Episode 83 - Exercise Transcript

Ellie: 0:15

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:18

The show where you find out there's a lot of philosophy at work in the activities of our everyday lives.

Ellie: 0:24

I'm Professor Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:26

And I'm Professor David Peña Guzman.Ellie, I wanna begin today with the kind of snarky claim that you only get when you get a French philosopher reflecting on American shallowness.Jean Baudrillard seems weirdly obsessed with the popularity of jogging in the United States in his1986 book America, which by the way,is an amazing coffee table book.It's beautiful, it's square.You can put it on a table, but here's a quote from that amazing coffee table book.Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach swathed in the sounds of his Walkman.Cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy indifferent event to catastrophes,since he expects destruction to come only as the fruit of his own efforts from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless.

Ellie: 1:22

Wow, such poetry to describe what he finds to be this terrifying spectacle of somebody running on the beach.I'm just picturing like a shirtless buff guy.Nowadays it would be AirPods instead of a Walkman, but

David: 1:38

Yeah.

Ellie: 1:39

nonetheless this 1986 example still holds up.David, how do you feel about jogging?Do you agree with Baudrillard that nothing evokes the end of the world more than this?

David: 1:49

So I'll respond.Being clear that I went running today,I ran for about 35 minutes this morning,but I absolutely detest running.I do agree with Baudrillard that there is a kind of solitary indifference that you have to tap into that is almost apocalyptic.Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight into the horizon for no purpose, for no utilitarian reason.And so I detest running because it is an extremely mental and solitary activity, but I have began doing it because I can't play my normal sports.Because of a back injury.So now I am guilty of this Baudrillardian catastrophic turn into my running self.

Ellie: 2:35

So you don't like it because it is solitary and you would prefer to be playing team sports?

David: 2:41

Yes.And I do think it is a kind of self-directed fascism running,

Ellie: 2:46

Mm-hmm.

David: 2:48

because at every moment I just think to myself, I could stop right now.And the only thing that prevents me is the fact that I tap into my super ego and I rule myself into continuing to run.So I do think it's an activity where you have to dominate yourself by abiding to a rule that you give yourself at the beginning.So there's a kind of let's call it a kind of mental.Autobondage that happens when you are a runner, and that's why I really dislike it.But I've begun to, I guess maybe like tap into the pleasure of that weird BDSM.

Ellie: 3:27

Okay, so it's masochistic for you.I wish I could offer an alternative perspective and talk about the pleasures of running, but I have only negative associations with running for myself.I have pretty much avoided running ever since.I no longer had to be in PE class after ninth grade.I was.

David: 3:46

Done with that.

Ellie: 3:47

not the best.Yeah, I like, I feel like PE class was a pretty traumatic experience for me because I was a total nerd and I got picked last for dodgeball all the time and I was like one of the slowest people running the mile.And so as soon as I no longer had to run anymore, I decided to never do it again.And now I pretty much only do it if I have to, like running through an airport or running away from like a dog chasing me.

David: 4:13

I have to sprint a hundred meters to my gate right now.Ready?Set.

Ellie: 4:19

Yeah, and I think actually a lot of the discomfort for me has to do with precisely what you're talking about, this idea that you have to subject yourself to yourself in running.And I'm somebody who already has a strong, we might call it super ego and a strong sense of discipline.And so for me, it's really easy for that to become.A voice that's unhealthy oh, do better.It just brings back all of that shame of being known as a wimp when I was a kid.

David: 4:51

Okay.So it's funny that you mentioned the ninth grade because I had the exact opposite experience of running because when I was young I was pretty athletically literate already, but I also had the build of a long distance runner slender kid without a lot of muscle.You just have that runner's

Ellie: 5:08

build.Just like extremely hot bod.

David: 5:10

No.I was really lanky, actually.Like lanky kid that is also athletic.

Ellie: 5:16

Yeah.Also, sorry, I said you had a hot bod when you were in ninth grade.Canceled.

David: 5:22

Ellie's a creep.It's now official on air.But my high school track and field coach tried really hard to recruit me for the track and field team for three years.I got pressured into taking up running competitively.

Ellie: 5:37

This is just rude, David.

David: 5:39

And it, and I was pretty decent at it, but I hated the fact that when you run, the whole world falls to the wayside.And it's just you confronted by your mental states, by your thoughts, by whatever happens to run through your brain at that particular moment.And I always fled from that.So it was too scary mentally.I don't think I have the rectitude that's needed.I don't have the strength of mind that's needed to be a runner.

Ellie: 6:06

Yeah, but I have heard that kind of level of self-discipline ends up producing a really strong felt sense of freedom.And also that feeling, as you just alluded to David, of things falling away and of cares and concerns moving into the background, which is why some people have told me that running is their form of meditation, which frankly, as a longtime meditator, I don't think is the right metaphor.At least, like running does not have a lot of similarities with the styles of meditation that I do, because I don't practice a form of meditation where the aim is to clear your mind.But I have heard that it has mind clearing benefits.Then again, I wanna just say that I think the way our conversation so far has gone in talking about our own solitude and personal experience of running.Is precisely the problem for Baudrillard, which is that we become indifferent to our surroundings, even to catastrophes, he says, because we become so focused on our own efforts and on seeing the fruits of our own efforts, and so he's picturing this person on a beautiful beach who's just completely ignorant of the surrounding world, and if something bad were to happen, then you know, they would be.Also ignorant of that.And so I think there's a way that Baudrillard is seeing this emphasis on the solitary practice of running for exercise as a metaphor for the American self-centeredness and absence of interest in one's environment.

