The Art of Manliness - Of Strength and Soul — Exploring the Philosophy of Physical Fitness

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.380 When you're lifting weights, you might be thinking about setting a new PR or doing your

00:00:15.140 curls for the girls. But throughout history, philosophers have thought about physical fitness

00:00:19.540 on a deeper level and considered how exercise shapes not only the body, but also the mind and

00:00:24.340 the soul. My guest today, Joe Lombardo, is a strength enthusiast who follows in this tradition

00:00:29.000 and has explored the philosophy of bodily exercise in his writing. Today on the show, Joe and

00:00:33.600 I discuss several different ways the philosophy of strength has been expressed over time.

00:00:37.500 We begin our conversation with how the ancient Greeks thought of physical training as a way 0.99

00:00:40.720 to develop personal as well as social virtues, and why they thought you were an idiot, in 0.99

00:00:44.780 their particular sense of the word, if you didn't take care of your body. We then discuss 0.99

00:00:48.660 early Christianity's relationship with physical exercise and the development of the muscular

00:00:52.300 Christianity movement in the 19th century. We end our conversation by looking at the philosophy

00:00:56.840 of physicality espoused by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and what he had to say as to

00:01:01.620 how strength training moves us out of the life of the night and towards the light of the

00:01:05.140 sun. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Lombardo.

00:01:20.000 All right, Joe Lombardo, welcome to the show.

00:01:22.620 Hey, thanks so much, Brett.

00:01:23.480 So you are a writer and a strength enthusiast who explores the philosophy behind strength

00:01:28.500 training, bodybuilding, and fitness in general. Tell us about your history and your relationship

00:01:33.180 with physical fitness.

00:01:35.540 Sure. So I just turned 40. I grew up in North Jersey in a fairly pleasant suburb outside of

00:01:44.080 New York City. Good childhood. I remember it being filled with biking everywhere, playing

00:01:50.200 a lot of pickup games of basketball, football, never joined the team sport, never really was

00:01:54.820 into it. But I just enjoyed kind of, you know, using my body in that way. And so in some ways,

00:02:00.720 physical fitness was kind of instinctive. And I think that's something that's definitely

00:02:04.180 there when you're a kid. You just sort of use your body and you can like wake up from a dead

00:02:09.720 sleep and run three miles. I remember that in like high school and stuff. And definitely at 40,

00:02:13.140 that's not the case at all. So I sort of began to realize even during the process that as I was

00:02:21.220 getting older and I went to college, went to grad school throughout my 20s and 30s, that some of

00:02:27.380 that was starting to kind of disappear. Some of the kind of physicality of my body, I was finding

00:02:31.300 myself sitting a lot more, whether it's studying or working or anything like that. And I think the

00:02:36.580 seriousness of adulthood, unfortunately, eclipsed the kind of the joys of childhood activity.

00:02:43.740 And to the point where really it was in my early 30s, I suppose, where I just looked and felt like

00:02:49.980 garbage, to be quite honest. I put on a lot of weight. I started, I was always a cigar guy,

00:02:55.560 but I was smoking way too many cigars, definitely drinking a lot and just becoming very kind of

00:03:00.480 irascible, not very pleasant to be around. I was doing my dissertation, just not a really good

00:03:06.360 person or human being. And I think a lot of that was just due to the fact that I wasn't paying

00:03:11.680 attention to kind of a long-term goal that I had for myself, both maybe spiritually as well as

00:03:17.840 physically, if you will. And I remember being a PhD student living in New York and being around all

00:03:25.600 sorts of guys who also really didn't care to lift or do anything. And they were very saturated with

00:03:31.660 kind of the ironies of life, always making very self-deprecating comments or even deprecating

00:03:36.920 comments towards others. You know, if there was a guy at the bar, it looked like he was jacked or

00:03:41.820 something. Someone would make some sort of joke about it. You know, there was just sort of this

00:03:44.660 bitter acid, acidity, if you will, I guess, towards people like that. And it just sort of felt very

00:03:52.140 bizarre. And I don't know, it didn't really leave me with a very good feeling about kind of

00:03:57.120 who I was becoming in that crowd, I suppose. And so at one point, you know, I was engaged to this

00:04:03.400 woman. I'd broken it off. I was doing my research abroad. I was doing research in the Middle East.

00:04:08.920 And I came back to Jersey, got a job, quit that, moved back with my parents and realized that I just

00:04:18.460 was not doing very well. And I remember there were kind of two instances. One of my mom was

00:04:22.260 pretty disappointed. I remember one day she sort of looked at me and she just had this kind of

00:04:25.820 sigh of despair, like, what have I become, you know? And that kind of hurt, you know, when your

00:04:30.140 parents see you like that. The second one, though, was I was working on third shift at UPS at a storage

00:04:36.300 facility outside of New York. And I remember there was like this guy, he must have been in his like

00:04:40.620 early 60s or so, big tall guy. I remember I like accidentally crashed the high-low into like all

00:04:48.260 these sacks of dye and they just like went everywhere. It was like that Indian celebration with all the 0.96

00:04:52.700 colors, except it was at work and it wasn't supposed to be like that. And so, you know,

00:04:57.420 this guy kind of like, you know, palm to forehead says, oh my God, what an idiot. So he helps me like 1.00

00:05:01.980 pick up these, I don't know, 30, 45 pound sacks of dye to reload onto the high-low. And I was just

00:05:08.980 having a hard time lifting them. You know, here it was at the time I was, I think, 33. And this guy was

00:05:16.220 just, you know, taking one sack after another, just walloping them right out back onto the high-low,

00:05:21.020 like it was nothing. And he just kind of goes over me and he says, you know, how old are you?

00:05:25.540 And I said, oh, I'm 33. It's like, you are one weak 33-year-old. You really got to go to the gym.

00:05:30.360 I mean, this guy was unfiltered. And you know, honestly, that was probably, although I didn't

00:05:34.680 like to hear it at the time, that was the best thing someone could have ever said to me

00:05:38.640 in my state. Because that really stuck with me. And soon thereafter, I really did some thinking and,

00:05:46.300 you know, I had this dissertation. I wanted to finish it. I did not want to be one of these grad

00:05:50.620 students who, you know, had a dissertation for years and years. I wanted to get this thing over

00:05:54.840 with. And I wanted to do it in like a semester, which is unheard of typically, although it can

00:06:00.640 be done. But that's how desperate I wanted to be out of school and to really turn my life around.

00:06:04.600 So after that, I started going back to the gym and probably like first time in, I don't know,

00:06:09.600 maybe eight, seven, eight years. In doing so, I started to kind of, you know, cut down on some

00:06:13.980 of the habits. I had no idea what nutrition was or dieting or anything like that. I just started

00:06:18.360 lifting. And of course, I had no technique. I had no idea what I was doing. And so that's when I

00:06:22.760 kind of started to, you know, go online and look up stuff in these different communities.

00:06:27.120 And I very quickly realized that the people that were into stuff like bodybuilding or powerlifting

00:06:32.900 were, they just seemed to be like, I had this almost like saccharine sense of happiness,

00:06:38.000 which I found so irritating at the time. They almost seemed too happy and positive. And at the time,

00:06:43.400 you know, like I said, I was sort of in this crowd where it was sort of the brooding

00:06:45.880 intellectual type. And I just didn't like it. It didn't really speak to me. But at the

00:06:49.600 same token, the more I was exposed to it, the more I kind of read up on their protocols

00:06:53.360 and stuff, the more I realized, you know, I can kind of see why they have this sense

00:06:57.680 of mirth. And so when I would go back to class or I'd go to some place where I was writing

00:07:03.360 and maybe a friend was there, that sense of excitement just wasn't echoed, I suppose.

