What is Skilled Coping?

Transcription

1 Simon Høffding What is Skilled Coping? Experts on Expertise Abstract: The paper uses a phenomenological analysis of interviews with a professional string quartet to critique the notion of skilled coping as used by Hubert Dreyfus. According to Dreyfus, skilled coping is a way of being and acting in which one is immersed in one s actions such that one is not thinking or reflecting. He uses examples from various experts, such a chess-, baseball-, and soccer players, to illustrate this. I argue that his account suffers from a reductive dualism between coping and reflection and further from a lack of clarity. I use my work with the string quartet to illustrate that so-called skilled coping, rather than a distinct phenomenon, is a series of connected mental phenomena that span highly reflective stances as well as trance-like states of absorption. Therefore, I point out that Dreyfus s problematic usage in fact prevents us from appreciating the phenomenological complexity of the absorption of experts. 1. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to investigate and question the notion of skilled coping. The discussion on the nature of skilled coping has re-emerged with the Dreyfus-McDowell debate (Dreyfus, 2007a,b; McDowell, 2007a,b; Schear, 2013), concerning whether reason-giving and conceptual knowledge are essential constituents of consciousness. To strengthen their respective claims, Dreyfus and McDowell make use of examples from various experts, such a chess-, baseball-, and soccer players. The debate focuses on experts because these are Correspondence: Simon Hoffding, Center for Subjectivity Research, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen. simonf@hum.ku.dk Journal of Consciousness Studies, 21, No. 9 10, 2014, pp

2 50 S. HØFFDING taken to exemplify the relation between reflection and smooth bodily coping. From Dreyfus s examples it prima facie seems as if the former impedes the latter, an idea with strong intuitive appeal. It is commonly accepted that overthinking a situation inhibits acting, as also expressed in Balanchine s now classical phrase Don t think dear, just dance. 1 This maxim (Montero, 2010) reduces expert coping to a mindless (Dreyfus, 2013) exclusively bodily activity. Further, the use of experts relative to the maxim informs and pertains to central parts of other debates from (radical) enactivism, embodied cognitive science, and interactionism (Hutto and Myin, 2013; Chemero, 2009; Gallagher, 2005; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Colombetti, in press) to phenomenology (Zahavi, 1999; 2005; Legrand, 2007; Colombetti, 2011), ecological psychology (Rietveld, 2008; 2012), sports psychology (Sutton et al., 2011; Geeves et al., 2013), and flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; 1997). The current paper focuses on Dreyfus, because he, more or less explicitly, is a central stakeholder in all these debates in offering a conceptual framework of skilled coping. But what precisely is skilled coping? I use interviews with the expert musicians of The Danish String Quartet (DSQ) to give a preliminary answer as well as to expand on, and critique, Dreyfus s position. I will structure the remainder of the paper into three parts. Firstly, I assess Dreyfus s account as three claims on (1) reflection, or detached observation, (2) skilled coping, and (3) their relation. Even though Dreyfus s position contains potent descriptions, I find it lacking in precision and ability to portray the nuances of authentic expert experience. In the next part, I turn to the DSQ and present four different prevalent intentional stances involved in musical performance. I use these four intentional stances in the final part to argue that Dreyfus either must abandon his notion of skilled coping as homogeneous or concede that it only applies to a very limited and extremely rare type of expert experience with little bearing on experts typical phenomenology as experts. The latter not being a convincing option, I conclude that the idea of skilled coping as a homogeneous concept in fact blinds us from appreciating the heterogeneous mental life inherent to expertise, not as theorized, but as lived. [1] See Montero s interesting commentpertaining to this statement (Montero, 2013, p. 316).

3 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? Dreyfus on Skilled Coping Over his career, Hubert Dreyfus has worked out an account of perception, practical knowledge, and our being-in-the-world that challenges computationally inspired accounts. In brief, the latter accounts claim that perception and practical knowledge are fundamentally conceptual and dyadic with a subject standing over and against a number of discrete objects constituting the world. In contradistinction, Dreyfus, drawing on traditional phenomenologists, especially Heidegger, as well as the psychologist J.J. Gibson, develops the idea of skilled coping. When coping skilfully, our world is not perceived as consisting of discrete objects. Rather, we perceive affordances and invitations to act, we are pulled or solicited to certain ways of acting. For example, in order to open and go through a door, I do not perceive the shape and size of the doorknob. Rather, the door affords opening and walking through and, already before reaching it, my hand responds to its solicitation by shaping up to match the knob without me being aware of its doing so. In the following, I will go into greater depth to define skilled coping, its relation to expertise, as well as two possible readings of Dreyfus s position Coping and Reason-Giving The central disagreement in the Dreyfus-McDowell debate is on whether conceptuality and reason-giving are necessary for practical knowledge. McDowell thinks yes and Dreyfus no. Dreyfus deploys cases of expert athletes, chess-players, and fighter-pilots to distil his position on skilled coping: McDowell and Heidegger both agree with Aristotle that practical wisdom is a kind of expertise acquired as second nature. So I suggest that to decide who is right as to whether skilled perception and action must be permeated by conceptual rationality we turn to the phenomena and take a look at how one becomes an expert in any domain, and at what capacities an expert thereby acquires. (Dreyfus, 2005, p. 52) In terms of phenomenological methodology, this passage is of importance. Dreyfus here wants to look at experts as a means such that he can decide on a theoretical issue, the nature of practical knowledge the end. The question of conceptual rationality thus becomes the theoretical framework imposed on the phenomena he sets out to explore, disregarding the possibility that the actual phenomenology of expertise might offer him other and more nuanced options. In my own investigation of the phenomenology of expert musicians I have not found the issue of reason-giving to be of special importance:

