 The experience of elite alpine skiers reported in Breivik (2007) is in line with Berthoz' views: "The ski champion cannot constantly be checking the state of all his sensory receptors; he mentally simulates the course of his run down the slope, and it is only from time to time, intermittently, that his brain checks to see whether the state of certain sensory receptors is in accordance with its prediction of the angle of the knees, the distance from ski poles, and so on. These groupings of receptors are called configurations, and it appears that the brain checks configurations of specific receptors as it plans movement."…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bodily movement – The fundamental dimensions

Breivik¹

2008

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy

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IntroductionBodily movement has become an interesting topic in recent philosophy, both in analytic and phenomenological versions. Philosophy of mind has taken a fresh interest in the body, due to developments in the intersection between psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and robotics (Hurley 1998;Searle 2004). Similarly philosophers in the phenomenological tradition combine Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty with brain research and empirical psychology (Gallagher 2005;Thompson 2007). 1 In this article I will mainly present and discuss insights from the phenomenological tradition since philosophers in this tradition were the first in modern age to show the bodily background and anchorage of perception, cognition and action. Furthermore they give valuable insight into movement itself and the role it plays in our lives.Human movement has caused problems in the philosophical tradition. Philosophy from Descartes to Kant defined the human being as a mental subject in a material body. For Hume the human subject seemed to be located in an inactive body. The body was merely another object of experience. With such an attitude the subject must state "I am an immobile observer of my body." (Todes 2001:44). Similarly I become a mover of (part of) my body.When I raise my arm I am therefore a user of my body. I raise my arm as I raise a stick. This mechanistic attitude toward the body still lingers on in many studies of motor learning and control. Furthermore the information processing paradigm that dominates in psychology, cognitive science and motor learning very often makes it difficult to understand the background and intentionality of bodily movement, how human bodies are oriented in space and the role of awareness and proprioception in bodily action (Dreyfus 1999;Searle 2004;Moe 2007). In this article I want to focus on just these problems. I will give examples of how recent philosophical insights from both the phenomenological and analytic tradition can contribute to a better understanding of human bodily movement. I will start with Heidegger's contribution to overcoming the subject-object dichotomy and his new understanding of the primacy of the practical involvement with the surrounding world. Heidegger, however, in many ways neglected the role of the human body. Merleau-Ponty took a huge step forward when he focused on the bodily intentionality of our interaction with the world. The next step was taken by Samuel Todes who presented a better understanding of how we are bodily 1 oriented in space. After having seen how the body is oriented outward towards the environment it is proper that the final part of this article goes inward toward the role of bodily awareness and the role of proprioception in human movement. Through this presentation my goal is to contribute to a better understanding of what goes on in sport. I will therefore try to use examples from sport, especially football, to show the relevance of the new insights. Heidegger and the primacy of the practical dealing with the environmentIn his early work H...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And it also fits better with experiences of elite athletes in such different sports as marathon running and downhill skiing. They report distinct episodes of proprioceptive awareness and even conscious attention during races (Breivik 2007). 7…”

Section: Merleau-ponty and The Bodily Being-in-the -Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bodily movement – The fundamental dimensions

Breivik¹

2008

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy

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“…I have already shown (Breivik 2007) how Heidegger is relevant and important for sport. Firstly, the athlete is a being-inthe-world, which means that the activity of the performer must be studied in an environmental context.…”

Section: Theoretical Groundwork -The Risky Bodily Being-in-the-worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The tradition from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the Dreyfus brothers has been used to attack the information-processing model used by cognitivism (Moe 2005), and instead a phenomenological approach to human movement and expertise has been developed (Moe 2007;Breivik 2008;Eriksen 2010). The Dreyfusian approaches have also been criticized and nuanced by several authors (Breivik 2007;Hopsicker 2009;Eriksen 2010). Secondly, phenomenology has been used to address 3 some of the ontological and metaphysical aspects of sports.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dangerous Play With the Elements: Towards a Phenomenology of Risk Sports

Breivik

2011

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy

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This file was dowloaded from the institutional repository Brage NIH -brage.bibsys.no/nih Breivik, G. (2011 Dangerous Play with the Elements -Towards a Phenomenology of Risk SportsGunnar Breivik, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences AbstractThe purpose of the article is to present a phenomenological description of how athletes in specific risk sports explore human interaction with natural elements. Skydivers play with, and surf on, the encountering air while falling towards the ground. The kayakers play on the waves and with the stoppers and currents in the rivers. The climbers are ballerinas of the vertical, using cracks and holds in the cliffs to pull upwards against gravity forces. The theoretical background for the description is found in the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenology of Husserl focused on the theoretical intentionality of the transcendental ego. With Heidegger the human being's concrete and practical interaction with the environing world moved to the foreground. Heidegger's analyses of 'equipmentality' throw important light also on the equipmentality in sports and how we deal with tools and equipment in sports. However in Heidegger's analyses the body resides in the background both as subject and object. The importance of the active body-subject is well documented in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and also Todes. The human being is a bodily 'being-in-the-world' and the body is the active medium through which the world is grasped. The body is however also situated and aligned with the fundamental dimensions of the world, with the vertical gravity and the horizontal action space. In the article I show in a concrete way how we in some sports use fundamental characteristics of the environing world in a mode of playfulness. In these sports human beings play in an extreme way with fundamental elements of nature. The 2 article thus puts phenomenology to a test. It should be able to move from general characteristics to specific features of our bodily human involvement with the environing world.

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“…Likewise, his earlier work (Breivik, 2007) focused on the role of the equipment context, arguing that Heidegger's philosophy allows us to comprehend and analyse 'how Dasein deals on a daily basis with the world and encounters entities in it ' (2007, p. 118). This earlier element of Breivik's work is more central to our own analysis of flow and skilled coping, though we depart from it significantly.…”

Section: Tackles Dreyfus Andmentioning

confidence: 99%