00:07:08.040 You know, it's kind of like you pick up a new hobby and you're excited about it, but your

00:07:10.720 friend's like, okay, cool, man. Like, that's great. You know, they don't really share

00:07:14.340 the same excitement. That was kind of like with me and lifting. But it felt like it was

00:07:18.260 more than a hobby. It felt as if I was transformed with my life. And I think a lot of guys feel

00:07:23.000 that way when they start seriously lifting. They feel like they're making this, they're

00:07:25.860 on this precipice of change in their selves. And I remember one point, you know, I was

00:07:32.440 picking up some papers in my department in the city and this one friend, young woman, you

00:07:39.460 know, saw me and she says, oh, you know, I heard you start working out. And she kind of

00:07:43.620 rolled her eyes and she said something to the effect of, oh, that's so hyper-masculine. 0.60

00:07:47.680 And, you know, it just, at the time, I mean, at the time I was annoyed, but I sort of laugh 0.86

00:07:51.940 now because it's such a silly term. I mean, who wouldn't want to be more masculine than

00:07:55.980 they are? But at the time it was seen as kind of a derisive remark. And I thought, this

00:08:00.400 is, you know, I realized I was sort of coming to the point where these weren't really my

00:08:04.680 people. And I really wanted to unmoor myself from that particular coast of thought and

00:08:11.820 to really start to explore this other side. Even if I didn't necessarily jive with the

00:08:16.940 kind of happy-go-lucky sort of attitude of the online bodybuilder community, I felt like 0.93

00:08:22.440 it was a lot better than being miserable and being this kind of, you know, arrogant intellectual 0.82

00:08:26.640 type, I suppose. 0.95

00:08:28.440 Okay. So this experience you've had, you started feeling better, not just physically, but also,

00:08:33.060 you can say, spiritually, emotionally. That caused you to start exploring, like, what's

00:08:37.260 going on there? Maybe philosophy can help me explain, like, why I feel better in my soul

00:08:43.300 when I started to exercise.

00:08:45.600 Yeah. You know, it's interesting. There's a quote I remember reading a while ago by Emerson.

00:08:52.300 It goes to the effect of, like, God offers to everyone his choice between truth and repose.

00:08:56.480 Take what you please. You can never have both. And so I began to kind of think, well, that's

00:09:02.220 interesting. You know, when I was kind of reading and writing and studying and all that stuff,

00:09:05.580 right, you always want to get to the truth of things. And that was a very active sense

00:09:08.820 of exploration. It gave me a lot of pleasure. It still does. But at the same token, isn't

00:09:14.960 that physical fitness, right? Isn't that also in some ways tending towards something that

00:09:19.500 we could consider as, you know, the truth of the body or somatic truth, if you want to

00:09:23.440 be like, I don't know, fancy about it. And the more I kind of looked into it, I saw sort

00:09:29.760 of two camps at play. One was the kind of, you know, antibody body camp within academia.

00:09:35.580 So these are people that are interested in, you know, the body, calling it stuff like

00:09:41.860 the meat, for example, is a term sometimes they use in academia instead of the body,

00:09:45.920 which is, again, kind of weird and derogatory. And they just see the body as something that's

00:09:51.380 just there. And, you know, we can change it as we please. And we're always kind of reinventing

00:09:55.980 ourselves. And it just seemed to me very banal. You know, it was also a discussion mostly

00:10:01.280 revolved around the sexualization of the body. It didn't really have much to do with the

00:10:04.540 active body, which was what I was interested in. On the other hand, the place where I felt

00:10:10.240 as though the body was being spoken of in terms that I can understand was Greek philosophy.

00:10:17.880 What's sort of interesting about the Greeks, and in particular, you know, Plato and Socrates

00:10:21.680 and folks of that nature, Aristotle, of course, is that they never really wrote long treaties

00:10:27.460 the way philosophers typically do on a certain subject. I mean, if you read the Socratic

00:10:33.220 dialogues, most of the time it's about what is the law, what is it to be brave, or what

00:10:37.320 is courage? You know, what is the truth, you know, or what is the best form of government

00:10:41.880 like the republic and so on. But there's only snippets or glances of what physical activity

00:10:48.860 is and the importance of it. So it's interesting, you read about it, you know, Pythagoras, for example,

00:10:53.240 was a trained boxer. Socrates was someone who trained every day. He was also a military veteran.

00:10:58.260 You know, Plato's Academy was not just a bunch of guys in togas reading books or scrolls, maybe.

00:11:03.000 They were actively engaging in wrestling and sports, sprinting, throwing javelin, you know,

00:11:07.940 all those kinds of activities.

00:11:09.900 Of the writing that we do have from Greek philosophers on fitness, what were some of their underlying

00:11:15.180 ideas? I mean, let's take Socrates. For him, what role did fitness or training play

00:11:20.160 in living a virtuous life? Yeah. So Socrates was, again, he didn't write a whole lot about

00:11:28.600 it. There are snippets in The Republic. Xenophon's memorabilia probably is where he talks about it a

00:11:34.000 little bit more. Although, again, that was more of a secondary source from his student, Xenophon.

00:11:39.440 But really, it was, physical fitness sort of boils down to an ethical imperative or an ethical

00:11:44.740 problem. To not train your body, to not purposefully exercise it with a goal of getting stronger or to

00:11:51.680 even just look better is, you know, not just a problem where it is sort of an immoral problem.

00:11:59.140 It's actually, in some ways, Socrates is very blunt about it. It's to be an idiot. 1.00

00:12:04.180 The term idiot, of course, in English is, you know, people immediately bristle at that because 1.00

00:12:08.960 it just basically means you're a moron. But actually, in the Greek context, idiocy is very 1.00

00:12:14.940 particular to a definition of being excessively interested in your individuality. And so people 0.98

00:12:21.220 who are idiots are people who are not interested in helping others. They're not interested in being 1.00

00:12:25.700 kind of good citizens. They're not interested in helping their neighbor. They're strictly concerned

00:12:30.420 within the parameters and confines of their immediate pleasure. That's what an idiot is. And 1.00

00:12:35.580 everybody has these tendencies. I mean, an idiot can be the person who, you know, sits on the couch 1.00

00:12:39.640 all day, whatever, eating chips and watching, you know, videos. An idiot also could be, you know, 1.00

00:12:44.900 a person who moves out into the woods and decides to say, you know, to hell with society. I mean, 1.00

00:12:49.100 these are both categories of idiots. So the body physical training is to not make yourself into an idiot 1.00

00:12:56.580 for others, is to be useful towards others. And that's kind of where physical fitness tends towards

00:13:02.040 virtue or wisdom or knowledge. Now, that said, in the final Socratic dialogue in Phaedo, for example,

00:13:11.120 you know, Socrates is about to, you know, drink his own death, basically exhorts the body, chastises,

00:13:18.740 saying, oh, you know, the body is nothing but the prison house of the soul. You know, the flesh is

00:13:23.340 something that, you know, guides the soul by the nose, dragging around, you know, into, you know,

00:13:28.740 overly sexual activities or into sloveliness or gluttony or excessive predilection towards

00:13:36.260 luxurious living. But if you really do look at the entire corpus of works, no pun intended,

00:13:41.900 you do start to see a much richer detail and relationship between the body and soul in the

00:13:47.100 Greeks, where the soul is obviously the more important one, but the body is expressive of the

00:13:53.320 soul. I mean, it's to be kind of not very politically correct. It's like when we see

00:13:58.640 someone who's obese, and I speak as someone who was obese, by the way, unfortunately, the first

00:14:03.280 thing in our minds is, oh, that poor guy, you know, there must be something wrong. I mean, that's

00:14:08.820 basically what it is, because it's an expression of the soul. So that's, for Socrates, that's kind of

00:14:14.560 what that, why physical training is so important within his line of thought.

