Skill: A Practical Philosophy

The following is a summary of a book I intend to write. I would be interested in any comments readers might have about what might be included in addition to what is described here.

Skill: A Practical Philosophy

Introduction: James Bond and Me

Friends sometimes compare me to James Bond because of my range of skills (“skillset”). Our skills don’t overlap much, though more than you might think (we both do knife throwing and are extremely suave) because we have different occupations, but the range is impressive in both cases. I think he has a slight edge on me, but then he is a fictional character and I am not. My skills include tennis, table tennis, squash, billiards, kayak surfing, windsurfing, skim boarding, skiing, gymnastics, pole vault, trampoline, discus, football, cricket, skateboarding, mountain biking, bowling, swimming, diving, Frisby, drumming, guitar, harmonica, singing, motorcycling, and the aforementioned knife throwing. This is not to mention my intellectual and writing skills or acting and comedic. But my purpose is not to boast (or not much) but to establish my credentials: I am not your typical clumsy ill-coordinated awkward egghead. I have a lot of physical (and other) skills. I also teach many of these skills and love to talk about them. So, this a good book for me to write. I will be mentioning my forays into skill a good deal in what follows.

Chapter 1: What is a Skill?

Here I will define the concept of a skill, so that we know what we are talking about. A skill is a learned ability to perform an activity, job, or task well through training, practice, and experience. It is primarily physical not mental, though it involves the mental. It takes place largely in the brain, though the muscles are crucial (“muscle memory”). It is not just any old ability.  A skill is always an achievement, generally hard-won, a feather in one’s cap.

Chapter 2: The Scope of Skill

Skill is ubiquitous in human life; almost everything we do involves skill. Work, play, sex, art, music, science, hobbies, socializing, cooking, etc. But not everything we do can be called a skill: digest, excrete, breathe, blink, sit down, fall over, jump up and down, and so on. There is unskilled manual labor and expertly playing the violin for a living. Material objects have no skills, nor do plants. Many animals have some skills, but some do not (e.g., jellyfish), and what they do have is nothing like human skill. We are the skilled species. Economies are built on skill, as are cities and countries. Our culture is saturated in skill. You can’t live a normal human life and have no skills–the more the better, and the better the better. We are always exercising our skills in one way or another.

Chapter 3: The Origin of Skill

Our skills go back a long way into pre-history, when we were still up there in the trees, brachiating away to our heart’s content. When we came down to earth, we had free hands and we made good use of them in developing skills, mainly involving tools. Skills saved us from extinction. They gave us purpose. They made us hunters and fighters. The development of civilization was the development of skills, mainly manual skills. Architecture, art, sculpture, heavy machinery—all require sophisticate skills. Brain, mind, body, and skilled behavior all developed together to generate the human package. Skill paved the way. It was one of evolution’s greatest discoveries. Eventually language skills evolved. Our distinctive intelligence is a skilled intelligence not a form of disembodied logical reason–the skilled deed not just the deed or the thought.

Chapter 4: How to Acquire a Skill

This is what you have been waiting for—skills are wonderful, but how do you get them? Not much expertise is innate, so they must be laboriously learned, and it isn’t instantaneous or easy. It takes work. This is where I excel: I’m willing to put in the work, and I enjoy it. You must be patient, disciplined, methodical—no lazing around boozing. A lot of repetition, analysis, focus, commitment. You can do it! Tennis takes a good three years to get even basically competent, even for the most talented players in the world (they are always going on about how much hard work they put in). I believe them; I do too. I favor an incremental method mixed with a more holistic approach. Break the skill down into smaller units; don’t just bash away at the fast forehand. You can practice in your living room—every day if possible. Every now and then try a full stroke and analyze what happens. Learn from your mistakes. Study and copy. Keep at it. I found that knife throwing took me over a year of daily practice, gradually stepping further back from the target. I can now stick it reliably from ten feet away, left-handed, no spin. I never thought that was even possible. Notice your improvement. The same for learning to sing: practice every day, pay attention to detail, don’t give up. Use your head as well as your lungs.

Chater 5: Physical and Mental Skills

We speak as if there are mental skills as well as bodily skills, but it is not clear whether this is metaphorical or not. Is acquiring knowledge a skilled activity? Not always—it just happens when you open your eyes. There is nothing skillful about dreaming or desiring or fantasizing. Mental abilities are not generally skilled performances. The concept of skill is primarily physical with mental performances so described by analogy. True, all skilled abilities have a mental component—they are sensorimotor—but mental actions and states are not generally skilled. When did you ever practice them or study the techniques involved? They are no more skilled than digestion or blood flow or respiration. You don’t learn these things by diligent practice. I don’t think I’m being particularly skillful when I think about philosophy or how to get somewhere. Skill arises mainly in the hands not in the brain alone. The brain houses the machinery of skill, but it itself has no skills to speak of.

