The Cult of the Body

Schmitt, Strauss, Heidegger, Arendt, Adorno, Benjamin et. al on Fitness Culture

Do you ever have philosophers’ voices in your head? Do you ever wonder what they would say about the latest issues of the day? I do, and so I thought that, from time to time, I would moderate fictive “panels” in which important thinkers might participate. This is my attempt to model the fantastical thinking that is too often missing in traditional academia, but which is closer to the heart of the religious commentator.

As a meta-reflection, ventriloquizing thinkers of the past is a great way to give voice to conflicting points of view without attaching to any single one of them. This is arguably one of the virtues of studying Talmud (and Platonic dialogues), and also why I used to lead writing workshops called “Write Your Own Talmud.”

What’s Up With the Cult of the Body? Yoga? Personal Trainers? Peloton?

Carl Schmitt: Vanity. The cult of self-improvement has replaced the virtuous fight. Liberals naively think the world would just be better if everyone had more dopamine. What a shallow, pathetic, nihilistic culture.

Leo Strauss: The joy that many experience from those things does not compare to the joy that I have felt and that thinkers of old have felt upon discovering a great philosophical mystery. And yet, I do not pursue close reading because it is pleasurable (but because it is worthwhile). We philosophers are somewhat ascetic. The finer things in life are OK, but it is the good, the true, and the beautiful that we ultimately seek. Beautiful bodies—as Plato knew—might evoke a sense of the eternal; but too often, they evoke a sense of morbidity.

Alexander Kojève: We need to strive and to compete and if fitness is one way that we do this it is good and healthy, representing an improvement from our more barbaric days. But let’s not lose focus on the main point—what people seek when they work out is not better bodies, but a sense of mastery and discipline. Now, if only they could exert the same desire for mastery and discipline in other areas, like logic or public service.

Hannah Arendt: Fitness culture is one of the only remaining regions where we still have not retreated from judgment, where there are standards of excellence, and where we are not be-saddled by the hopeless relativism of “body positivity” (the progressive legacy of Rousseau). And yet it is a misdirection of our attention from the arena where genuine thought and action occur. Instagram has replaced the polis, and now, instead of speech, we just have images of bodies, all the same.

Theodor Adorno: Contained in the falsehood of the barbell is the truth that if obstacles did not exist they would have to be invented.

Walter Benjamin: The Messiah is depicted as a hunchback hiding inside of an automaton, a figure of uselessness, marginal, like Kafka’s Odradek, or Melville’s Bartleby. Such a figure is too frail even to set foot on a treadmill, and yet, when the weightlifter looks in the mirror he catches a glimpse of him.

Foucault: Care of the body is one of the ways that people resist authority, but also one of the ways that power works itself out through and upon people. The flexible yogi appears as a volunteer, but is in fact a subject produced by a culture of internalized surveillance.

Baudrillard: People do not work out to be strong, but to be seen as desiring to be strong.

Girard: Ballerinas and body artists are our scapegoats. We deify them and dehumanize them all at once.

Maimonides: There is no intellectual or spiritual health without bodily health, but bodily health without intellectual or spiritual health is a form of both stupidity and idolatry.