4 52 S. HØFFDING undertaking a phenomenological investigation of expert musicianship, I could ask a musician, why are you playing this note in this exact way? or what is the reason you played more loudly in this passage?. Most likely, I would be met with an answer to the effect of well I don t know, that is what is written in the score, I guess I just felt like playing it like that, or that is how we agreed to do it. In other words, asking musicians to retroactively ascribe reasons to their actions does not yield much insight into their phenomenology. I am not arguing for or against reason-giving in practical wisdom. Rather, I contend that the question of reason-giving is unimportant or misapplied if one wants to understand the phenomenology of expertise. If this is so, then Dreyfus s wish to argue for non-conceptual coping skews his account and renders it unnecessarily dualistic. Let me elaborate on this dualism Dreyfus s Dualism Dreyfus claims that our fundamental being-in-the-world consists in a non-conceptual coping. He also acknowledges the importance of conceptually mediated rule-following, for instance when learning a new skill. The dualism derives from his account of the relation between skilled coping and rule-following: We should therefore be suspicious of the cognitivist assumption that as we become experts our rules become unconscious. The actual phenomenon suggests that to become experts we must switch from detached rule-following to a more involved and situation-specific way of coping. (Dreyfus, 2005, p. 52, my italics) We normally cope skilfully in our environment. When we meet unforeseen obstacles, our coping breaks down as we switch to a reflective, conceptual, rule-following strategy. Coping, as bodyschematic (Merleau-Ponty, 2004; Gallagher, 2005), continues in the background (Dreyfus, 2007a, p. 354), but ultimately the primary awareness must be either coping or rule-following. They are opposed, but hopefully supplementary (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 21), which I take to mean that both are needed in an exhaustive account of the mind. Fleshing out this dualism further, Dreyfus s position can be refined into three claims: 1) Rationality is an observation-like, reflective, rule-following, distanced intentionality structured with a subject, objects, and conceptual content. 2) Coping is a distanceless, direct responsiveness to solicitations, not based on rule-following.

5 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 53 3) Rationality and coping are mutually exclusive, the former inhibiting the latter Rationality In his 2013 essay, Dreyfus names rationality a detached observer (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 34). You intermittently become a detached observer and step back from the world, in which you can no longer act taking a free, distanced orientation (Dreyfus, 2007a, p. 354). The gap from one kind of consciousness to the other is almost unbridgeable, comparable to the hiker, who gets lost, and tries to find his way not through his senses and intuitions, but through the abrupt mediation of a map. He now relates to a different world or a representation of the world using logical inference, rule-following, critical reflection, as well as distancing memory and anticipation. This world of reflection is determinate, unified, namable, and thinkable (Dreyfus, 2007a, p. 360). 2 Looking closer at Dreyfus s work, one can identify at least two versions of coping. The first, and weaker, is the merely non-conceptual. The second, and stronger, is both non-conceptual and mindless a. Coping: The weaker claim In the work before the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, Dreyfus s claims make for the weaker reading: Thus, the pure perceiving of the chess master has a kind of intentional content; it just isn t conceptual content. A bare Given and the thinkable are not our only alternatives. We must accept the possibility that our ground-level coping opens up the world by opening us to a meaningful Given a Given that is nonconceptual but not bare. (Dreyfus, 2005, p. 55) The two primary constituents of the weaker reading are intentional content and a Given. This means that our perceiving, qua intentional content, is about something and in being open to a Given has objects, or at least something object-like. Having something object-like again points back to a perceiving subject which gives us an account that, although stressing affordances and motor-intentionality, [2] Thinking of the work done in the phenomenological tradition on the nature of reflection, lumping it together with observation seems odd. Further, in the phenomenological tradition, one can find work on the nature of reflection that resists Dreyfus s reductive account: if one looks to Eugen Fink, there is a description of reflection, not as self-reifying, but as intensifying pre-reflective self-awareness (Fink, 1992, pp , 128). In Sartre we find the notion of pure reflection (Sartre, 1991, p. 155) which imbues ordinary reflection with extraordinary almost omniscient qualities. Why not recognize that reflection can be much more and can be conceived much more flexibly than as a mere detached observer? (See e.g. Zahavi, 1999, Chapter 10; 2013; Merleau-Ponty, 2004, p. xv.)