David: 7:30

Yeah, and the end of the world here I think has two different meanings if we think about this quote from Baudrillard because it has the meaning of the end of the world for the runner who is only concerned with exhausting his energy until depletion.But then there's also the end of the social world because of the solitary nature of the activity of running.So if you imagine a community of old runners where old people do all the time is just run.It seems like there wouldn't be much of a communal life because it would be a bunch of people together in their individual solitude.But I have to say in connection to the benefits of running that you mentioned,Ellie, I have experienced the runner's high, that's what people usually refer to when they talk about the mind clearing.

Ellie: 8:14

Oh yeah,that's the term for it.

David: 8:15

Yes.And I have to say, I can definitely understand the almost addictive quality of that feeling because the first time that it happened to me, and I date a runner, so I have been slowly drinking the juice of the running community and going running more and more.But the first time that I experienced a true runner's high, I felt like it was an out of body experience in the technical sense of the term where I saw my body and felt my body.Moving by itself with absolutely zero sense felt sense of effort on my part.It was as if I was floating through space and time contemplating the world.Almost like a Flaneur, but like a flaneur that's going really fast.

Ellie: 8:59

You are almost convincing me to try it.

David: 9:07

Today we are talking about exercise

Ellie: 9:10

Why do we exercise and exercise so religiously in our modern world?

David: 9:15

What is the relationship between physical,exercise, politics, and democracy?

Ellie: 9:20

and how does our experience of time and embodiment get transformed during bouts of intense physical exercise?David, ever since we had the idea for this episode, I have been so excited to share with you one of my favorite ever essays, which is an essay by Mark Greif called Against Exercise.I think I'm pronouncing it correctly.It's G R E I F, so I guess it would be Griff in German.But I'm gonna say Mark Grief cuz that's how I've heard it.Sorry if that is incorrect.But what I love so much about this essay,which is from the early two thousands and is included in his more recent book Against Everything, is that it is just an incredibly beautifully written ode to what he hates so much about exercise.

David: 10:07

I know.Yeah.It's at an, it's at an ode.It's like a diatribe.

Ellie: 10:10

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

David: 10:12

It's a beautiful, a beautifully expressed diatribe against the rigors of exercise and the role that it plays in the modern world.

Ellie: 10:20

A polemic, let's call it.

David: 10:22

Yes, and I do love the title of the book Against Everything.Is there a More Badass Title and a More Badass Project?Philosophically speaking.I'm very jealous of Grief/Greif track record on this point.

Ellie: 10:36

And I wanna start off David, with actually sharing some of his words with our listeners because they are so great.It's, I know we just started with the Baudrillard quote, but we're not done with the quotes yet about exercise snark.And we promise for those of you who love exercise, that we will get to the positives later in the episode.But we're continuing with the snark for now.

David: 10:55

Who knew that philosophers would just be killing it at the level of prose when it comes to exercise.It's like that's how you know that most philosophers are nerds because we just have nothing but bile to throw at fitness.

Ellie: 11:08

Grief is actually not a philosopher, but yes, I do agree with that in general, that we are not known for being, exercising types.Okay, so here we go.Were 'In the penal colony'to be written today.Kafka could only be speaking of an exercise machine instead of the sentence to be tattooed on its victims.The machine would inscribe lines of numbers, so many calories, so many miles, so many watts, so many laps.Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself.Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work, but a modern gym.The lever of the die press no longer commands us at work, but with the gym,we import vestiges of the leftover equipment of industry to our leisure.We leave the office and put the conveyor belt under our feet and run as if chased by devils.

David: 12:00

So good.And I love the evocation of an image of both the penal colony and the factory of the 19th century.These two institutions where what they have in common is actually the punishment of the body, the kind of disciplining of the subject at the level of the body, which happens both in Kafka's The Penal Colony, and also in the kinds of industrial factories that, for example, Marx is raging against in his writings in the 19th century.

Ellie: 12:29

And Greif's point seems to be that we are willingly subjecting ourselves to this kind of discomfort and discipline that we live in a society that no longer demands of us, right?And so we're perpetuating what we might call a Protestant work ethic or some sort of moralization of hard labor in spite of, an increasingly.White collar or pink collar oriented world and in so doing, we are, yeah,reproducing the conditions of our own subjection, if that makes sense.

