Athletics and Autonomy
Working Out as the Antidote to Myths of the Limitless Self
I read a thought-provoking essay recently (entitled “Underneath the Sun,” written by a fellow named Joe Lombardo) which used the lens of Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel to reflect on weightlifting and the politics and philosophy “of the human body in the age of obesity.” There were many things I liked about the essay – its celebration of physical fitness, its rejection of the unthinking brains vs. brawn dichotomy,1 its refutation of the (practically Gnostic) modern conception of the body as a “meat suit,” and its repudiation of postmodern notions about being “healthy at any weight” – but ultimately I found myself disagreeing with the author’s philosophical outlook.
I thought that might be a good jumping off point for me to write an essay about exercise, laying out my case for a different philosophical approach to physical activity, athletics, and the human body.
Background:
I’ve never read Mishima, a prominent midcentury Japanese novelist who was killed in 1970 in his attempt to lead an uprising against the Japanese government. So, I’ll try to avoid commenting too much on the philosophy he develops in Sun and Steel. Mishima was a Japanese nationalist who wanted to restore Imperial Japan, along with the traditional honor culture that had defined Japan until 1945. Some of the quotations from Mishima which Lombardo included in “Underneath the Sun” resonate with me. Others strike me as absurd.2
My goal here isn’t to be overly critical of “Underneath the Sun,” which I enjoyed reading. In many ways, it’s typical of the genre.3 Certain elements of it – which struck me as rooted in a worldview I ultimately reject – are common to much of contemporary writing about the philosophy of fitness, at least going back to the 1960s. It’s a worldview you encounter a lot in bodybuilding circles, and especially in distance running,4 so I’m quite familiar with it.
It's a worldview that draws heavily on Rawlsian and Rousseauian conceptions of freedom and the individual,5 although many of its adherents have probably never read either of them.6 This worldview holds that individuals are basically uncorrupted, that happiness (self-gratification) is the meaning and purpose of life, that everyone is engaged in a process of self-definition and reality-definition, and that physical fitness is part of that self-definition.
I find this all to be a little hokey. I have a different theory about the meaning and purpose of physical fitness. Today, I’ll try to lay that out.
(An aside: given when he died, Mishima almost certainly didn’t encounter anything from Rawls. And he probably didn’t read Rousseau either. He came out of a completely different cultural and philosophical tradition. Some of his lines sound like he subscribes to certain ideas of self-creation that would be quite familiar to this worldview I describe, but this is probably an example of convergent evolution in philosophy more than anything else. Mishima was a nationalist, an imperialist/anti-liberal,7 and a traditionalist to the point of being anti-modern, so he certainly couldn’t be accused of sharing much in common with Rawls or Rousseau or anyone heavily influenced by their thought.)
Endless Self-Creation:
You see a little of this sort of thing in bodybuilding circles: the idea that we are engaged in creating ourselves when we are working out and building our bodies. It is true that we are improving our bodies – their health, performance, and even aesthetics. But improving your health isn’t the same thing as defining health to be whatever you feel like it should be.
You also hear this kind of stuff in running circles. The loneliness of long-distance running becomes some transcendent pursuit of self-knowledge. It’s true that human performance can be beautiful and noble and that racing and training can be a kind of art form. But – as Bruce Dickinson reminds us – if you run hard enough, rather than achieve nirvana, you lose all of your ideals and “it all seems so futile.”
At times, it’s easy to slip into solipsism and vanity when you pursue athletics (especially a non-team sport), and I’ve been guilty of that myself sometimes. But that shouldn’t be celebrated as a virtue! Gazing at your muscles in the gym mirror is something to be laughed at, not cheered on.8
Do I Subscribe to This Worldview?
I can see why someone might think that I would naturally find this stuff appealing. After all, I spend a lot of time exercising and physically moving. And I write sometimes about freedom and individualism, and have stated previously that I’m something close to a maximalist on the freedom of expression.
So why shouldn’t I naturally like this confluence of physical fitness and individual self-expression?
Because I have a different idea of what freedom is for, and what physical fitness is for.9 And I have a different conception of individualism, for that matter. There are alternative conceptions of liberty than that put forth by Rawls and Rousseau, some of which I find more compelling.
For the most part, I don’t share Mishima’s worldview either, although I do like the idea of applying traditional honor culture to competitive athletics,10 including individualized sports like running. Although, generally only for people who choose that, and with a healthy dose of non-judgmentalism thrown in (i.e., either don’t judge people, or judge them by the standards they want to be judged by).11 It would be pointless to hold someone who is just running for fun to any standard other than, “Did you have fun?”12 But for those who choose honor, not fun, that is the standard to which I will hold them.13
Vanity:
Many moralists and traditionalists have long held that fitness is vanity. Working out is self-centered. Exercising too much is a waste of time. It’s not productive.