00:14:18.920 Okay, so just to unpack that, so there is a personal element to physical fitness, how it can

00:14:24.240 help you achieve personal virtue, and then there's a social element. And to unpack that first part,

00:14:30.060 how fitness or physical training can help you develop personal virtue, you talk about in the

00:14:36.300 memorabilia, so this is written by Xenophon, he said this about physical fitness, I'm going to quote it,

00:14:43.160 when you aren't physically fit, this is what Socrates says happens, he says,

00:14:46.580 who does not know that even here, many greatly falter because their body is not healthy.

00:14:51.040 And he says, and forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and madness frequently attack the

00:14:55.960 thought of many due to the bad condition of their body. And it sounds like you experienced that when

00:15:00.260 you were, you know, a grad student, you felt that peevishness, dispiritedness, and that changed once

00:15:06.560 you started physically training the body. Yeah, the body is not really meant to be a subject of ironic

00:15:14.260 mockery or observation. The body really is meant to be something that we train, that we condition,

00:15:22.140 that we discipline. In academia, I think, writ large, I mean, of course, yeah, sure, there's going

00:15:28.600 to be the physicist out there who's a PhD student who's like, Jack, okay, I'm not talking about that

00:15:32.620 guy. I'm talking about your kind of run-of-the-mill, maybe a little socially awkward PhD student,

00:15:37.700 which was me, maybe I still am, that, you know, doesn't really feel very confident in the flesh.

00:15:44.960 And of course, it's not just a body problem, it's a mind problem. I mean, I think of like Jay Cutler,

00:15:49.240 the, I think he's four or five times, Mr. Olympia bodybuilder. And he said, you know,

00:15:52.940 people always said to him, it's like, oh, wow, look at this body. He says, you know,

00:15:55.440 the problem for me wasn't the body per se, it started with the mind. I had to train my mind in

00:16:00.620 order to train the body. And I think that that really speaks by and large to cultivating a sense of

00:16:06.300 personal ethic or personal virtue there, is that you want to, you could be very intellectually

00:16:11.440 disciplined, for example, you could be, you know, very smart at, you know, calculating certain

00:16:15.560 theorems, reading over certain methodologies, whatever discipline you happen to be practicing.

00:16:21.780 But at the same token, shouldn't that discipline extend into your very mortal being? Like what allows

00:16:28.060 you to be on planet Earth in this moment is your body. I mean, Martin Heidegger, infamous,

00:16:32.920 I would say probably philosopher, German philosopher of 20th century, you know, once said, you know,

00:16:37.620 we don't have bodies, we are bodily. And I think that that's kind of the way to look at it is that

00:16:44.040 we exist in this body. We're not just, as one of my friends once said, we're not a brain driving the

00:16:48.860 meat robot. You know, we're the entire sum of our being there operating. So I think the discipline that

00:16:54.300 we lack for our bodies is obviously going to be a certain lack of discipline that we cultivate in

00:16:59.820 our souls or our, you know, intellectual capabilities, I would say.

00:17:04.180 I want to quote some more because you have some essays where you quote from Xenophon that I think

00:17:06.820 are really interesting from Socrates.

00:17:08.460 Sure.

00:17:08.800 Talking about this idea of how exercise and physical health can help you attain personal

00:17:14.080 virtue. It says this,

00:17:15.620 For those who maintain their bodies well are both healthy and strong. And many due to this are saved

00:17:20.780 in a seemly manner in the contest of war and escape all the terrible things. Many bring aid to their

00:17:26.160 friends and do good deeds for their fatherland. And due to this are deemed worthy of gratitude,

00:17:31.240 acquire a great reputation, and obtain most noble honors. And due to these, live the rest of their

00:17:36.200 life in a more pleasant and more noble manner and leave their children with more noble resources for

00:17:40.700 life. So exercise is nobility. It's how you gain nobility.

00:17:44.460 I agree. I mean, it comes down to an extension of, you know, the coward is the one who dies a thousand

00:17:49.280 deaths. I think lack of training, lack of that initiative echoes.

00:17:53.660 Yeah. I love that. And then also, you know, the opposite of that, if you don't keep your body

00:17:57.100 in good shape, there's this famous quote, I'm sure people have, it gets posted on Instagram and

00:18:01.520 the internet a lot by Socrates. He says this, it is also shameful to do to neglect, to grow old before

00:18:08.380 seeing oneself in the most beautiful and strongest bodily state one might attain. So I think it's

00:18:13.400 interesting, this idea that it's noble to want your body to look beautiful. That was a very Greek

00:18:18.820 ideal. And we kind of lost that today. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the sort of Western

00:18:26.080 mentality or Western civilization is something that's not necessarily strictly in the geographic

00:18:31.040 parameters of Greece or Rome or Europe or the United States. I mean, I think one of the greatest

00:18:37.540 exponents on what I would imagine is probably the best philosophy track on the active bodies by a

00:18:44.200 Japanese man and author, his pen name was Yukio Mishima. He was the person who I think in The

00:18:50.500 Sun and Steel, this sort of long essay short book, depending upon what your definition of either, I

00:18:56.220 suppose, is, was thoroughly Western and Greek in his conception of the body in spite of being from

00:19:02.900 East Asia. And I think the Greeks really spoke to this very kind of biologically rooted instinct,

00:19:10.220 at least in men, I can't speak to women, but at least in men to kind of excel in their bodies, to be 0.96

00:19:14.920 dynamic in their flesh, and, you know, to look good, regardless of their abilities or how they happen to

00:19:21.420 have been born. I think that that instinct is there for each of us. And it's something that the Greeks were

00:19:26.980 maybe a little bit more successful than others that I'm sort of unpacking and exploring.

00:19:32.440 And Socrates also talked about as you train physically, it's going to help develop this more, I would say,

00:19:38.180 call them abstract virtues, conscientiousness, fortitude, discipline, moderation. By doing the

00:19:46.060 physical act, it allows you to enact these sort of abstract virtues that can play out in other parts

00:19:52.020 of our lives. Yeah. One article that I had written last year or so was on this man, Ryan Belker,

00:20:01.200 probably still alive, I imagine he's not that old, but he was a sort of elite level power lifter from

00:20:07.180 Michigan. I can't quite recall where. But anyway, there's an interesting story that was picked up in the

00:20:12.120 news maybe about five or six years ago. And that was around the time I started seriously training. And, you

00:20:17.940 know, this guy's going to pick up his kids. It's, you know, late afternoon, it's Valentine's Day, it's

00:20:22.940 probably utterly freezing in Michigan at that point, I have no idea. And he passes by a car accident, I guess

00:20:28.640 there's a Cherokee that flipped over and there's another car. And the man who had been in the

00:20:33.920 flipped over Cherokee was sort of pinned between a stop sign and the car itself. And, you know, like

00:20:38.880 everybody, we have this sort of pedestrian instinct to, you know, say, hey, look, I'm going to keep

00:20:43.660 moving on. You know, it's kind of like the parable of the Good Samaritan, you know, before the

00:20:47.320 Samaritan, all these other folks, even the Holy Ones, just walked on by. Belker didn't, he stopped and

00:20:55.100 he realized the man's position. And, you know, he managed to effectively partially deadlift

00:21:00.680 a two or three ton vehicle off of this man to basically save his life. Now, of course, that's

00:21:07.380 an extreme example of strength that, you know, fractions and fractions upon a percentage of a

00:21:13.860 population even possess. But I think that there's something ethical and very Greek, quote unquote,

00:21:19.420 about that is to use the body and the service to others to build that virtue, to express it, to not 0.99

00:21:25.740 be an idiot, basically, in your flesh. I think Belker exemplifies that almost perfectly. 0.97

00:21:31.840 Yeah. And so this goes to this idea that physical fitness allows you to develop those social

00:21:35.880 virtues that were vitally important to Greek life. You talk about to be an idiot in Greek life was to 0.99

00:21:42.600 be a very private person. And for the Greeks, the polis was the main social, that's how you organize 0.99

00:21:49.140 yourself. And, you know, Aristotle talked about the only way you can actually develop yourself fully

00:21:52.780 as a human being, is to be actively engaged in polis life. And so Socrates says, in order to be

00:21:59.100 a useful, active participant in polis life, which is vital to our very existence as a Greek,

00:22:06.160 you had to be physically fit. Yeah. It's something that nobody today wants to hear.