David: 13:05

Yeah.And I love the reference here to Weber's,the Protestant work ethic, or we might say the Protestant work out ethic.Because one thing that Weber talks about is that one of the things that really helps capitalism get off the ground in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were actually religious beliefs about the spiritual nature of work.So for a lot of Protestants, according to Weber, especially Calvinists,if you really worked hard, it's not that you are doing it to make money,but it's that you are doing it in order to add to the glory of God.And you do that through sacrifice and through suffering.and so there's a spiritual dimension to work that I do think here gets replicated at the level of working out the fact that for many people who go to the gym and as you said earlier, do so religiously, there is a certain kind.Of spiritualization of suffering.That almost takes an aesthetic dimension, right?Where we admire the beauty, that's the aesthetic point, of the suffering,and that's the religious part, of the person who goes to the gym.It's almost like the image of a crucified Christ that's also like Christ also has abs.So like just imagine a ripped Christ doing a bunch of abs at the gym.

Ellie: 14:23

And indeed I started going to Pilates maybe five or six years ago, and the first class that I went to I was just like, this is kinda like a medieval, tortured device.talking about the machine that you use in Pilates, cuz I do the Pilates with the machines.

David: 14:44

Wait,what machines are those?I thought Pilates is just like balls and like rubber

Ellie: 14:48

No, that's mat Pilates.But there are a variety of different machines that are traditionally used in Pilates, and they have all kinds of complicated levers, pulleys, these metal coils that you attach for certain weights.You push and you pull and you lift,and you do all kinds of strange maneuvers often with the intention of isolating really specific muscles.And so that's part of the aim of Pilates is to strengthen really particular muscles.And so you're just doing this same motion over and over again a hundred times to strengthen one tiny little muscle in your shoulder.And I just had this moment when I went into being like, why am I doing this?This is not a comfortable situation, and this looks like a medieval torture device.

David: 15:36

In that isolation of particular body parts and particular movements is something that you do at the factory with the specialization and the division of labor, especially at the end of the 19th century, where like you specialize in just like putting one lid on one kind of bottle over and over again,doing a repetitive body movement that does lead to an asymmetrical development of physical strength if that's the only thing that you're doing all day.And does isolate those muscles,and it is also something that happens in Kafka's Penal Colony.Now, for our listeners who have not read that story, it's simply a short story where Kafka envisions this perfect punishment machine that tattoos the punishment that has been dished out against you by like a judge on your body,not with ink, but by drawing out blood and essentially creating like a scarification.And it's a really wonderful story precisely about the way in which the suffering of the body can take on almost transcendental dimensions.And so what you get in Kafka's short story is an account of how people can enter almost a state of ecstasy when the verdict that they received from a person in a position of authority is literally written on their body and their suffering becomes the way in which they transcend their own criminality.

Ellie: 16:57

This relates to that link between the Protestant work ethic and the religious beliefs of Christianity that you mentioned, David.And I think another aspect of this to put in the mix is the association of thinness with holiness, right?Because we're not just exercising in order to, pursue this felt sense of a high.Or to adhere to a moral code of discipline.We're also disciplining our bodies in order to achieve.The goal of thinness, and I say we in a kind of broad sense in terms of the American cultural values.One of my favorite books that I've read in the past few years is Fearing the Black Body by the sociologist Sabrina Strings.I think we might have talked about it in our fat feminism episode a couple of years ago.And one thing that Strings talks about is how the notion of American exceptionalism got really tied up with the prizing of thinness and the prizing of thinness as whiteness.And so in particular, a lot of the Northern European immigrants who came to the US.We're naturally thinner than people of other ethnic groups.And then that became part of the American ideal and the American dream.It's a particularly white, often blonde, lanky sense of thinness.And I wanna talk about this a little bit in relation to like our own experiences of exercise, maybe David, because the goal of thinness is something that people have a lot of different.Relationships to.So what is your experience?Or maybe it's less about thinness for you.I'm not sure as a man, but like it might be a buff ness, but how about this idea of objectifying your own body in order to achieve certain physical goals, like gains or I want my shoulders to look a certain way, or I want my stomach to be flat, et cetera.

David: 18:43

Yeah, and I think this is something that comes up actually in the Greif essay where he talks about some of the motivations that people have for going to the gym and doing exercise.Many people wanna talk about health,and we can talk about that in a minute, but he does say that for many people who are regular gym goers and have that gym membership that they show around as a source of pride.There is this commitment to thinness as a moral good thinness in the case of men as leanness.Cuz the goal with men is not that you're going to be thin because you do have to build up muscle, but that muscle should rip through the skin without any fat between the muscle and the skin.And so there is maybe more of a focus on leanness plus muscle buildup in the case of men.Whereas in the case of women, it really is primarily about leanness, which then allows other aspects of culture like medicine or surgery to intervene,to enhance other body parts in women.So you know, the ideal female body type is very lean because of workout, but with big boobs and a big butt, which you cannot have if you're working out to the degree that you need to in order to be as lean as you're expected to be.And so then you have surgery.

Ellie: 20:02

Yes.Although I asked you about your own experience and you started talking about Greif.

David: 20:07

Oh, okay.So this is me clearly fleeing from any discussion that might involve me actually confronting the reasons why I go to the gym.

Ellie: 20:18

Yeah.Do you exercise for a particular body type?

David: 20:21

Yes, I exercise for...oh, I've never thought about this.But the answer is yes.And the reason that I want to emphasize that is because I, I know deep down the reason I go to the gym is for vanity and not for health as much as it pains me to say that.And it typically is, I would say leanness plus some upper body muscle expansion.I think that's the best way.But I am not looking for muscle expansion as the ultimate goal on its own.I'm not looking to bulk up.