Except for the era of Muscular Christianity, there has often been an element of this among some (certainly not all) orthodox-minded Christians going back to St. Paul.14 Lifting weights encouraged self-absorption. It wasn’t productive (making it problematic for the Protestant work ethic).
By no means is this criticism of fitness – that it’s vain and unproductive – limited to religious people. It probably comes just as frequently from secular corners of the culture, and from individuals who identify as agnostics or atheists.
Now, there is something to this criticism. Working out can encourage navel gazing. Part of my problem with both Mishima, and the fitness culture of self-love, is that it leans into this. Self-obsession becomes a virtue, not a vice. As an exercise fanatic, I don’t like this – because it validates every criticism ever leveled at fitness.
But I think there’s another way. I don’t think the antidote to exercising for vanity is to stop exercising. I don’t think the antidote to body-obsession is poor health. And I don’t think the antidote to the excesses of a certain type of individualism is to discourage anything and everything smacking of individualism. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for an individual to do something by himself or herself (or for himself or herself). To my fellow Christians, I’d point out that people can fall into sin just as easily in a group as they can alone. (And exercise can actually be a powerful antidote to some of the temptations moralists most worry about.)
We live in a vain age. If vanity infects fitness culture, it is because vanity infects American culture. We hear about the “cult of the self,” and we hear that taking excessive numbers of selfies contributes to narcissism, and we nod our heads. But neither selfies, nor the cult of the self, are products of the gym. They are products of the outside world that we bring into the gym. Most of the selfies taken in this world aren’t taken in the gym.
You can grow vain from working out, but you can without working out too.15 You don’t have to take selfies at the gym. I don’t. I doubt most serious athletes do. Most serious athletes work out for other reasons than to look good. Most work out for health and enjoyment and sense of accomplishment rather than aesthetics.16
Actually, one of the secrets that many people don’t know is that a good number of gym regulars did start out working out from a desire to look good. And those for whom that was their only motivation didn’t stay, because you need a better reason than that to get yourself under the barbell day in and day out.
Many of those who stayed discovered that – while they may have started just out of a desire to look good – they found other reasons to keep working out, and those reasons became more important to them. Eventually, they lost the desire to look good, or at least they stopped thinking of their workouts as having anything to do with vanity. Plenty of them still want to look good, at least a little, but it’s not very important to them and they don’t think about it much and they have matured as athletes. They started exercising out of vanity, and exercise took their vanity from them.
Reality:
Rather than an exercise (pun intended) in the creation of a limitless self, weightlifting teaches you hard lessons about your own limitations. All sports do. Throughout your practice, you will learn that it takes work to make incremental progress, that there are some feats that will always be beyond you no matter how hard you try, and that life requires tradeoffs. But you also learn that work pays off within reasonable limitations: if you train right and eat right for years, you can achieve realistic athletic goals.17 You learn that freedom requires self-discipline: if you want to improve your body, you will need to make certain sacrifices, work in a methodical way, and engage with physical reality on a daily basis.
Running definitely teaches you about your limits. Instead of helping you to “construct a self-myth,” it helps you to shed the myths you tell yourself about yourself. It’s easy to believe that you’re capable of anything, until you try to actually do it.
What myths does racing shatter?
The one about the magical burst of adrenaline that comes in the middle of the race, where suddenly you feel so much better and you speed up nearly effortlessly (“the second wind”). If you’re running hard enough, that doesn’t happen.
Or the one about how anyone could keep up with elite marathoners in the first hundred meters of the marathon. But the elite men are running ~4:40 miles, which means you’d have to run that hundred in 17.5 seconds. An athletic person should be able to do that without too much difficulty. But not everyone can.
If you spend all your time online, it’s easy to overestimate your physical prowess. But it’s also easy to imagine that your body is nothing more than an earthly vessel encasing your true self. Especially if time indoors combined with lack of activity has given you poor physique and poor health. For centuries, there have been monks and scholars and philosophers and poets who lamented the weakness and limitations of their corporeal forms. Their minds roamed free, but their bodies were slaves to the need to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and consume water.
The best part of “Underneath the Sun” is the author’s explanation of why this is the wrong approach to life (and perhaps even a blinkered one). My position on mind and body is pretty clear.
In an age where we’re told that self-creation is limitless and we can be all that we want to be, our bodies are a troubling reminder that we are finite, flawed, and limited. Some people rebel against that reminder, and insist that they really can ignore their body’s limits. But this notion that our bodies are nothing but “meat suits” for carrying around designer, customizable selves is ridiculous. We’re more than minds in meat suits.