00:22:10.420 Yeah. I mean, we don't, we talk about, when we talk about fitness, we think about it just for

00:22:14.080 ourselves. You never hear people think, well, I'm being physically fit so I can be a better

00:22:18.620 citizen of the country. Sure. And I mean, I think everybody in modern society, and maybe this is

00:22:24.580 more of a commentary about modern secular society than anything else, but you know, it's, it's sex 0.79

00:22:29.640 appeal. First of all, we want to look good, attract and meet, you know, maybe there's a health aspect

00:22:34.020 too, but I think first and foremost, a lot of guys want to live because, Hey, I want to look good for

00:22:37.480 girls, you know, and that's fine. We all start from there. I'm not necessarily against that, but I think

00:22:42.040 that there are higher iterations of thought the more and more you get into it. And I think that there is an

00:22:47.200 interesting cleavage in sort of between modern fitness or secular fitness where it is about

00:22:52.020 discipline, but it's a very kind of warped discipline of being antisocial. Oh, you know,

00:22:56.700 sorry, I can't help you today. I'm training or I have to get to bed at eight o'clock and I wake up

00:23:00.320 and six and I go to work and I train and I don't really care about my family and I don't really care

00:23:03.840 much else. Oh, maybe I should, you know, look into this drug now, this enhancement, you know, that's

00:23:09.300 kind of a form of sort of decadence that I, that I think is not particularly healthy and doesn't

00:23:14.100 really breed the kind of virtue that I think the classical Greek or even for that matter,

00:23:19.140 sort of theological Christian virtue would have the body prepared for. 1.00

00:23:23.280 It's another form of idiocy. 1.00

00:23:26.260 Exactly. 1.00

00:23:26.920 Yeah. I think there have been periods in at least American culture where this idea of physical

00:23:32.540 fitness was seen as part of being a good citizen, you know, back in the sixties, you know, JFK,

00:23:37.700 that whole, we got to get fit, you know, the soft American. And usually that happens during times of

00:23:43.200 war where there's like this idea, okay, we're going to, we might have to go to war against

00:23:46.040 the Soviets. So we need to have a citizenry that's able to do that. And then you see that 0.91

00:23:50.920 kind of, you know, marshalling of we're going to get fit. We've had, we talked about on the podcast,

00:23:55.180 the La Sierra high school, a physical education program in the sixties was a response to that call

00:24:01.580 for physical fitness as to be better citizens, but typically it fizzles out and we just go back to

00:24:06.580 the, just focusing on the self. So the Greeks, a physical fitness was a way you can develop your

00:24:11.140 personal virtue, your social virtue, the mind and body were not separated. The Greeks thought they

00:24:17.240 were connected, you know, healthy mind and healthy body. What about the Romans? Did the Romans have 0.97

00:24:22.440 a philosophy of physical fitness? The Romans, I think, well, it's interesting. I think when you

00:24:28.500 talk to people who are, and I'm not an expert in like Greek philosophy or something, but I think when

00:24:32.620 you talk to people who are, they kind of, the Romans are sort of like the, at the bottom of the 0.98

00:24:36.640 ladder there, the Romans didn't have, I think a real complex understanding of just even an approach

00:24:42.700 to philosophy relative to the Greeks. And I say that by the way, it's like someone who's of Italian

00:24:46.520 descent. So I hate to say it, but the Greeks were far superior than, than Romans were. For them, 1.00

00:24:52.600 physical fitness was military training. That's what it was tended towards. Yes, of course, there were

00:24:57.860 some that did become fascinated with, you know, the kind of Grecian ideal of aesthetics and beauty and

00:25:03.080 all that stuff. And they were often kind of taunted or made fun of in Roman society. Romans saw the

00:25:07.740 Greek understanding of fitness as effeminate and Romans thought it was more proper to war, to become

00:25:14.520 proficient in javelin throwing and sword play and that kind of thing. I think in some ways it's

00:25:19.740 unfortunate because I think really the Greeks stand out amongst really all civilizations as being 1.00

00:25:24.740 those who tended to take play and sports seriously. I mean, think of the Olympic games,

00:25:30.220 the Olympic games, united the entire Hellenic world. In fact, they induced peace treaties and

00:25:35.200 ceasefires. If they knew that one warring sitting state had athletes from another come over, they

00:25:39.760 would stop battle. They would ceasefire. They would let them pass the enemies. Athletes pass through 0.92

00:25:45.080 unharmed. So it's a real interesting ancient civilization that way, where I think you see it in

00:25:50.680 probably most other civilizations, maybe East Asian, Aztec, where yeah, there was always sports and

00:25:56.260 games, but the Greeks just, or Romans for that matter, but the Greeks just had a much more intense

00:26:01.160 philosophical explication of that. So I, for me, the Romans never really impressed me. I know that

00:26:07.180 there are probably a lot of Ryan Holiday fans out there. I just can't get into them. I think also

00:26:11.460 too, because I tend to get my sense of ethics and purpose and stuff. I tend to see that more in my

00:26:17.500 Christian faith, I guess. So for me, I'm not interested so much in what the Stoics felt is how we should

00:26:23.760 approach life in so much as I feel I should be doing sort of God's will for my life and what

00:26:29.080 he wants me to do. But again, I'm sure there are people who are Christians who love the Stoics and

00:26:33.220 I'm happy to stand corrected, but I tend to see them as a little bit distant from my interests,

00:26:39.020 I suppose. The Stoics would use fitness analogies to explain philosophy. You know, they talk about you

00:26:45.180 have to be like a wrestler or a runner training. You have to take that same approach to your own

00:26:50.540 philosophical development and training the soul. But yeah, they don't say too much about

00:26:55.080 exercise itself. And I like that idea that you talked about how the Greeks injected this idea of

00:26:59.380 play into their fitness or their exercise. And Edith Hamilton wrote a really good book about the

00:27:05.740 Greeks where she captures this, I think, really beautifully. It's just, she describes a culture

00:27:10.140 that's vital. It's effervescent. It's fun, but also serious at the same time. It's just alive.

00:27:16.360 For sure. Yeah. No, there's something unique about, I think, the Greek experience and their

00:27:22.860 natural curiosity that is really unparalleled. They didn't look around the world and just adapt

00:27:28.920 themselves to it. I think they tried to really see the world as a means to propel themselves

00:27:34.280 to become better and more virtuous. So I think that's fairly unique.

00:27:39.720 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:27:46.360 And now back to the show. So in a couple of essays, you've talked about how you return to your

00:27:52.260 Catholic faith and you mentioned how you've been thinking about fitness and faith together.