Ellie: 20:54

Yeah.Yeah.I exercise purely because people tell me it's good for me.So my journey with all of this is that I have precisely the kind of thin privilege that Sabrina Strings is talking about in Fearing the Black Body.I don't really gain much weight naturally.My friends know I eat a lot of food and like I, I'm that friend that people are like, Ellie, why do you eat so much food and just never gain weight?I stay within a certain 10 pound range, which is purely genetic.It has absolutely nothing to do with moral goodness.In fact, I feel like my thin privilege has really enabled me to hide behind,or I've been able to hide behind it.And have a pretty unhealthy lifestyle because people assume that I'm healthy because I'm thin.And so I spent most of my twenties like just not caring at all about exercise.And then I.About five years ago, I got more interested in nutrition and I was like, oh, you know what?Maybe I should take a little bit more care for care of my health.I was experiencing headaches.I realized later that was due to sugar and lactose intake and so I changed my dietary habits and my sister, who has been a long time exerciser, she was like in water polo in high school,has like always been all about it.She was like, Ellie, if you're actually taking concern for your health,maybe you should start exercising.It is a recommended thing to do.And granted, ok, I should actually say I have been a longtime practitioner of yoga, so I have done that.Which you could consider exercise, but for

David: 22:31

Yeah,I would consider that.Yeah.

Ellie: 22:33

Yeah, but it's always been for me more about like the ties to a spiritual practice than it has been just for like purely physical, gains.So anyway, I started goin to Pilates more and I sometimes go to spin class, but it's literally only because people tell me it's good for me.I don't enjoy it.I'm not doing it to change my body.It's just Oh, I read enough studies and enough people have told me that I need to be doing this, so I don't,have like heart problems or Alzheimer's later or whatever it might be.It's just like this projected idea, but there's that.That's it.

David: 23:06

Yeah, no, I have to say that if I'm being fully honest, I don't do it for health.I also don't lead a particularly healthy lifestyle in terms of my dietary patterns, for example.I get a lot of crap, and for me,the gym really is about two things.One, it is about the modification of the body to try to.Pursue that ever elusive ideal.That gives you some form of sexual capital, not some form of sexual

capital: 23:31

it gives you sexual capital.And secondarily, similar to what I said about running, I have come to appreciate the kind of mental relaxation that can happen with intense forms of exercise.And so now there are times where I do go to the gym because it allows me to lose myself in that, let's say, workout high,the gym's version of the runner's high.And I do feel more.Relaxed and more in control of my emotions, and I feel more present in my body as well.So it's a combination of the two.It's body modification and I do the way it makes me feel in my body beyond just the question of appearances and surface.

Ellie: 24:14

I think perhaps my lack of that felt sense of goodness in the body after exercise is an indication of my own bodily alienation.And so I think there's one way to think about bodily alienation and exercise, which is when you are objectifying your own body and thinking about the gains you wanna make, and basically treating your body as an instrument for your own physique.No, that doesn't really make sense.You know what I mean?You're,

David: 24:40

Or like an instrument for achieving an ideal?Is that it?Or something that you tried to approximate?

Ellie: 24:45

Yeah.Or an object that you're trying to shape in a particular way.And even though that's not my experience with exercise, I think you could argue that I'm still objectifying myself and exhibiting alienation from myself.In saying that the only reason I exercise is for some long-term abstract ideal of health.It's because I'm afraid of falling ill.When I'm older.Yeah.The, so there's one other aspect though,to change the subject cuz we should move on from the Greif in a minutes.But there's one other aspect of this that I wanted to get your thoughts on,David, which was how Greif talks about the essential solitude of modern exercise.He says that the gym is a masturbatorium, where everybody is just like focusing on themselves.There's this odd loneliness to being in a gym.And because it's different from a team sport and I was thinking about this a little bit in terms of my Pilates class, cuz I go to a Pilates class here in Silver Lake.I do see a number of models and actors there, so I'm just like the rando in the back, huffing and puffing while literal models are in front of me and everybody's staring at themselves in the mirror the whole time.It's like this weird solitary pursuit where even when we're in a class, we're just like little islands of narcissism unto ourselves.

David: 26:08

No.And so I really love this aspect of Greifs article, which is the way in which he describes gym culture as a masturbatorium where everybody is masturbating, i e only working on themselves, but in public, and making a spectacle of what traditionally would've been a private function,whether that is literally masturbation.Or actually like just dealing with the biology of your own body, right?

Ellie: 26:35

Yeah.Like bodily maintenance.

David: 26:37

Yeah, bodily maintenance typically happens within the confines of the home of the domestic space, but the gym revolutionizes that because we all bring our bodily functions and put them on display in a semi-public space for others to see.And I think this highlights one of the fundamental irrationalities of exercise for Greif.Which is that when we exercise, according to the requisites and the demands and the pressures of gym culture, it's not just that we're at war with our body sometimes in ways that are weirdly unhealthy, even though we claim to do it for health, but also we are essentially wasting the best years of our lives when we're young and sacrificing our bodies for the sake of this abstract ideal,which is just like either health with a capital H or the prolongation of life for the sake of the prolongation of life.And for him, there is something fundamentally irrational about this, and I do think he's right about that, that there is a deep absurdity to going to a place to basically, Move weights from one side to another for no purpose and to run in place like on a treadmill.It's absurd.