The author of the essay gets this. Once, he was one of those scholars who sneered at fitness out of a desire to put down that which he lacked. But, one day, that changed: he started lifting weights and underwent an incredible physical transformation, to the point at which he could be rightly proud of his body.18 He discovers that he was wrong to sneer, and that physicality still matters in the digital age.
Now, I think he goes too far (from “the body doesn’t matter” to believing it matters too much),19 but I think he is entirely correct to dismiss the vague unreality of digital postmodern youth.
To those “meat suit” youth, and to the spiritual moralists who bemoan the vanity of fitness, I would say the following. There is something beautiful and noble (and sometimes transcendent) about athletic achievement. There is something admirable and praiseworthy about pushing your boundaries, about working for years to overcome your physical limitations. There is something impressive about the constant struggle: the Sisyphean battle against age and time that we can wage but never win.20
This is the reality that physical exercise teaches us. This is the lesson. Yukio Mishima and Joe Lombardo would obviously agree with that. I think, though, that they take the transcendent argument too far. Lombardo dismissed the unrealistic belief that a person could engage in infinite self-definition by inhabiting completely the liminal space of digital media, but he still takes self-creation too far. To be fair, a lot of fitness gurus do.
Perhaps a better encapsulation in word and art of the lesson of weightlifting comes in Henry Rollins’ famous spoken word poem “Iron and the Soul.”21 Rollins encapsulates the way lifting weights can improve a person’s entire life: taking a shy boy who was the target of bullying and transforming him into a confident and self-assured young man who could defend himself and earn the respect of his peers and teacher. He showed that poetry was compatible with strength training, that the former wasn’t just for nonathletes and the latter wasn’t just for meatheads, and that movement itself had a kind of poetry.
Rollins also grounded his poem in the hard lessons “the Iron” taught him. We can’t just decide we’re infinitely capable: if we lift a heavier weight than we are ready to lift, we will become injured. If we want to transform our bodies, we can do so, but it takes years of toil and effort and discipline.
It even taught him that true freedom requires constraints and that constraints can be found in the world around us:
“It took me years to fully appreciate the value of the lessons I have learned from the Iron. I used to think that it was my adversary, that I was trying to lift that which does not want to be lifted. I was wrong. When the Iron doesn’t want to come off the mat, it’s the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn’t teach you anything. That’s the way the Iron talks to you. It tells you that the material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you.”
Exercise is one of the ultimate reality checks. If we’re prepared to receive its lessons, physical activity dispels the vague conceptions we have about ourselves and our capacity for limitless self-definition. It shows us that the world isn’t our oyster, but that if we engage in the world and perceive ourselves in relation to the objects and people in it (rather than in relation to nothing), we can in fact change that reality in small, but tangible ways.
We have the power to affect reality, to alter the world around us, but it takes hard work. We are neither fixed, nor fluid. Some things are fixed, but many things are simply heavy – difficult to move, but responsive (to greater or lesser extent) to our efforts. We can change ourselves, but it doesn’t happen overnight, and we might fail many times along the way.
Lessons Physical Activity Will Teach You:
All knowledge is not self-knowledge and wisdom doesn’t begin with the individual self. Billions of human beings – athletes, scientists, doctors, health gurus, yogis, etc. – have developed practices and principles and traditions of athletic excellence over thousands of years. If knowledge of how to exercise began with you and me in 2022, our efforts would be hopeless ineffective, inefficient, and counterproductive. Luckily, we have received wisdom on anatomy and sports medicine and nutrition and movement training, which means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
If you spend enough time in any sport, you’ll begin to learn some of these principles of movement and human physiology that apply to every human being. You’ll stop learning about you and start thinking about patterns and periodization and techniques and healthy eating. While there’s some individual variation, the basics are the same for everyone.
Everyone can work out the way he or she wants, but everyone doesn’t get to define reality for him- or herself. Sports can mean different things to different people, but people don’t just get to choose their own truth. At the end of the day, there are certain proper techniques and if you deviate from them, you can get injured. But even this can teach you a valuable lesson: that there are consequences to your actions. If you train in a way that your body isn’t ready for, it will punish you. If you neglect certain elements of human health: stability, mobility, etc. you will reap what you sow. If you only work out for aesthetics, your strength will only be for show, not for real.
But, speaking of aesthetics, athletics can teach you important things about art and beauty. Great athletic performances can be works of art. Human achievement can be a beautiful thing. Rather than a vain concept, this can be quite humbling. The feats of Haile Gebrselassie, Michael Jordan, Lou Gehrig, Eliud Kipchoge – they can make us smile and move us to tears. We need not “love our bodies” to celebrate greatness and beauty and human flourishing, and to know that physical fitness and physical achievement are good things.