00:27:57.940 Let's talk about that. Like what was the early church's view on physical fitness and taking care

00:28:03.680 of the body? Yeah, pretty negative. Unfortunately, I will have to say that when the Greeks were becoming 1.00

00:28:12.860 Christianized under the Byzantines, one of the things that I think was maybe Theodosius II,

00:28:18.680 someone maybe could verify that, he basically had outlawed and banned the Olympic Games because it

00:28:23.680 was a form of pagan worship. And it was, it had pagan rituals to it. So anybody kind of associated with

00:28:29.460 the Olympic Games or training and stuff like that, also like, even though, you know, Paul writes,

00:28:33.520 for example, the Testament about, you know, faith is like running a race and, you know, talks about the

00:28:38.640 body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, all these things. Obviously, they knew of athleticism in

00:28:43.240 similar ways that the Stoics were quoting about, you know, comparing training to training the soul.

00:28:48.520 There was some of that a little bit to a less extent, certainly in the New Testament, but the

00:28:52.980 early church was not really much of a fan of that, to my disappointment, I think, initially. Maybe

00:28:59.300 there were some exceptions. Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of Paul, I know, you know, Paul, before he was Paul,

00:29:05.100 he was Saul and he was a Roman citizen and he was trained in Roman philosophy. So, I mean,

00:29:09.980 he knew Stoicism and I'm sure he took these Stoic lessons he took and these analogies of

00:29:14.140 physical fitness and training the soul and brought that into his epistles. Another thing that was going

00:29:18.840 on too with early Christianity, highly influenced by Platonism, particularly Augustine. So this idea

00:29:25.140 that, you know, the soul is the most important thing, the body, not so much. And that probably got

00:29:30.400 mixed into that as well. I think too, what's important though, is that very earlier on,

00:29:35.740 and even today, some would say, you know, the Gnostic tendencies were very strong in the ancient

00:29:42.040 world. These were, this was one of the first heresies in the first century that the early

00:29:46.420 church had to sort of combat. I'm basically thinking that the material world was inherently

00:29:50.420 sinful. The flesh was kind of a sinful punishment. It's all about kind of liberating the soul from the

00:29:55.480 flesh. And so the church did have to very strongly rebuke this line of thinking that was coming out

00:30:01.340 of Egypt at the time. And so they had to kind of posit the bodies. You know, the, you know,

00:30:06.660 to be, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, to be is good. To have a body is great. We have to sanctify the body.

00:30:13.020 Of course, we have to do things with it. We don't just have a body and then that's it. There are things

00:30:17.700 that Christians, you know, have to do with their body. And of course, a lot of it tends to be, 0.98

00:30:21.800 you know, not just sort of, you know, sort of ritualism, but also, you know, sexual purity and

00:30:25.120 things of that nature. But I think as an extension of that, certainly physical fitness being helpful,

00:30:31.400 being, you know, you know, carrying one's cross, for example, if you will, all these kinds of like

00:30:36.400 physical and spiritual tasks. I think that you can easily draw from that a whole corpus of ideas

00:30:42.820 that are pretty interesting to go down. So yeah, I mean, Christ was in his earthly ministry, you know,

00:30:47.400 saying, hey, you got to start lifting here, nor were the apostles per se. But I,

00:30:51.500 I do think at the same token that a lot of the importance of the body that the Christians really

00:30:56.080 used and fought against the Gnostics, not just in Egypt, but also against the Albigensians in the,

00:31:01.960 I think the 13th century in France, the Waldensians in Switzerland. I mean, there were a lot of kind of

00:31:06.960 heretical movements that cropped up that did kind of put the body or position the body as this just

00:31:13.300 sinful carcass that we have and we're sort of carrying around. From a Catholic point of view, 0.72

00:31:18.320 even the kind of the development of the rosary, for example, by St. Dominic, was supposed to remind

00:31:24.220 people of Christ's incarnate earthly ministry, you know, the crucifixion, the kind of corporeal sense

00:31:31.080 that he was here and is, you know, on earth doing these things, this is earthly ministry. Those were

00:31:36.360 reminders and they were purposely used in some ways to counter the Gnostic effects and heretical

00:31:42.100 viewpoints that were spreading in Bulgaria, Egypt, and France and parts of Switzerland at the time

00:31:48.280 too. So I think that there's a lot that Christianity says of the body. It's just like, you know, it's

00:31:52.700 just not in the sense of Socrates saying, hey, bro, maybe it's time to live, you know?

00:31:56.280 Yeah. You know, Christianity, it's, it's a incarnate religion. So yeah, God comes, takes on a physical 0.86

00:32:00.260 body. He dies, takes up his body again, and it glorifies it, resurrects and promises disciples,

00:32:06.440 the same will happen to you. Yeah. Okay. So for, you know, early Christianity, physical fitness

00:32:10.960 exercise, kind of like, well, body's not, you know, body's good and bad. We have to use it for

00:32:15.440 good purposes, but you don't need to spend any time training it specifically. When do you see that

00:32:21.480 change in Christianity? So I can't speak to like a long breadth of history. I will say that I think

00:32:30.640 one of the more noteworthy periods that some folks know, Brett, I'm sure you're aware of too,

00:32:35.540 is this whole muscular Christian movement that was sort of emerging in the latter half of the

00:32:40.240 19th century, particularly in the Anglophonic world in England. So, you know, at that point,

00:32:45.320 you're kind of at the sort of high golden arc of industrialization. Anglicans in England were

00:32:50.720 noticing that the men populating their pews were fairly sallow, looking kind of exhausted,

00:32:56.460 just didn't seem very virile, if you will. And so there was this big discussion within kind of

00:33:01.160 like high church Anglicanism about, well, like, what do we do about this? Like men are kind of 1.00

00:33:05.900 losing the very, you know, physical aspects or attributes that it is to be a man. And so there's

00:33:11.820 a lot of heady debate, I'd say mostly amongst the Protestant world. Interestingly enough, the kind of

00:33:17.240 Catholic iteration comes from a man, St. John Henry Newman, who is Anglican, he converts to Catholicism,

00:33:22.440 and he wrote a book on university and education. And one of the things he does is he picks up on these

00:33:28.260 debates. And he says, you know, part of a proper education is to have physical fitness and the kind

00:33:33.880 of spiritual importance of that. So the 19th century was a time of kind of spiritual and religious

00:33:40.240 zeal. Of course, that's when you have a Cupertine who starts to resurrect. In his idea, the Olympic

00:33:45.620 Games, you start to have all these like, you know, old timey health clubs and strongman stuff. You know,

00:33:50.660 Eugene Sando is around at the time, all these kinds of, in some ways, critiques of the effects of

00:33:57.540 industrialization on man's spirit and body. I think fitness is there, or that industry comes

00:34:03.440 as sort of an answer to that. And also to, you know, make a buck off of it too, for that, you know,

00:34:07.640 no doubt. Yeah, so we did a whole sort of mini book about the muscular Christianity movement. It's a

00:34:14.060 really fascinating period. So yeah, you said late 19th century, it reached America, and it kind of went

00:34:19.340 on to the early 20th century. But a lot of things going on, a lot of different cultural currents just

00:34:24.300 crisscrossing. And so yeah, muscular Christianity movement, that's what gave rise to the YMCA,

00:34:30.200 the Young Men's Christian Association. What was developed in the YMCA? Basketball was developed

00:34:34.600 there. Volleyball was developed there. You see churches starting church leagues, not just Protestant

00:34:40.300 churches, but Catholic churches. You all see this in Judaism. A lot of synagogues were starting

00:34:45.240 basketball leagues. Boxing gyms would be at these places. And they were seen as a way not only to

00:34:50.460 inject some more virility in the church, but it was like a missionary arm of the church. It's how

00:34:55.740 you could get young urban men who might've been, you know, committing crime. Well, let's get them 1.00

00:35:02.400 to church boxing and maybe they'll come to the pew as well. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's an

00:35:08.800 incredible part of history. Even, I think there was one Canadian Presbyterian missionary out in the