Ellie: 27:52

When I was 13,my parents were like, Ellie,you're not in any sports.You need to be doing something.This was right after I finished my freshman PE class and had no PE and so my parents sent me to Curves, which was a gym that was designated for middle-aged women where there are these little.Pads that you run in place on for 30seconds, and then you switch to a machine for 30 seconds and you do this little circle, you make this little circle on these individual pads throughout a room,and that's what I'm picturing right now.The fundamentally irrationality of me as a 13 year old going to a gym made for aged women and running in place on little pads.

David: 28:30

Well, or conversely, the absurdity that I also often see at the gym of 60 and 70 year olds trying to submit their bodies to exercise routines that are clearly designed to lead to the ideal body type of a 20 or 30 year old, and thinking that they can still get there.There is a true denial of death.There is a denial of aging.There is a denial of decline that is sometimes a little bit uncomfortable to witness, in my case as a gym goer, because I know that's also where I'm heading.And like you're confronted with this irrationality that you know you're pursuing, but that you don't want to stop largely for superficial, meaningless objectives that you have, like staying hot.

Ellie: 29:17

Yeah, and an extremely irrational association of weight with health.

David: 29:47

Ellie, there is an evolutionary story that is often told by experts in evolutionary theory about why it is that we exercise so much, and that includes why we do physical exercise like the one at the gym, but also why we do sports.According to the story, our ancestors were what is now known as super endurance predators.

Ellie: 30:10

Wow.

David: 30:11

I know it's such a good name.

Ellie: 30:12

How far we have fallen!

David: 30:14

Yes, like moving weights from place to place for no purpose and running in place.

Ellie: 30:20

me going to Curves when I used to be a super endurance predator in previous lives.lives

David: 30:28

And so a super endurance predator is a creature again, our ancestors who preys on other animals,think about deer and elk and pigs and things like that by hunting them.But one of the problems that.Has come up in these evolutionary stories is literally how could we bipedal creatures of in our past, we were like four feet tall, all of us.How could we literally catch up to these animals that are way faster than us?So think about, you can have as many spears in your hand as you want.You're not gonna catch up to a deer very easily, and you cannot throw it fast enough or far enough.And the answer here has to do with our gigantic booties relative to the rest of the great apes.

Ellie: 31:17

We like our butts.

David: 31:19

Uh,Literally our butt muscle.The fact that we have like a butt that goes out like an Audi

Ellie: 31:24

David, Save this for the Butts episode!Remember when you came to visit and we decided that we were gonna do a two-part series on butts?

David: 31:31

I you have not yet given me confidence that's actually gonna happen, even though I want it to happen.

Ellie: 31:37

I said I would wait until after I get tenure to do a two part butt series.

David: 31:40

Yeah, you didn't wanna submit an episode on butts the philosophy of buts to your tenure and retention

Ellie: 31:47

But tell us about our butt muscles.Tell us the butt story here.

David: 31:51

If you look at great apes, like we have the biggest, like most protruding butts, chimps are pretty much flat.So are gorillas.And some of us are closer to chimps and gorillas in that sense.But as a species, we have a big butt.And the reason for this is because our ancestors were long distance runners, so one of the ways in which they would hunt these animals is that they would run after them.Even though the animal would be a lot faster, the animal would eventually have to stop because if not, they would overheat.But we have a bunch of biological processes that allow us to sweat and to deal with high temperatures.And constant activity in a way that those prey species don't.And so we would run behind the deer.It would suddenly be there.It would run away again, and we would keep running, always catching up to it.Over time, the animal would get more and more fatigued and would be unable to run further and further.Eventually, the animal would be overheated.And would just pass out from having done all the sprints, whereas we're running the slow race of a long distance marathon runner.We catch up to it and that's when we're able to take down the animal with our spears and with our airs.

Ellie: 33:09

That big booty, super predator must have had such a runner's high when it finally chased down the deer.

David: 33:17

Though, yeah, the one that was also getting the runners high would be the deer constantly like passing out from these fast sprints.And that's also where the role of interpretation of footprints was also very helpful for our ancestors.But anyways, the point here is that maybe we evolved to do precisely the kind of sustained, protracted, exhausting,physical activity that we do at the gym because of the way in which our ancestors were able to meet their biological needs, especially concerning nutrition.

Ellie: 33:48

Yeah,that's so interesting.And it also strikes me that a lot of ancient cultures when it comes to what we would now consider to be exercise, did physical exercise in the context of rituals.Often really complex rituals that were done with others.And I don't know, maybe that could be some sort of crossover from the age when we were hunting in groups like chasing down these predators, right?So we have rituals surrounding exercise in places like Mesopotamia, Egypt,and ancient Greece, and in particular,when it comes to our own philosophical tradition, the ancient Greek culture of exercise, I think is really interesting.Or maybe we should say the culture around sport and physical prowess.It's not an exaggeration to say that philosophy and exercise were intertwined from the beginning.Even though I think it's now easy to forget because we think of philosophy as some abstract disembodied pursuit, but Aristotle's School of Philosophy was literally started in the hallways of a gymnasium.And you see this in his teacher Plato as well, because Plato, I think a lot of people think of as this theoretical philosopher of disembodied forms,a false conception, in my view.But Plato was really invested in bodily cultivation and was actually a wrestler.