6 54 S. HØFFDING structurally is not all that different from a classical, conceptual account. Still, coping is non-reflective and non-conceptual b. Coping: The stronger claim As Dreyfus s debate with McDowell advances, so does the radicalness of his position. He now intends to show that mindedness is the enemy of embodied coping (Dreyfus, 2007a, p. 353) and develops an account that seemingly dispenses with all notions of content, objects, and even the subject: There is no place in the phenomenon of fully absorbed coping for intentional content. (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 28) While coping, one is mindless (Dreyfus, 2007a, p. 353): in responding to solicitations they aren t figuring for a subject as features of the world. When one is bodily absorbed in responding to solicitations there is no thinking subject and there are no features to be thought (ibid., p. 358). But does a mindless experience with no thinking subject, no content, and no objects even qualify as an experience? Does Dreyfus literally mean mindless as in unconscious? Likening coping to an aeroplane pilot staying on course, Dreyfus does claim that there is no experience at all (ibid.), and mentioning Olympic swimmers, he speaks of unconscious coping, the swimmer on auto-pilot, like a sleepwalker (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 38, n. 43). In these statements, Dreyfus seems to claim that there is a kind of coping which is not an experience at all. Hence, such non-experiential events are beyond the limits of a phenomenological method, which is solely concerned with conscious experience. 3 From his writings, however, it is not clear whether mindless coping is exceptional, whether it only is available to experts, and how it relates to weaker cases of coping. I will return to these ambiguities, but for now I ll treat the third claim Mutual exclusion We have already been told that there is no place for mindfulness in absorbed coping. Dreyfus s basic intuition here is that if we reflect on, or monitor, our coping on the go, we degrade its smooth operation: even awareness that things are going well [is] sufficient to break the flow and so produce inferior performance (Dreyfus, 2007b, p. 377, n. 5). From experience, most of us know that some kinds of sustained contemplation can indeed halt our walking and shift our normally world-involving attention. But need it be that all reflection or detached observation necessarily degrades coping? Barbara Montero [3] See also Zahavi (2013).

7 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 55 has provided a clear empirical case that shows Dreyfus to be mistaken in this regard: here, a classical guitarist finding himself stuck at a certain level of play was only able to improve by directing his attention to his movements (Montero, 2010, p. 112). 4 Montero s demonstration, however, has not affected Dreyfus s position. This is due to a certain impenetrability to counterarguments generated in the constellation of his three claims: if it involves reflection and self-awareness, then it is not expert coping Experts and Non-experts It is now apt to explore how ordinary coping and expert coping are related. Is opening and passing through a door phenomenologically the same as a grand-master moving pawns and kings? We should remember that Dreyfus s primary interest in experts derives from his wish to say something about coping and practical wisdom in general. To specify, although most of us are not grand-masters or fighterpilots, we nevertheless are experts in many ordinary affairs, from dishwashing to keyboard typing. The experts in question serve to magnify the nature of this ordinary coping. Dreyfus does not clearly distinguish the different kinds of coping. On one hand: absorbed coping is not just another name for involved coping (Dreyfus, 2007b, p. 373, my italics); and on the other: A Dasein can be fully absorbed in being a soccer mom, a devoted teacher, a victim of discrimination (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 30, my italics). If a soccer mom qua soccer mom can be fully absorbed, it follows that absorption is not relative to expertise, at least understood in a professional sense. Further, in between absorbed coping and involved coping we find terms such as immersed action in which an ego is involved (Dreyfus, 2007b, p. 374), coping at its best (ibid.), fully absorbed coping (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 28), total absorption (ibid.), and finally as mentioned unconscious coping in which the expert is at his best (ibid., p. 30). Two conclusions can be drawn from the above. Firstly, it seems that on Dreyfus s account, when it comes to the absorption in coping, we should not discriminate between professional experts such as athletes and pilots and everyday experts such as soccer moms. Secondly, it is unclear how many kinds of absorption there are, how they relate, and how they are distinguishable. Before moving on to my own investigations, let me sum up this part of the paper: with the language of affordances and coping, Dreyfus has availed an alternative and powerful account of perception and [4] See also Montero and Evans (2011)

8 56 S. HØFFDING expertise. However, on one hand Dreyfus s picture is dualistic and rigid: even on the weaker account it is impossible for the absorbed coper to be reflectively and conceptually aware of himself and his surroundings. On the other hand, Dreyfus s account is general and imprecise because it is impossible to determine what the different kinds of coping entail on the experiential level and how they relate. Coming out of a debate on reason-giving, Dreyfus does not provide a clear and nuanced understanding of skilled coping. The following, then, can be seen as an attempt to expand and clarify the phenomenology of skilled coping as seen in expert musicians. 3. A Taxonomy of Expertise Dreyfus primarily relies on anecdotes from experts to construct his account. In contrast, I chose to base my phenomenological analyses on interviews. Going from context-relative, qualitative interviews to more universal phenomenological claims, i.e. from individual complex and often contradictory human experience to formal structures of subjectivity, is a methodological minefield. A justification of the transposition of insights from one type of enquiry to the other requires an entire paper in itself. The aim of this paper is different, and instead of proposing even a brief sketch of specific methodological challenges and their resolution, for the time being I will simply presuppose that my interview-obtained data are applicable to the domain of phenomenological philosophy. For about two years, I have been following the DSQ through a number of concerts and tours during which I have conducted in-depth interviews with each of the members concerning their experience of playing their instrument. From these interviews, I have collected data that directly pertain to Dreyfus s claims about skilled coping. My strategy from here is, based on direct quotations from the DSQ, to describe four more or less distinct intentional stances, all of which could be considered instances of skilled coping. I bring out their differences and similarities in order to show the following: since they significantly differ and since they equally qualify as acts of skilled coping, it follows that the very term skilled coping is too general to be of value: the unified term thus prevents, rather than furthers, any real understanding of the phenomenon in question. Interviewing the DSQ reveals significant differences in perception of how one should focus (or not focus) while playing, how one should practise and how significant immersion and concentration are to the overall effort. In other words, there is little consensus on even the