Finally, you don’t have infinite autonomy. You’ll never deadlift 10000lbs. But if you work hard for many years and stay disciplined in your diet, training, and recovery, you might deadlift three times your bodyweight. You’ll never run a one-hour marathon. But if you train right, eat right, and recover right, you can complete one. And you might even do very well. It isn’t easy to run a marathon, let alone run a competitive time, and many people fail on their first attempt. But anything worth doing in life is hard, and there’s no shame in trying again until you succeed.
This is the way it works throughout life. You have to live in the reality that exists. You can’t transcend it and you can’t create your own.
You are in fact free: through effort and discipline, you can improve your body and your health within natural limits, by applying well-developed principles of training, the latest rigorous science on human physiology, and the traditions of athletic excellence that have been passed down to you. You can push against the limits around you (which requires sweat and energy), but your freedom is grounded in reality, rather than floating in abstract notions of a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
A rejection implicit in the idea of applying weightlifting to philosophy and vice versa.
Unfortunately, this article is now behind a paywall, even though it wasn’t when I read it. So, I can’t give you any actual quotations.
Although, better written than most of its competitors.
For instance, I’d put Running and Being in this category.
Microsoft Word tells me that “Rousseauian” isn’t a word. Well, if I were a subscriber to Rawlsian conceptions of individual autonomy, I might say something like, “it can be a word if just one person (me) self-defines it as one.” So, I’ll just keep going and assume readers can figure out what it means.
Nor do they need to. In the same way that “moralistic therapeutic deism” is a loose collection of common beliefs that are vaguely based upon some combination Christianity and the new religion of psychotherapy, this worldview I describe is loosely drawn from these philosophers and others, without being particularly grounded or rooted in the particularities of A Theory of Justice or The Social Contract or any other work.
I mean that he literally wanted to restore the Japanese monarchy and empire, and that he was against liberalism.
The mirrors are there to help you exercise with proper form and improve your technique (which is actually quite important if you’re doing complex lifts). Not to fuel anyone’s vanity.
Most obviously, physical fitness is for physical and mental health much more than it is for self-expression.
Fully unpacking that statement would require its own essay. An extremely basic version of an explanation might be: holding friends and teammates accountable for the goals and commitments they set for themselves and not letting them back out or cheat themselves.
And for any traditionalists who say non-judgmentalism smacks of Rawlsianism, I’d point out that it was Christ who said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
If the answer is, “Yes,” and that was your goal, then I’m happy for you.
Paradoxically, in the age of “everyone can just be themselves,” and “everyone gets to define running for themselves,” the only choice that is unacceptable is to say, “fine, then I choose honor – not fun.”
At the same time, from both a Catholic and an Evangelical Protestant perspective, complete denial of the body is Gnosticism and a form of heresy.
I will go further than this. In a few cases, those leveling the vanity criticism at athletes are doing so from a place of deep insecurity about their own appearances. Because they don’t see any reason themselves to work out other than to look good, they don’t understand how anyone else could have a different reason. They assume it must drive even people whose sport (e.g., powerlifting, where the goal is just to increase the weight you can lift relative to your weight class) involves training that is contrary to the type of training you’d do if your goal was to look good. I don’t say that to be mean or to put anyone down, but rather to point out what is sometimes going on.
Bodybuilding is the only sport in which the goal is actually to look good. Bodybuilders on the podium are judged by their appearance. For that reason, bodybuilders train very differently from most other athletes.
You also learn about inequality. Unless you’re the genetically gifted one, you’ll meet people who can best you effortlessly. No matter how hard you work, they can show up on race day ten pounds overweight and without having run a single mile in four months and they’ll crush your time without trying. Or they’ll take six months off from lifting and still PR in the bench press in their first month back. But you’ll also meet people far less gifted than you, and either way, you’ll be humbled.
There is certainly such a thing as too much pride in one’s body. But I use the term “rightly,” because there is such a thing as healthy pride, most obvious in the phrase “take pride in your work.” It takes a lot of work in the gym and in the kitchen to develop a poor physique into a strong and healthy one, and that is an achievement that a person should take some small pride in (but not too much).
Our physical bodies are an important fact of life, but not the central fact.
As Albert Camus reminds us, “Sisyphus is happy.”
Now, as the former vocalist for a hardcore punk band known for albums like “My War” and “Family Man,” I’m not suggesting Rollins doesn’t subscribe to bohemian ideas about personal autonomy, but at least in the poem he seems to grasp that working out teaches you hard lessons about reality and your own limitations.