David: 35:05

Oh my God.I ran, I, when doing research for this, I ran into that and I was like, wait, what?Plato was a wrestler.And yeah, I was pretty shocked because I imagine him being one of those like nerdy people who has nothing but negative things to say about exercise and running.

Ellie: 35:21

When, when Nietzsche talks about the overly educated Germans as just being a giant ear because the rest of their body has atrophied, it's one of my favorite images in all of philosophy.Anyway.

David: 35:32

Yeah, but Plato was actually the other way.He was just like a gigantic sixpack for wrestling.That was the specific organ that got hyper developed.

Ellie: 35:41

The ancient Greeks didn't care that much about abs, right?that's why see they've got like really nice shoulder muscles and butts in their sculptures, but not a lot of six packs.

David: 35:51

Yeah, no, and there is a lot of references in Plato to gymnastics, and before we get to Plato's ideas, I think we should talk a little bit about the context of ancient Greek sporting culture more generally.And I think we cannot talk about ancient Greece and exercise and philosophy without talking about the Olympic games.And the reason here is because the Olympic Games started in ancient Greece in 776 B c E.We're talking about the eighth century before Christ, and that's a few centuries before the time of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates.And at this time, the Greeks launched this project that was quite radical because it was an attempt to bring together city states with very different political systems and religious beliefs together in a kind of cosmopolitan competition where they would share with one another.And the literal place where the Olympic Games took place, which is called Olympia,became a site of panhellenic worship.So it, it had again, this international, tolerant, multi-religious orientation from the very beginning.Now, the philosopher Heather Reid, who specializes in the philosophy of sport,says that what made the Olympic Games so radical and made them break with tradition was not only that they encourage religious tolerance, but it was the specific way in which the Olympic Games.Unsettled aristocratic assumptions about the link between power and fitness.

Ellie: 37:25

In what sense?

David: 37:26

So basically before the Olympic Games, before 776 bce.People had this weird association of health and fitness with ruling.So the ruler of the Empire was thought to be just by the fact that they were the ruler, the fittest person in the realm.But the Olympic Games changed that completely because suddenly, In order for you to be considered the most athletic person, you couldn't just rely on your political heritage or your political office.You actually had to win fairly in a competition where everybody had the same starting point and where the competition was taking place in front of a public that would act as an arbiter and watch out for violators.

Ellie: 38:14

So there's a real democratic orientation.

David: 38:17

That's correct.And that began in Greece, not through voting or political institutions,but precisely through the practice of sports in the ancient games at Olympia.And here's a quote from Heather Reid in her book, Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport.

Ellie: 38:33

We're doing a lot of quotes today.

David: She says: 38:36

it was with the advent of the ancient Olympic games, that sport would seriously dissociate itself from man-made hierarchies and exhibit authentic,philosophical wonder and uncertainty by leaving questions about virtue and worthiness up to the contest itself.And so for her, the Olympic games are basically the backdrop to the invention of democracy.

Ellie: 39:04

I love this background because it adds much needed context,not only for the rise of democracy,but also for the development of Greek philosophy, because a lot of Greek philosophers, as we said before, took physical cultivation very seriously.Usually using the term gymnastics rather than exercise.So going back to Plato for a moment in his dialogue, the Republic, one of the points made is that we need to exercise not only our minds, but also our bodies so we don't get too soft.And he uses iron as a metaphor because iron becomes brittle and weak if it softened.Too much, but we're not just doing this exercise of the body for kicks, right?We're training our bodies with a view to arousing the spirited part of our nature.So exercise for Plato in the Republic is not about developing strength.This he says, is the pursuit of athletes.Instead of doing that athletic move of trying to develop strength, we are trying to.Improve the spirited part of our nature.So it's a broader and more soul oriented pursuit than just athletics.

David: 40:17

Yeah, and I think The Republic is a really good place for thinking about the significance of gymnastics because there, Plato doesn't just connect gymnastics to basically virtue, which is the point that you just made, but very clearly connects it to politics more broadly.The Republic is where Plato lays out his conception of the ideal city.And there's a lot of discussion of the institutions that would go into making this big city how the citizens would have to behave, et cetera, et cetera.But there he says explicitly that the guardians, the people in charge of protecting the city in order for the city to work, have to be trained in two things.On the one hand, they have to be trained in music because that for him has to do with the development of the mind and the soul.But they also have to be trained in gymnastics.And it's interesting that he puts gymnastics and music on the same register as essential for the training of the city's protectors, because both of them have to do with bringing about a certain kind of harmony.Again, with music, it's a mental or spiritual harmony, but with.Exercise for gymnastics is about a certain harmony of the body and a certain kind of rhythmicity of the body.And there he also says that there is a clear causal connection between those two because if you are the kind of person that doesn't do gymnastics,sometimes you can have what he calls motions of the body, maybe like stirrings or like desires maybe that can affect the tranquility of your soul.And so if you regiment your body, you can more easily regiment also your soul.