9 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 57 most basic aspects of music and musicianship. Thorough analysis, however, reveals certain general patterns in the musical mind. Below, I categorize some of these into four distinct kinds of musical intentionality. Such distinct boxes do not do justice to the complexity of the mentality in question and they should therefore be understood as overlapping and as a matter of degree rather than of determinate type. Further, this particular diagram is one of many possible and used primarily as a heuristic to facilitate at least a superficial understanding of expert, musical intentionality. 2 Absent-minded playing Figure 1. Expert musicians intentionality in four categories Standard playing 1 Standard playing 4 Absorbed playing 4a Playing under stress/fighting to get back Trance/lack of self-awareness Ex-stasis/distance/ spectatorial awareness Standard playing is a very wide concept covering the kind of mentality in which the DSQ-members most often find themselves. They do not give much explicit expression to its nature, exactly for that reason. It can easily oscillate between bored, another-day-at-the-job, absent-minded playing, and more concentrated, absorbed playing. Frederik Ø, 6 one of the two violinists, puts it in the following words: 4b 3 [5] Besides these basic categories, one can make a more elaborate version describing how musicians in various ways move between these and under what circumstances. This is unfortunately beyond the scope of the present paper. [6] I add Ø, the first letter of the violinist Frederik s surname, to his name to help distinguish him from Fredrik, who is the cellist.

10 58 S. HØFFDING But you can perhaps say that what we re striving for at a technical level, that is to be that it is coming by itself and that you are not too aware of it, that you do not spend any energy on it, that you just have this that it is coming by itself, but that you are aware of it maintaining itself, that there is this little control Frederik Ø is here giving voice to the kind of agency that marks standard playing. All four DSQ-members mention something along the lines of playing as you want to indicating a correspondence between expectation and execution of the musical phrase or piece. When this match exists, attention can be directed somewhere else than on the execution, which is why one rarely comes across detailed expressions of the actual standard playing: There were no bumps on that road It was very smooth. I could do as I wished to. Attention is then directed away from technical, sensorimotor aspects of the performance (besides, in Frederik Ø s case, this little control ) and can go to all sorts of places: looking at the audience, looking at the score, looking at the other DSQ-members, listening, enjoying, imagining, performing mental tricks to enhance musical expression, or being absentminded. To speak more directly to Dreyfus s thesis, this attention can both be of what would match his understanding of affordances, such as suddenly being pulled into a new musical idea, but it certainly can also be of a much more reflective nature: Frederik Ø, while playing, can imagine how he might want to play an occurrent passage in a different fashion later on, and Rune, the other violinist, lays claim to paradigmatic cases of reflective self-awareness, asking himself, while performing, how is my current facial expression?, what am I conveying right now?, or how is my page-turning? without this interfering with his level of musical expression. 7 In conclusion, standard playing can be expressed as the default mode of performing, when the music, circumstances, or performance are not overly challenging, 8 when the musicians are not overly distracted or absent-minded, or when they are not deeply concentrated on or absorbed into the task at hand. [7] See also Michael, Overgaard and Christensen (2013) and Christensen et al. (2013) for an account of the integration of complex cognition with basic embodied responses. [8] See Csikszentmihalyi (1997, p. 30) for thoughts on the relation between flow and feeling challenged.