00:35:14.880 Prairie area of Canada. And as he was going about, he'd see these prairie towns and these guys were,

00:35:20.020 you know, hard drinking, that kind of stuff, that lifestyle. And it really started to kind of

00:35:24.000 develop an athletic program for them. You know, it wasn't anything complicated, but it was similar

00:35:29.040 to what you were saying. It was echoing the fact of, hey, let's, you know, get you off the street,

00:35:32.420 get you off the bottle. Let's do this and closely tie it to a sense of faith. Not just like, hey,

00:35:37.860 lift and look good, but this is important. Yeah. You were supposed to exercise so you could be a

00:35:42.240 better servant in the kingdom of God. Right. And you started seeing these books come out. There's

00:35:46.940 like this one book that I read, The Manliness of Christ, written in 1903. And it just talked about

00:35:51.840 how, you know, Jesus was actually this really manly, manly dude. He wasn't this sort of effeminate

00:35:56.280 kind of wavy looking guy you see in stained glass. He was actually really manly. And they'd look at the

00:36:01.020 Bible and the New Testament stories and say, look how Jesus, he fasted for 40 days and then was able

00:36:05.780 to battle the devil. And then he was able to just walk all over Judea and, you know, deal with

00:36:11.420 thousands of people and healing them. And he had the stamina to do that. And so we need to be like

00:36:16.160 that. And in order to do that, we have to exercise so that we can go forth and spread the gospel.

00:36:20.620 And then like you brought in the progressive movement into this in the social gospel, where

00:36:25.180 we had to not only develop ourselves spiritually, but the goal was to develop. It was to go out and

00:36:30.880 change the world, like bring the kingdom of God here on earth through missionary work,

00:36:34.600 through eliminating poverty, increasing literacy, and improving health. And it sought not only to

00:36:41.200 improve the health of people in society in general, there was also this idea that you as an individual

00:36:48.620 needed to be healthy in order to do all this good work.

00:36:52.860 That's a fascinating time period.

00:36:54.460 Yeah. Okay. So I want to move on. You mentioned this guy, Yukio Mishima. You mentioned him earlier.

00:36:59.840 You've written some essays about him. This is a controversial figure, but if you're in the bodybuilding

00:37:04.400 world, you'll probably come around to some Mishima quote, or you're going to see some guy be like,

00:37:10.760 Sun and Steel. He wrote this treatise called Sun and Steel, and he explores his own journey into

00:37:16.420 bodybuilding. Give us some background on Yukio Mishima.

00:37:20.240 Sure, sure. So Mishima was a very interesting guy. He was in some ways born a little bit too young to

00:37:28.820 participate fully in World War II as a Japanese. And that's something that I don't think he ever really

00:37:34.000 let himself. He didn't really forgive himself for that. I think he wanted to fight. Instead,

00:37:39.360 he was a student. I think he was working at some sort of munitions factory in Japan and basically

00:37:44.680 saw his country's defeat. I think for him, one of the turning points was when he noticed that on the

00:37:52.440 day of defeat, it was a very sunny day. It happened to be beautiful outside. And in some ways, he became

00:37:58.460 kind of angry at that because he felt like, well, you know, how cruel it is, you know, the empire's

00:38:02.180 fallen and yet it's so beautiful out. And I think that really stuck with him, this theme of dark and

00:38:07.060 light, the nighttime and the daytime. These are, you know, certain themes that are very prevalent

00:38:13.160 in his book, The Sun and Steel. Mishima was a complicated guy. He was a samurai enthusiast,

00:38:21.160 although I think that's kind of putting in a very hobby-like way. I think he was in fact a very

00:38:25.100 brilliant supporter of Japanese imperialism and the kind of pre-Megi modernization. A lot of his 0.83

00:38:31.600 books often touched upon kind of mocking the ways that Japanese would attempt to mimic the West or

00:38:36.360 bring Western traditions in. So he really held close to his heart the kind of samurai tradition.

00:38:42.000 And I guess he at one point maybe claimed some sort of lineage to them. I'm not particularly certain

00:38:47.120 if that is true or not, if he's just saying that. He was a man of pretty small stature. I think he

00:38:52.400 might've been like five foot or five one and he was very thin. And so he was also sort of mocked for

00:38:58.260 being so small. And so I think there was a lot, there was sort of building up into his interest in

00:39:05.280 lifting and weights. I don't think it was a pure intellectual adventure. I think it was also

00:39:10.960 a confidence building exercise, but he was first and foremost a writer and poet. He was also

00:39:16.900 gay. He was someone who certainly struggled, I think, with that in some of his books that becomes

00:39:22.120 evident. And all this kind of transpires for him, maybe in his thirties or so, probably around the

00:39:29.000 same time I started lifting and maybe a lot of people do often, when he realized that he sort of

00:39:33.540 become a man of the night. He was up late night reading, burning the midnight oil. This is all things

00:39:39.960 that he documents in the sun and steel. And, you know, for me, I think to be self-referential,

00:39:47.520 I suppose, I saw a lot of that when I was doing my PhD. It's just a lot of burning the midnight oil,

00:39:53.920 not really getting good sleep up until three. I'm writing, you know, drinking coffee, maybe having a

00:39:59.060 cigarette or a cigar or whatever have you. And, you know, not really wanting to go into, you know,

00:40:04.860 the daytime, really to more enjoy the night and to kind of find a lot of intellectual productive

00:40:09.360 activities then. So I think for him, he was very much a creature of the night there. Eventually, I think

00:40:16.220 he comes to a point where he wonders to himself in the essay, you know, why is it that with words

00:40:21.700 they can soar to the greatest heights? And yet here my body still remains, as it were, you know,

00:40:26.920 in a room, not going anywhere. And I think he saw this sort of dissonance between, you know,

00:40:32.360 poetic flourish or metaphorical flourish against that of his body, which was just this very skinny

00:40:38.660 thing. And I think he wanted to make that commensurate. I think he wanted to kind of

00:40:42.880 rebalance himself in that way. So for him, he was already very fluent, obviously, in writing prose,

00:40:50.560 but he was not very fluent in what he would call learning the language of the flesh. And that is to train

00:40:55.860 the body with steel or what, obviously, in America, we would call the iron.

00:40:59.600 So there's a lot of things there. So just to talk about, he was a good writer. He was actually

00:41:03.360 considered for the Nobel Prize in literature, I think, five times for some of the stuff he was.

00:41:07.920 He was a very good writer. This idea of the nocturnal life, I mean, I think that perfectly

00:41:12.340 describes this, like, it was like the life of the mind. He talks about this, like, I was just inside

00:41:15.920 my head. And it sounds like when you were a grad student, you were there and, like, your other

00:41:20.740 grad students were just, like, inside their heads. And that's as far as it went. Like you said,

00:41:25.300 you could do these amazing lofty things with words. But then when you actually looked at your

00:41:29.900 lived experience, it was like, ah, something's not matching here. Something's off.

00:41:36.240 Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think for Mishima, there was something very noble. As I mentioned

00:41:44.500 before, he was a very, he's very thoroughly Greek thinker when it came to the body. And a lot of his

00:41:48.780 books, which are fantastic, I think he actually might be my favorite author, at least close to it.

00:41:53.520 Just incredible writer, or he's just got very good translators. It could be both.

00:41:58.040 But he talks a lot about the Greek understanding of the body. He has an incredible grasp on Western

00:42:04.440 literature and culture. He's East Asian, obviously, but he doesn't really have a lot of reference to

00:42:08.840 what Buddhism or Eastern thought might say to it. In fact, he even characterizes learning the language

00:42:16.140 of the flesh as almost kind of revivifying a dead language like ancient Greek or Latin.