Ellie: 41:55

Yeah, and I think that this really shows again, just how removed from that tradition of the harmony between body and soul and the harmony within both body and soul we have become in our modern day.Ways of thinking about philosophy because we think of ancient philosophers nowadays as these nerdy guys who just spent their time arguing in the Agora, in the marketplace at most.But they also had a lot of conversations at the gyms.I mentioned how Aristotle's School,was founded in the hallways of the gym,but Socrates himself would often pick debates with young men at the gymnasium.And so he was literally, Going to the places where people were already doing physical exercise to try and show them that they should also be taking care of their soul.

David: 42:40

I know, it makes me think that if somebody wants to be truly a modern day Socrates,they have to go to a modern gym and just start having intellectual discussions with the gym rats there.Like what do you think about politics?What do you think about justice?But it has to be at the gym.

Ellie: 42:55

I am no Socrates then cuz I would love never to set foot in a CrossFit.

David: 42:59

In a gym.And also there is a passage in the Euthyphro, which is one of the dialogues that Plato wrote.Socrates starts a discussion with somebody outside of the courthouse, and then it leads to a whole discussion about justice.And actually Euthyphro, the interlocutor, says to Socrates, why are you outside of the courthouse?Why are you not hanging out at the gym?With your boys where you're usually hanging out.So there's a reference to this in one of the dialogues.And also I think we should clarify that the gymnasiums of antiquity were not like the mind numbing gyms of today.Most of the time they were actually open spaces more similar to a park where people would engage in rigorous physical and mental training together because the idea of just doing one or the other in isolation wouldn't have made sense.

Ellie: 43:50

And we also have to keep in mind here what the ultimate goal of the exercise is on the platonic view, right?It's not about just strengthening the body, but it is about strengthening that spirited part of the soul, as you just alluded to as well, David.And this is analogous to the way that Socrates distinguishes between philosophers and Sophists.Sophist just argue to argue or argue in order to win, whereas philosophers argue for the pursuit of truth, right?And so they have a higher goal in mind,and I think that's precisely what you see as well in the ancient Greek focus on the physical cultivation of the body is it's not cultivation of the body for the sake of just improving the body.It's physical cultivation for the sake of improving the soul, but also so that the soul can reach its pursuit of truth, right?So there's this harmony of body and soul in service of a higher goal.

David: 44:40

Yeah.And beyond that, I would like to point out that it's not just that there is the mind and the body unity, but that in Plato we also get this image of the kind of debate that Socrates engages in with the people that he interacts with, which is known as dialectics,as a kind of gymnastics for the mind.So in the laws, which is a late dialogue about politics, Plato explicitly says that being good at logical debate and argumentation is a kind of mental gymnastic talent.So there's also an association between dialectics and exercise or gymnastics more directly, more than just it being the mind and the body.What you do in the mind is a kind of gymnastics.

Ellie: 45:25

Yeah.But the logic as mental gymnastics,in contrast with a lot of contemporary analytic philosophers' views, needs to be framed in terms of the pursuit of truth rather than just oh, look what I can do.

David: 45:39

Yeah, and so it is not about just winning, which is why some people would say that the sophist of antiquity would be modern day lawyers who just argue for the sake of argument,independently of any conception of justice or the good, or the true or the beautiful.

Break: 45:59

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Ellie: 46:19

We've talked about Plato and the ancient Greek tradition of physical cultivation and.I think following this, it's fair to say that my disdain for exercise is rooted in our culture's separation from the mind and the body where I associate myself much more with the mind.But following what we've just said about the Greeks, I think we should think about exercise as a form of cultivating a felt unity between body and mind, because this felt unity is something we've really lost today, but I'm increasingly coming to see that exercise can help us cultivate.If we train ourselves in it, right?So not just using exercise as a way of changing the way our bodies look, but using exercise as a way of bringing ourselves into alignment, right?And this is a view that reminds me of what my former undergrad advisor,Drew Highland, talks about in his book Philosophy of Sport, which is that skilled athletes achieve a lived bodily unity.And this is something that we should strive for in order to.Overcome mind body dualism,but it does take that skill.Beginning athletes have not yet achieved that lived bodily unity.This is also, in fact, what the tradition of yoga is all about.Achieving a harmony between mental and physical processes such that you overcome dualism, which is a default for us, but is really misleading, right?We are not separate mind versus body.

David: 47:44

And can you tell me why Drew Highland in this book says that it's skilled athletes in particular that achieve a kind of unity of body and mind as opposed to maybe a debutante or a beginner who is doing it for fun.Is it about the seriousness versus fun element, or is it something else?

Ellie: 48:01

I think it's because we have this default of a segmented separation between mind and body.We could also say between our different body parts that we need to overcome.When you first start throwing a baseball, you're probably not gonna be putting your whole body into it.It's not a dance the way it would be for a skilled baseball player.You are just like using your arm to throw the ball.