11 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? Absent-minded playing Once in a while, the DSQ-members get distracted or absent-minded. Frederik Ø calls this going to Netto, 9 such that you for some time mentally leave the performance to think about something as trivial as what you might need to shop for later. Asbjørn expresses it as follows: It could be like if you are driving and then have driven or suddenly find yourself someplace else on the road, that you suddenly are 500 metres further down the highway and cannot recollect having driven those 500 metres. 10 Both Frederik Ø and Asbjørn confirm that absentminded playing is just like normal absent-mindedness, as when one cannot remember whether one has locked the front door, where one s keys are placed, etc. While playing, and seemingly without detracting much from the quality of the performance, the mind wanders somewhere else and thus exhibits an intentionality distinctively different from that of standard playing in which one is intentionally directed towards some aspect of the performance. Except for Fredrik, the cellist, the DSQ-members recognize that this mode of awareness is distinctively different from the other absent-mindedness-like experience of absorption and is unlikely to lead to anything of particular experiential or artistic value. 3. Playing under stress/fighting to get back Certain situations can impose a great deal of stress on the musicians, which prevents the kind of effortless execution, already described as standard playing. These are the bumps or obstacles not experienced in normal situations and can take the form of physical or mental disturbances/irritations/pains or derive from a noisy or inattentive audience. Rune, one of the violinists, gives an example: In the Nielsen string quartet it was not a good experience to play this piece of music. You entered a kind of to hell with it -like [mood], which is not very good when you have to play music. It became pure survival and I had these frustrated thoughts in my head, partly because of my own play, partly because I know we can do it better. It is not the kind of result I could have wished for. Far from it actually. And it was such a strange feeling, because I entered and kind of, it is often such that if you don t feel it is going well, then you [9] Netto is a Danish grocery chain store. [10] This example has striking similarity with Armstrong s absent-minded truck driver. See Armstrong (1981).

12 60 S. HØFFDING start thinking about here we are not together, here it is not in tune, such that you begin to look for errors and once on this track, then it is hard for me to make my way back. The intentional stance here is more one of pure survival, of trying to make one s way back to standard playing, often leading to an overly technical focus or a reflective attention to specific body-parts aching, functioning improperly, or to aspects of the performance not working optimally. There is a mismatch between expectation and execution preventing the freedom experienced in standard playing from unfolding. While playing under stress often leads to a more technical and reflective attention, it need not always be so. In some instances, pure survival should be taken in a much more literal sense. Asbjørn describes it as: fight or flight Like if you are running for your life. This mind-state cannot be characterized as reflective, but rather as just barely keeping up without missing the notes, yet nevertheless coping, managing to perform without mistakes. Even if it is unpleasant or a state of panic it is still coping. Another example occurred at a particular performance of Beethoven string quartet no. 15 A minor, 3 rd movement, which is a very long (easily 15 minutes) and slow movement, incredibly fragile and requiring a strong sustained concentration on the part of the musicians and audience: a member of the audience sitting just behind the two violins wanted to leave due to coughing, but instead fell flat and very loudly on the church floor, causing genuine shock in both audience and musicians. The DSQ almost interrupted their performance, but went on, now with the daunting task of rebuilding the sense of concentration in the room. Here is an extract of Fredrik s experience of the accident: [Fredrik] Yes, I got a shock. I did, and I, and I, like you say, was pulled out of the experience. And actually had a hard time coming back in again. [Interviewer] OK, can you try to describe how it was difficult to get back in again? [Fredrik] The problem was the focus disappeared to something outside of our quartet-community. And I clearly remember that I was paying attention to all kinds of sounds and things that happened and reactions in the audience at the time. And I somehow had some of my focus removed from our quartet-play to something out there in the hall and it was kind of difficult to turn the gaze back inside myself and come back But the concentration simply disappeared, not

13 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 61 just from us, but from the audience and it is evident that there you also have quite a task when the audience is no longer directing focus on us, then it also becomes difficult for us to get it [back]. In that case, we have to seize it and that is something entirely different. The three other DSQ-members express a similar experience of the event. Even so, after a few seconds of musical confusion, the playing continued seamlessly. In my opinion, the technical musical output was not much different from an instance of standard playing, even if the DSQ-members own experiences were of a radically different nature. As Fredrik expresses, they were intensively focusing on trying to get back to standard playing, or even to a more immersed state from whence they seemed to come prior to the accident. They were forcefully concentrating, yet knowing the futility of the effort as absorption is not something one can enter forcefully or at will: you can try to bring yourself in the right circumstances, mood, and concentration, but there is an inherent kind of passivity in absorption, meaning that you have to let it come by itself, which points back to Frederik Ø s statement about standard playing. There are many kinds of stressors that can cause the state of mind in question. The above-mentioned is quite unusual. It is instructive, however, as it is clearly different from both standard playing and absent-minded playing. Being an amateur musician and having known the DSQ for over ten years, the past two with sustained and intense observations, I find myself unable to detect whether a particular performance instantiates standard playing or playing under unusual stress, although I certainly could infer it in the above-mentioned case. One may have an impression of a particular performance being of higher or lower quality, but this is by no means necessarily connected to the musicians being under stress. It might be that an expert musician knowing the DSQ intimately could detect a difference between stressful and standard playing, but on the other hand, the musicians are performers trained to play their best no matter the circumstances. Alternatively, one might argue that coping is not really a question of a physical performance, but rather concerns a specific subjective quality of consciousness. The present paper, however, is rejecting this proposal and arguing that coping cannot be reduced to a single mental state but rather shows up in different types of awareness. What I will mention later under absorbed playing might indeed possess such a distinguishing subjective quality, but, as I shall show in the conclusion, it would be problematic