00:42:21.920 And he talks about sculpture. Of course, that's the eternal metaphor that every guy who lives uses,

00:42:27.060 you know, is to like be a self-sculptor, is to carve yourself out of the flesh that you're the fat

00:42:31.780 and all that stuff. So he has a very kind of interesting outlook. The sun is something that

00:42:37.940 at first presents itself kind of as an enemy. It's very merciless. The sun comes up. It doesn't

00:42:43.040 matter what happens or what is happening. It's still out. It's still a gorgeous day, whether it's

00:42:47.480 your country's defeat or whether you're just this kind of, you know, slovenly grad student or writer.

00:42:53.140 There's something that he wants to bear himself towards to kind of ascend to the heights. And I

00:42:57.900 think that that's kind of the metaphor of the sun. It reveals all. In one of my essays that I write

00:43:03.360 about it, there's something interesting about kind of fashion, even athletic fashion or athleisure,

00:43:07.940 they call it, where there's kind of a sleight of hand going on with some of these kind of trends.

00:43:12.760 For Mishima, it's like, yeah, like exposing your body, its muscles in the sunlight. People will see,

00:43:19.360 you know, the imperfections. They'll see the beauty of it, that which you've wrought from your training.

00:43:24.920 And I think that there's something incredibly invigorating about building your body and being able to

00:43:29.820 kind of look good. So I think that's kind of what he meant by learning the language of the flesh,

00:43:33.240 was to explore the threshold of his body through struggle, through pain, exactly how the Greeks

00:43:40.280 thought of it in their concept, like agon or what we get agony or agonistic, which of course is very

00:43:45.220 negative in an English language. But agon meant struggle. It meant something that you encounter

00:43:50.140 to reach a higher plane, to explore something else. And Mishima's concept of pain is thoroughly

00:43:56.680 Greek in that way.

00:43:59.180 All right. So pain is how you learn. It's like, it's a way to reveal who you are.

00:44:03.240 Yeah.

00:44:04.240 Yeah. Yeah. His idea of this language of the flesh, there's an intelligence inside of our bodies,

00:44:11.080 not just in our head. You talk about how this is similar to what Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke

00:44:14.660 Zeresutra. He says,

00:44:16.280 You say I, and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe

00:44:22.120 it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say I, but performs I.

00:44:27.720 Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to a very banal truism that we all hear. It's, you know,

00:44:35.140 actions speak louder than words, I suppose.

00:44:37.560 And then this idea that what Mishima found in the steel or pumping iron and building your muscles,

00:44:43.500 he had this to say about what it can do in kind of training or helping you learn the language of

00:44:48.560 the flesh. It's a great quote. He says,

00:44:50.340 Yeah. What an incredible quote. I mean, talk about the power of words right there.

00:45:20.320 Yeah. I think he's able to really leech a lot of what I think people who lift may not necessarily

00:45:28.320 approach as a clear thought, sometimes maybe peripheral. I think sometimes our sense of

00:45:34.480 talking with the body to go back before about, you know, the kind of online bodybuilding where

00:45:38.440 it just seems to be like a very kind of sugary sense of enthusiasm or optimism or sort of a pop

00:45:43.840 definition of discipline. I think these are our attempts, I think, to get close to what Mishima

00:45:49.180 so brilliantly puts, you know, in that quote about muscles and what they are and what they do,

00:45:55.020 the opposite of language, what the steel does for us. I think all these things are ways of all of our

00:46:00.020 kind of thoughts about the body approximate what I think Mishima puts so brilliantly. And I think

00:46:05.500 that's why he's probably the greatest exponent of a very Greek understanding of the body.

00:46:10.400 Yeah. And I think there is a language of the flesh. Like whenever you exercise, what I've noticed with

00:46:15.060 strength training is that you develop a bodily awareness. Like I know, I know what I'm getting

00:46:21.640 to failure. And a lot of people, they might think they're getting close to failure, but actually

00:46:26.060 they're not to failure because they haven't pushed beyond that initial feeling. But you can train,

00:46:29.780 you can learn, like listen to your body. It's like, okay, it might feel not great right now,

00:46:34.300 but you can actually do three, four or five more reps if you wanted to. You can't get that without

00:46:39.560 training. Yeah. Right. And pushing yourself beyond a self-perceived limitation. I mean,

00:46:45.300 I think that that's the hardest mental barrier because really for a lot of people, it's about

00:46:50.000 safety. You know, it's, um, if I get under the squat rack in this bar, you know, what happens if I

00:46:55.300 can't make the last lift? Let's say, you know, my, the pins aren't adjusted properly. There's no one to

00:46:59.460 spot me. I mean, you know, people immediately think of severe injury or death. And of course that does

00:47:05.220 happen. So I think kind of living on, on that, that edge of life, if you will, just in your garage

00:47:11.960 squatting is an experience that I think very few people will understand maybe short of obviously

00:47:17.880 serving in the military or being a cop or firefighter or something like that, or paramedic, I guess.

00:47:22.220 Yeah, no, there's, when I've, when I was really into powerlifting, I had post videos occasionally of me

00:47:27.220 squatting or something like a PR and people in the comments would ask like, what were you thinking

00:47:32.480 when you're doing that? And like, it's like the only thought that's going through my head is like,

00:47:35.720 don't die. That's, that's all I'm thinking. Don't die. Exactly. Exactly. But also, you know,

00:47:42.440 in that moment of perhaps avoidable pre-death, you are also much more conscious of all the muscles

00:47:48.480 you're using. Like you realize, oh wow, if I'm like, if I'm getting up out of the hole, for example,

00:47:51.940 if my core isn't tight, I'm not going to make it out. So I think this bodily awareness,

00:47:57.220 it expands. You begin to become more fluent, I think, in your body when you're in these situations,

00:48:03.640 which is why I do love powerlifting, even though I've kind of departed from it for

00:48:07.480 past a couple of years now. And Mishima, like the Greeks, he thought that the body,

00:48:12.880 like how the body looked, it also revealed what your mind or your spirit was like as well.

00:48:18.760 Well, yeah, for sure. For sure. And I think that whole beginning part of the essay where he's sort

00:48:25.460 of emerging out of this sort of intellectual cocoon of the night, if you will, I think that

00:48:30.100 that's just extremely apt, not just for, you know, a writer like him or a grad student like me, or was

00:48:36.080 a grad student, but really for anybody who just, you know, has that kind of profession where it's a lot

00:48:40.220 of sitting and thinking. I think a lot of people can identify that with that.

00:48:44.340 So Mishima, he was a Japanese romantic. He loved samurai culture. He was also a nationalist who

00:48:51.460 was extremely critical of the post-war materialism that he saw in Japan and also the democratic

00:48:58.120 government. And then after an unsuccessful coup, he attempted, well, he committed seppuku or, you know,

00:49:06.800 it's a harikari, right? Ritualistic suicide by disembowelment. And then they chop your head off 0.98

00:49:12.700 after that. And he was very famous for that death, but he thought a lot about death previous

00:49:17.620 to it. So what role did death play in his philosophy of the body?

00:49:22.540 It goes back to kind of this rejection of the idea of the body as not being an ironic or a properly

00:49:27.900 ironic subject object. There's something that Mishima kind of muses about, you know, it would be so

00:49:33.960 bizarre and strange to have this flabby body upon death. So I think as far as I understand it,

00:49:40.260 through his words, working out the body training was in some ways to prepare oneself for death. It

00:49:45.780 was to fight to the death. There's kind of this idea, I think in some Japanese literature, from what

00:49:51.240 I understand, of kind of like the heroic loser. You know, it's the samurai that fights to last breath

00:49:56.140 and then he dies, you know, by the sword of the enemy or something like that. There's that theme,

00:50:00.240 I think, that's fairly rife in certain literature in Japan, from what I understand. So I think he was

00:50:05.340 sort of tapping into that aspect. You know, it would just be kind of like weird or silly to have

00:50:10.200 like this like big fat guy and he's holding a sword trying to defend himself. Like, I think that

00:50:15.600 there's less of a romantic image versus a guy who's like, you know, jacked or something and he's, you

00:50:19.800 know, fighting to his last breath. I think that's kind of what he's getting there too. So to have a

00:50:24.520 trained body is to prepare oneself for the final fight for effectively to fight to the death.