David: 48:27

Yeah, I can see that.So it would have to do with the isolation of different body parts in a kind of awkward way that breaks that body part away from the intentional unity.That should be the body, but maybe it also would have to do with what is known as the state of flow, because what differentiates skilled athletes from beginners is that they can enter into a state of activity where they don't actually have to think about the activity itself.Not because it's thoughtless, but rather because the body already knows what to do and you cannot actually tell whether it's the mind or the body that is taking charge of a particular movement.It's actually.Both of them at the same time.That's what happens to me when I play tennis, which I do play competitively.And also when I play volleyball, that I enter into a state of flow where it would be inaccurate to say that I think about what to do before I do it.And it would also be inaccurate to say that I don't think about what I'm about to do.It's rather that my body just enacts the movements that make sense in the context of a particular situation.Does that make sense?

Ellie: 49:36

Yeah.and I think another way of conceiving of what we've been talking about is that sort of physical skill doesn't simply achieve a unity, but actually is a rediscovery of an original unity between what we typically call mind and body.That's part of the yogic view that we are overcoming the illusion of the separation.And you also interestingly see this in Rousseau.Rousseau's 18th century philosophy of education has been extremely influential up until the present day.In part because for Rousseau education is partly about cultivating what is already naturally within us, but it's equally, if not more about resisting cultivating what should not be cultivated.For Rousseau.Our modern culture is twisted,perverse, all kinds of weird, and if we go back to basics and avoid those sort of strange artifacts that emerge from our educational system, then we will be much healthier beings.He wrote an essay on the government of Poland.Very strange, obscure essay that I found in researching this episode where he says that in all the schools, a gymnasium or place of physical exercise must be established for the children.And the reason for this, as he goes on to argue, is that, Gymnasiums are actually the most important part of education because they help us prevent vices from being born.When you're focused on physical exercise,you're cultivating the body and you are not therefore like involving yourself in all kinds of weird flights of fancy and scheming and introducing bizarre ideas into the mind that shouldn't be there.He says in the same letter, I shall never repeat enough that good education ought to be negative,prevent the vices from being born.You will have done enough for virtue.And so the simplicity of having a gym for children encourages a work on the body that prevents them from falling into the vices that might emerge on the basis of physical laziness.

David: 51:43

Well, And I think we find a similar concern actually in Plato because when he's laying out the republic, he says that one of the reasons why the guardians of the city should focus on music and on the gymnasium is because that will draw their attention away from other activities that are bad for them and that they should avoid like drinking and partying.And so there's a sense in which it keeps your mind occupied on yourself in a way that is productive and that leads maybe to the development of a certain kind of personality or of a certain kind of virtue.But now that you're talking about Rousseau and in particular about this notion of rediscovering something that was.Originally there.It makes me think about the question that I asked you a minute ago in a different way, because I asked you whether the reason that skilled athletes achieve a unity of mind and body is because they're having fun versus being serious, or whether it's because they are skilled rather than being beginners.And now this Rousseau quote makes me think that those two things are the same.So let me build up to this argument a little bit because in the book that I mentioned earlier, introduction to the Philosophy of Sport, Heather Reid makes the argument that the reason that we experience sport and exercise as fun is precisely because it brings with it a feeling and an experience of what she calls absorption.Again, that state of flow where you experience your body and your mind as fusing rather than your body as a mechanical marionette, that your mind is somehow controlling.And so for read, There's a clear connection actually between fun, which we associate with children and the sense of flow that we only get when we are experts in a particular thing.And so expertise in this case,like expertise in gymnastics.Would actually reawaken something that we have there at the beginning as children, which is that sense of letting go and that feeling of fun.And so it would be a rediscovering of something originary rather than the creation of something on top of our nature.

Ellie: 53:53

And I think what we're seeing from this in thinking about ancient Greek physical cultivation and in Rousseau, is that the association of exercise with virtue predates the Protestant work ethic and its variance in contemporary American culture.But it's very different from the moralizing around thinness and a certain body type that we have today.Because it's not a matter of self-objectification, it's actually about yoking the...Like the mind and body.Those are bad words for it, but as well as the body itself together in order to achieve this felt sense of unity that we perhaps have lost in the modern day.

David: 54:35

And this actually reminds me of the way in which Greif concludes his essay against exercise because he talks about ways in which we might rediscover the pleasures of exercise without buying into modern rat gym culture.And he says that two ways in which we could do this is one, by truly embracing the solitary nature of exercise and instead of doing it at a gym where we're showing of our body for other people while pretending that we're not doing that, truly.Create an eccentric practice where you maybe go off into a mountain and exercise without routines, without your Apple watch and really tap into the solitary nature of it for real.Or if you really want the social dimension, maybe tap into that in a way that is much more communal.And much more cooperative,which the gym is not.And he has a point in the essay where he says, when exercise truly becomes social and you're actually interacting with other people, it actually starts to revert itself.That's the way he puts it.So maybe a way to rediscover that unity that we're after would be to either tap into the solitary nature.Or into the social dimension in a more meaningful way rather than this weird in between of making a public spectacle of our loneliness, which is what we get in the current gym.So,

Outro: 55:57

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