14 62 S. HØFFDING to reduce all forms of coping to just this rare kind of experience. Since performance is not seemingly degraded or enhanced relative to the three kinds of playing mentioned so far, stressful performance included, it is reasonable to claim that all three are instances of skilled coping. 4. Absorbed playing Like the other kinds of playing that shade off into one another, absorbed playing occurs on a continuum. But most musicians I have interviewed recollect one, or a very few, particular instances of very deep absorption. Most can recall the exact time and place and the deep absorption is of great significance to them on a personal level. Although the recollection of the existence of the experience is clear, the accompanying expression of its nature is quite to the contrary. Phenomenologically, a description of absorbed playing is challenging, because much of the subject object structuring intentionality seems to be changed or blurred in accord with Dreyfus s claims. There are only vague contours of intentional objects sometimes to the extent that the experience completely blurs, also described as a total lack of awareness, a blackout, a trance, or even that it wasn t the musician himself who played (Bastian, 1987). Examining this experience in some depth, however, I have also come across another quality of quasi-ecstatic self-observation (4b in the diagram). I shall briefly sketch these two: 4A. Lack of self-awareness/trance The claim to a loss of self-awareness can be found in all kinds of artistic experiences (e.g. Bastian, 1987; Meinertz, 2008). To a phenomenologist, this experience is particularly interesting, because losing self-awareness, qua the minimal self as an essential feature of consciousness (see Zahavi, 2005; 2011a), would entail unconsciousness and clearly a performing musician is not unconscious. Here follows an excerpt with Fredrik on his experience of disappearing : [Fredrik] The deeper you are in, the less you observe the world around you and I had this especially powerful experience where I completely disappeared. I remember that it was an incredibly pleasant feeling in the body. And it was incredibly strange to come back and at that point I spent a few seconds to realize where I had been. I had been

15 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 63 completely gone and with no possibility of observing It was this intense euphoric joy. 11 [Interviewer] OK, but if you are certain of having played, you cannot have been completely gone, so you must have known that you were playing, or? [Fredrik] Weeell in this case I cannot completely answer you. You can say that it was easy for me to figure out that I had played at the time I was finished. [Interviewer] But how can it be that it was easy for you to figure out? [Fredrik] Well because there was still, you can hear a bit of resonance in the room and you kind of feel Wow, now I have been playing. [Interviewer] Neither can you remember what you were playing? [Fredrik] Yes I can. Because I know that I was practising Bach 5 th suite. And that is quite long. There is the overture and the fugue that together take 6 7 minutes. So I have probably been starting it. [Interviewer] You can remember starting it? [Fredrik] Yes. And the in the course of, I have been playing and playing, and then in the course of the 6 7 minutes, I have just disappeared somewhere. From Fredrik s description, it seems that his primary mode of recollective access to the absorbed experience is a kind of retroactive inference. 12 Of the actual experience, all he can remember is that there was a pleasant bodily sensation. He remembers beginning, and once there were no more notes in the piece, it seems as if he woke up. I cannot go further into a phenomenological interpretation of the experience, but for present purposes note that, prima facie, this experience fits Dreyfus s idea of absorbed coping without subjects and objects. Here, I interject that although Fredrik mentions often experiencing deep absorption, he has only once (having played for no less than 25 [11] Fredrik is inconsistent in that being completely gone or completely disappeared is incompatible with a powerful experience or an incredibly pleasant feeling. As a minimum it seems acceptable to claim that aspects of his experience were so altered that he was unable to recognize himself as being the subject of it in a conventional sense. [12] Dreyfus mentions the same, see Dreyfus (2005, p. 54).

16 64 S. HØFFDING years) experienced this paradigmatic occurrence that we could call total absorption. Consequently, the question to Dreyfus is whether he wants to restrict absorbed coping to such rare occurrences. Again, parallel to the three other modes of playing, there are no clear indications that this kind of absorption either increases or detracts from the overall aesthetic quality of the output. Many musicians, Asbjørn as a case in point, 13 believe in a correspondence between depth of absorption and aesthetic expression, but I would not know how to qualify or disqualify this belief, which appeals to aesthetic judgment. 4B. Ex-stasis/distance/spectatorial awareness As can be seen from the above, very deep absorption is difficult to account for phenomenologically. It certainly does not make it simpler that the experience on occasions also is expressed in terms seemingly contrary to the idea of a lack of self-awareness. Here follows two descriptions from Asbjørn (whose set expression for deep absorption is being in the zone ) and Frederik Ø respectively: You are both less conscious and a lot more conscious I think. Because I still think that if you re in the zone, then I know how I m sitting on the chair, I know if my knees are locked, I know if I am flexing my thigh muscle, I know if my shoulders are lifted, I know if my eyes are strained, I know who is sitting on the first row, I know more or less what they are doing, but it is somewhat more, like disinterested, neutrally registering, I am not like inside, I am not kind of a part of the set-up, I am just looking at it, while I m in the zone. But if I m not in the zone, I become a co-player, I become a part of the whole thing. And cannot look at it like a bird over the waters. I become conscious of things because I am not part of them to the same extent 14 It is not a primitive control. It is a kind of very deep control. Ur-control. You really feel like a warlord deploying the troops and control it in a way and it gives a kick that you are just a kind of pure superiority and pure control. [13] Even more interesting: Frederik Ø actively shuns very deep absorption because he thinks it distorts the sound in being overly emotional. The relation between absorption and intensity of emotion is another interesting question to pursue. [14] The transcription here is ambiguous and should be understood as follows: In the zone, Asbjørn becomes conscious of things as standing out to him, open to disinterested, neutral registration. When not in the zone, he is more immersed a part of the set-up or a part of the whole thing. This seems to go against Dreyfus s basic idea of absorbed coping as distanceless.