00:50:29.760 Maybe Socrates would get that, right? Didn't Socrates say, or someone said like philosophy

00:50:34.380 is about preparing for death, preparing to die?

00:50:36.720 It is. And this is something that I think too, when you look at, you know, Mishima's writing here,

00:50:42.100 when you look at the Socratic ideas as well, something that Heidegger, Martin Heidegger talks

00:50:46.920 about in various areas of being in time is that we live in a society that avoids talking about death.

00:50:54.500 We live in a society that just assumes that death isn't there, that we're about full,

00:50:59.320 maximal enjoyment. And so what happens is that if we don't have this clear understanding that we

00:51:03.780 will die and that that's something that we should think about, life becomes whatever you want it to

00:51:09.260 become. It doesn't have really a purpose. It becomes very amorphous. And in some ways it becomes

00:51:13.980 very destructive, ironically. So I think for Mishima, having that clear aim of having a body to fight

00:51:21.140 and prepare for death gives him that resolve and discipline to then train, similar to how the Greeks or

00:51:28.660 even the Romans for that matter, to train, to be able to fight the enemy, to go towards death.

00:51:34.460 At one point, I kind of took a lot of these ideas so seriously, I ended up joining a fire and rescue

00:51:38.840 academy in Virginia because I wanted to really test my mettle. And I was probably the oldest guy in the

00:51:46.360 academy at the time. I didn't pass because I actually injured myself doing deadlifts, ironically.

00:51:51.420 But I did notice something, though, that in those kinds of paramilitary or somewhat martial

00:51:57.460 environments, PT or going through evolutions, these were things that, for the most part,

00:52:04.720 were not fun at all. They were extremely taxing on the body. They were exhausting. And it wasn't like

00:52:11.220 when I was training where I can just stop and I can get a glass of water or something like that.

00:52:15.260 You had to keep going on and on. And so oftentimes, I would think about Mishima, most of the time

00:52:20.660 thinking about God because I wanted to just get through the day. But there was something about

00:52:24.680 that martialness of the body that did kind of help push me through until I eventually did get an

00:52:30.540 injury. So I often wonder what that's like for other folks who went through those academies or in

00:52:35.880 the military and what their perspective is. And I think it mirrors closely to what Mishima kind of goes

00:52:40.540 about. So how has looking at exercise through a theological, philosophical lens, how has it

00:52:47.860 changed how you approach your own training? Very, very simply. It's just that the limits that I think

00:52:53.600 I have aren't really limits. They're kind of, you know, reprieve on climbing the mountain. It's to stop

00:53:00.160 temporarily, but realizing that there's more to go. It's to, in some ways, step out of the immediacy of my

00:53:07.760 own comforts of kind of what, like Socrates would say about the flesh, where it kind of just, it's

00:53:13.260 always looking for the next high, if you will. And it's to kind of pick myself up, sort of, well,

00:53:19.880 physically pick myself up, but also spiritually or intellectually pick myself up to kind of keep

00:53:24.340 going a little bit more. And I think the quote that you had passed by Socrates, you know, from Xenophon's

00:53:32.100 durability, it's a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the strength and beauty of which

00:53:36.560 his body is capable. That famous kind of like bro lifting quote. I think it's amazing because I think

00:53:41.460 that also gives me kind of fuel and sustenance to go on there. So it's nothing incredibly worked out

00:53:46.620 in my mind. It just provides norsels of intellectual nourishment on days where I either do not want to

00:53:52.860 lift or if I'm lifting, I want to stay safe and not lift as heavy. I guess that's for me what the

00:53:59.580 importance of how that relates. And in terms of just bodybuilding in general, how that might even

00:54:03.920 working out, I should say, works on the opposite end of my life. I guess my day job, so to speak,

00:54:10.020 is that, yeah, I mean, you have to kind of, it pushes you a little bit more. You're healthier. I

00:54:13.820 see a lot of folks get into just eating garbage food and stuff. And if for me, it kind of trains me to

00:54:21.020 be healthier at work, if you will. For me, it makes training, it just gives another dimension to

00:54:26.600 your training. It makes it more fun. It gives it more texture, I guess. That's what it does for

00:54:30.800 me, at least. I think so, too. I think that it's awesome, too. I have like two friends,

00:54:36.860 Chris and Jason. We're all the same age, all in early 40s, you know, married kids and all that.

00:54:41.040 We go to the gym, train, and honestly, it's better than meeting at any bar or craft brewery or having a

00:54:47.780 cigar even. To me, that's like the most fun I'll have with other guys is lifting with them, joking,

00:54:53.880 and there's just something incredibly uplifting and pleasurable about that that I hope to sort

00:54:59.680 of continue on in my life as I get older. Yeah, you got that Greek element of vital play.

00:55:04.340 Yes. Yes, that's exactly it. Well, Joe, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to

00:55:08.860 learn more about your work? Yeah, sure. So I co-edit an online journal of the active body. It's called

00:55:15.640 Ultra Physical. You can just sort of, I think it's ultraphysical.us, if I recall. We publish infrequently,

00:55:22.560 but often quarterly conversations from people who, you know, think about the bodies in the way that,

00:55:27.660 you know, you, Brett, have been thinking about it, the way I've been thinking about it,

00:55:31.080 adding kind of an intellectual and philosophical capacity. It's heterodox, even though I myself

00:55:36.680 am more conservative. The co-editor is liberal. So we have kind of different perspectives as well,

00:55:42.880 I think, that are in there because we don't feel that talking about the body is necessarily the

00:55:46.680 prominence of the left or right. It's something that as human beings, we all have. So we do that.

00:55:51.720 On a more, I guess, more individual level for me, Quillette, I've written about, I think,

00:55:55.920 three essays for Quillette, an Australian-based journal. Recently in March, I came out with one

00:56:02.400 from the European Conservative. That's another journal. And I think there might be something

00:56:08.460 else, but I'd say Quillette, European Conservative, and of course, ultraphysical.us

00:56:12.440 are the main clearinghouses for all things Lombardo, I suppose.

00:56:17.120 Fantastic. Well, Joe Lombardo, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:56:20.180 Brett, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

00:56:21.400 My guest here is Joe Lombardo. He's the editor of the online journal,

00:56:26.260 Ultra Physical. You can check that out at ultraphysical.us. Also check out our show notes

00:56:30.980 at aom.is slash Lombardo, where we find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.

00:56:42.480 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. If you'd like to be part of an

00:56:46.220 organization that takes seriously both the practicality and the philosophy of physical

00:56:49.760 fitness, consider joining The Strenuous Life. It's an online, offline program that challenges

00:56:54.340 men to be their best in body, mind, and soul. A new enrollment of The Strenuous Life will be

00:56:58.520 opening up next month. Go to strenuouslife.co and sign up for our email list to receive an

00:57:02.960 announcement letting you know when enrollment has begun. As always, thank you for the continued

00:57:07.120 support. And until next time, I'm Brett McKay. Reminding you to listen to AOM Podcast with put what

00:57:11.480 you've heard into action.

00:57:12.400 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - May 06, 2024

Of Strength and Soul — Exploring the Philosophy of Physical Fitness

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