Chapter 6: The Value of Skill

But why does skill matter? What makes it good? Two answers suggest themselves: they are useful for survival or obtaining pleasure, and they are intrinsically valuable—good in themselves. Both these things can be true, and I think both are. For sure, skills can get you the good things in life—money, mates, status, admiration. But they are also valuable because they expand the self (the soul); they add to what you are. They promote what psychologists call self-realization—I would prefer to say self-augmentation. A human being with no skills is a paltry being, an object of pity, not envy. But a skilled individual is viewed as well-rounded, impressive, special. Skill is an occasion for pride. Also, it is enjoyable to exercise a skill—to stick a knife in a target, to hit a tennis ball just so. Skills are like knowledge—the more the merrier. Your life is more meaningful the more skilled you are. I have never regretted acquiring a new skill (I took up skateboarding at 74). Skills are fun! They produce self-esteem as well as admiration by others. Dare I say that they make us more godlike? Jesus had a worthy skill, carpentry, and his heavenly father had every skill known to man or God—omni-skillfulness. They make us whole, divine, splendid (I wax poetic, but that’s how I feel). A skill is definitely something worth possessing.

Chapter 7: Capitalism and Skill

Work has always involved skill–economies run on it. It was Adam Smith who extolled the virtues of the division of skilled labor, and capitalism grew from this economic insight. But there is a downside, which we might call skill-starvation: people are condemned to a single limited skill for the whole of their working life (nail sharpener in Smith’s famous example). They used to have a full set of skills adequate to a human life (to human nature), but under capitalism they become one-trick ponies—bored ponies, stilted and stifled ponies. They fall on a single stool. Thus, capitalism fails to respect a central fact of human nature—the fact of poly-skillfulness. True, we can be more productive economically this way, but we become stunted and dissatisfied. I would view my own life as impoverished (poorer) if I were deprived of my range of skills and allowed to practice only one (say, bowling). As an athlete, I like to do many sports. As a musician and singer, I like to play more than one instrument and sing different kinds of song. Capitalism makes us richer but also poorer (did Karl Marx ever make this argument?). Skill starvation is a real thing. You might die of it, spiritually.

Chapter 8: Philosophy of Skill

How should philosophy respond to the centrality of skill in human life? Two areas stand out: philosophy of action and epistemology. We need to distinguish action generally from skilled action: non-skilled action is subject to simple belief-desire psychology, but skilled action also involves the presence of a skill. I eat an apple because I’m hungry and I believe an apple will relieve my hunger, but I hit a tennis ball in a certain way because I am a skilled player—the skill plays an explanatory role (among other things). So, action theory needs to recognize the importance of skill as a determinant of action, not just belief and desire. I hit the ball that way because I am a skilled player—skills explain skilled action. In regard to epistemology, it is generally accepted that there is knowing-how as well as knowing-that; and the former is another way of talking about skilled action. Thus, there is skilled practical knowledge and unskilled factual knowledge. Indeed, this kind of skilled knowledge is arguably the basic kind—knowing how to throw and catch a ball, say. It precedes and underpins theoretical understanding of ball dynamics. Philosophy of skill needs to be added to the curriculum (Wittgenstein got close to this in his emphasis on rule-following ability).

Chapter 9: Happiness and Skill

Here is my considered opinion: a happy life is a life of skills—many of them. In my case intellectual skills (if we allow these to be skills in good standing), athletic skills, and musical skills. Secret agent 007 apparently prefers skills of fighting, driving fast cars, seduction, and martini drinking (he is a skilled shaker). To each his own. But he has a wide range of them, and they make him what he is. Skilled action contributes to human flourishing more than unskilled action, or no action at all, like eating and lying in bed. Bond clearly gets a kick out of his advanced espionage skills, as I get a kick out of my more pacific skills. It’s about doing, and doing it well, not passively feeling pleasure. It’s about having a license to skill. We need to cultivate our skills. Education must inculcate skills in students as well as facts and theories. It already does so in PE, art class, and music class; but I would like there to be an explicit emphasis on skills—they are good preparation for a normal productive life. There is nothing I like better than seeing a young boy or girl hitting a tennis ball skillfully.

Chapter 10: The End of Skill?

Is there a danger that skill may wither and die? Capitalism has caused some withering, along with opportunities for developing other skills, but AI contains a more potent danger, especially in the form of robots. For it threatens to make human skilled behavior redundant: robot doctors, teachers, and lawyers (not to mention bricklayers) are apt to steal jobs from human agents. Why do we need to learn skills if machines can do all the skilled work? We can just lounge around the place instead of acquiring new skills (loafing not learning). This has already happened to some extent with the industrial revolution, but it may become even more pervasive: robot actors, athletes, comedians, hostesses, masseurs, sex partners—these devices might become more skillful than their human counterparts. Then what? Well, life would lose a lot of spice and zing, because we admire and enjoy skill in others and ourselves. It would all be rather mechanical. My own view is that we will come to accept a kind of dual economy—powered by AI skill and HI skill (“H” for “human”). Maybe we will fulfill our skill needs in leisure not work, in games not labor. The future of skill may be very different from hitherto: in some respects worse, in others better. Maybe we will develop our skills for fun not profit.