17 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 65 Asbjørn s sense of ex-static, disinterested, observation and selfobservation and the sense of clear and pure superior control that ensues is interesting. Phenomenally, it is in strong contradistinction to Fredrik s sense of total absorption. Frederik Ø, who otherwise actively shuns experiences of deep absorption, has nevertheless had the following experience while playing the slow 3 rd movement of Beethoven s string quartet no. 15 A minor: [Frederik Ø] So it is exactly both being present and not being present simultaneously, such that you ooor it is hard to explain it is kind of the feeling that the possibilities, but you don t take heed of each possibility it is like the feeling of looking over a large landscape and knowing that this landscape consists of insects and branches and roots and all kinds of things building up the whole thing, but you cannot see the individual parts, you just know that all of it contributes to the being and that you actually could affect the little things, but you don t want to because you want everything to be there and contribute. But there are nevertheless somehow two tracks running. An awareness of what you are doing and an awareness of what you would like or what you could do, or can do it a little or. [Interviewer] But how about what you describe with Beethoven, are you still in those two levels, or is it entirely different, or? [Frederik Ø] My sense is that things get somewhat dissolved once you get that far out. It is like, it becomes completely open, it goes mostly towards that one, in which you have no sense of what is happening, where it is only the other track [of what you could do]. But there has to be, something mechanical is happening after all, you are moving your fingers after all, so there must be some part of the head which is there. But the awareness of it disappears. Frederik Ø shared with Asbjørn the exact contradiction that you are both more conscious / present and less conscious / not present at the same time, pointing to a fundamental inability to understand and adequately express the nature of this experience. Further, they share the sense of non-involvement and distance ( disinterested, neutral registering / bird over the water / looking over a landscape you don t

18 66 S. HØFFDING want to interfere with ), 15 a freedom of not being caught up with details, and a future-oriented, open expectation ( warlord deploying troops / only awareness of the track yielding a sense of possibility ). This kind of ex-stasis challenges Dreyfus s thesis that absorption is phenomenally distanceless. Absorbed coping is clearly more complex than a mere dismantling of subject and object structures (if such is even possible). Rather, subtle changes in awareness are taking place that can be experienced both as a loss of and a heightened sense of being a subject. The confluence of the absorbed and the ecstatic is fascinating, but deserves a paper in itself. What is of importance is to dismantle the speculation that would reduce absorption to a kind of absent-mindedness. Besides Fredrik, who in an interesting way is able to utilize absent-mindedness or daydreaming as a path to absorption, the other DSQ-members believe very clearly that they are able to distinguish the two states. Such distinguishability justifies labelling absorbed playing even if it has two forms a distinct kind of intentionality on a par with the other three. Absorption in the sense of lack of selfawareness (4a) of course is absent-minded in the sense that there seemingly is an absence of mind, which cannot be located in retrospective memory. Absent-minded playing, as in going to Netto (2), however, is not absent in the sense of being nowhere, but in the sense of being absent from the occurrent situation by having gone somewhere else, daydreaming. It may be hard to retrospectively access the content of one s mind at the time, and it indeed can be quite blurry, but it nevertheless is usually possible to trace as having been somewhere else, e.g. in Netto. In other words, the phenomenological distinction between absent-mindedness (2) and absorption (4a) hinges on the respective presence or absence of an intentional object. In 4a the intentional object seems to have blurred to the extent that it no longer has the boundaries we normally associate with an object. 4. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, and Coping Before concluding, it is worth digressing to the well-known idea of flow as developed by Csikszentmihalyi and seeing how it might accommodate Dreyfus s idea and the interview data presented. I am motivated to do this by the potential objection that Csikszentmihalyi s ideas can already account for Dreyfus s notion of skilled coping and reflection, combined with the presented interview data, and hence that [15] See Hurlburt (2011) for a number of highly interesting and similar findings.

19 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 67 I am not presenting anything original. Let me show why this is not the case. To Csikszentmihalyi: The metaphor of flow is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives (1997, p. 29). Flow can be experienced in programming a computer, reading a good book, closing a business deal (ibid.), or having a nice dinner conversation with friends (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. 71), and is loosely defined as being full of experiences that are in harmony with each other (ibid.) or even wider as joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life (ibid., p. xi). On the one hand, there clearly are overlaps between flow and coping; on the other hand, it is difficult to make an expedient comparison, because Csikszentmihalyi as a psychologist uses a different language and has different aims than those presented in this paper. For instance, although Csikszentmihalyi works on both consciousness, the self, and the body (ibid., Chapter 2 and 5), his discussions are understandably often of a more normative and psychologically prescriptive character in so far as he is concerned with Finding Flow (1997, title). 16 More importantly, he does not appear to be concerned with the role of the reflective and the pre-reflective in the flow. Nevertheless, it is worth taking a look at his flow chart. Figure 2. Flowchart from Csikszentmihalyi (1990, p. 74). [16] For instance, Csikszentmihalyi writes: Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals (1990, p. 37). It is quite clear that although words such as consciousness and self occur, the way they can be disrupted, impaired, effective, or weakened points to a more normatively and less transcendentally and formally oriented position than that of phenomenology. Therefore, a substantial amount of analysis of the exact implication of the central terms in both traditions would have to be undertaken before any comprehensive comparison could be made.

20 68 S. HØFFDING As shown above, the relation between perceived challenge and perceived skill is fundamental to the notion of flow. Let us first see how the chart matches Dreyfus s ideas and then see how it accommodates the interview-based taxonomy of absorption. We might identify the diagonal flow line with skilled coping and the upper left triangle, anxiety, with reflection. The lower right triangle boredom could also be subsumed under coping by virtue of not being primarily reflective. As for my own taxonomy, anxiety would prima facie equate to playing under stress (3) and boredom would correspond to absent-minded playing (2). The flow channel would then be standard playing (1) or even absorbed playing (4). This accommodation, however, is too superficial. Coping cannot equate to flow: by virtue of taking place in standard, absent-minded, and stressful playing, coping by implication is taking place in all three categories of the flow chart, perhaps with the exception of an overwhelming anxiety or stress causing the performance to break down altogether. Equating anxiety/stress with reflection is not univocally correct either. One of the descriptions of stressful play is pure survival. As mentioned, this can in rare instances literally mean experiencing a sense of panic, a panic of not being able to keep up, comparable to running for one s life, which is hardly of a reflective nature. 17 When it comes to the relation between a sense of challenge and flow, my taxonomy again is at odds with Csikszentmihalyi s chart: in the example discussed in 4a of lack of self-awareness, Fredrik was alone in a studio playing a movement of a Bach cello-suite. It was not a situation that would be perceived as particularly challenging and nevertheless it gave rise to one of the starkest experiences of absorption. What can be concluded from the above, then, seems to reinforce my general point: when considered somewhat superficially, Dreyfus s ideas combined with my four distinctions fit Csikszentmihalyi s chart rather well. But, once we go into greater detail, it no longer matches up so neatly. Firstly, the notion of coping is much wider than that of flow, because coping goes on both in cases of relative anxiety and in boredom. Secondly, the presented understanding of absorption (4a and 4b) does not fit flow either, on the one hand because it can occur in situations that are seemingly non-challenging, and on the other [17] On the other hand, playing under stress might lead one to think and worry about upcoming difficult passages, in which case it would be of a more reflective nature. Equating anxiety/stress with reflection is not univocally correct because it takes a more detailed analysis to spell out the relation between different kinds of anxiety/stress and different kinds of reflection. See Zahavi (1999, Part I) and Zahavi (2011b) for systematic work on reflection.

21 WHAT IS SKILLED COPING? 69 because absorption is much too rare to fit Csikszentmihalyi s descriptions of having a nice dinner conversation or reading a book. Further, Csikszentmihalyi s description of flow is phenomenologically uniform, while absorption can be both trance-like (4a) and ex-static (4b). Perhaps it could be said that flow is a kind of emotion. Coping, however, is a structure of subjectivity, irreducible to any emotion, that allows for a kind of bodily unfolding; a structure composed of different, but connected, intentional stances. Some of these, then, can give rise to the emotion of flow. 5. Conclusion Now, let us return to the outset and look at Dreyfus s three main claims in the light of the above analysis: 1) Rationality is an observation-like, reflective, rule-following, distanced intentionality structured with a subject, objects, and conceptual content. 2) Coping is a distanceless, direct responsiveness to solicitations, not based on rule-following. 3) Rationality and coping are mutually exclusive, the former inhibiting the latter. To point one: most kinds of coping I have described are not instances of detached observation. However, the ex-static absorption described seems to fit quite well with the idea of detached and distanced observation. The existence of this kind of absorption contradicts Dreyfus s framework in that it includes a kind of detached observation and a clear subject object distinction. For point two, I have presented the rare case of lack of self-awareness (4a) which seemingly fits Dreyfus s strong version of coping. However, I have presented three other distinct kinds of playing or coping (standard, absent-minded, and stressed) and further a kind of deep absorption (ex-static) that is not distanceless and that is structured with intentional objects presented to the subject. With regard to point three, I have provided examples of Frederik Ø and Rune engaging in high-level reflection while playing. I am not denying that there are kinds of reflection that hinder smooth execution, but the general claim that they are mutually exclusive is not true. If reflection degraded expert coping, why would musicians willingly reflect while playing? If Dreyfus is correct here, it would entail that the experts themselves are not able to tell what kind of mental activity improves or degrades their coping.