How to Think About Exercise

Chad: personal trainer.

Meet Chad. Chad is a personal trainer, from the Coen brothers film Burn After Reading. He is a fictional character, but we recognize him immediately: muscular, handsome, full of energy and positive thinking and as dumb as a sack of small stones.

In fact, Chad is worse than a bag of pebbles, because pebbles are supposed to be dense. Chad has made himself this way. How? By living the life of the body. Chad is a professional jock, and his mind is forfeit. (The hard body as soft brain, as one New York Times reviewer put it.)

In this, Chad is a symbol of much that is missing in exercise today. His caricature, the idiot athlete, is such a common part of popular culture we can forget its meaning. It is not about this footballer or that tennis player, not a bias about buffed celebrities. It is not really about Chad and other personal trainers. It is a basic prejudice about human nature. The Chad stereotype comes from a conflict: between the mind and the body, thinking and doing, spirit and flesh.

This prejudice is behind the myth that sports stars must be stupid, and philosophers or writers weak and anaemic. It is an outlook that sees physical and mental exertion as somehow in conflict. Not because there is too little time or energy, but because existence itself is seemingly split in two. There are body people and mind people; flesh places and spirit places and to choose one is to forgo the other. This is what philosophers call dualism, and it can rob exercise of its lasting appeal.

Mind: the Gap

To get a clearer idea of dualism, it helps to step back about four hundred years before Lycra shirts and get pumped workout playlists. Chad is probably not an avid reader of seventeenth-century French philosophy. But the outlook behind his clueless athleticism was elegantly summarized by the philosopher Ren Descartes.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes argued that the mind and the body are two different substances. A substance, for philosophers, usually means something fundamental: the basic stuff of the world. Humans, said Descartes, are made of two different kinds of stuff: thinking things and material things. Because of this, mind and body are barely part of the same world. They are coordinated, said Descartes, at the pineal gland. (Why? Partly because no one knew quite what the pineal gland did.)

This is what philosophers call substance dualism, and it is one of the most popular ideas in Western history. It says that the world, including humans, is basically divided. Even if mind and body are somehow joined in everyday life (which Descartes recognized), they are actually worlds apart.

Dualism usually brings with it a pecking order: mind at the top, and the flesh at the bottom. Descartes wanted certainty, for example, but was suspicious of bodily senses. He recognized that truth required some intimacy with the physical world, but he was wary of sight, touch, smell. In the Meditations, Descartes did away with everything he thought vague, until he was left with only the most certain thing: mind. Thinking is another attribute of the soul, he wrote, and here I discover what belongs properly to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. This is why he said, famously, I think, therefore I am: only the mind was the real Descartes. The rest was dodgy, dubious flesh.

This is an old idea with a fine philosophical pedigree: the Greek philosopher Plato also believed that his mind was his true self. Socrates, in Platos Phaedo, described the body as heavy, oppressive, earthly, and visible, as opposed to the light, liberating, heavenly, invisible soul. But for Plato, and for the Christian churches who carried on his ideas, Descartess suspicion was joined by contempt. The body caused errors of fact, but it also waylaid the good soul. The flesh goaded the spirit to be greedy, capricious and lustful tainted and impure, as Plato put it.

The body is, at its best, foreign to the mind at its worst, corrupting of it.

These Boots are Made for Accelerators

Where does dualism come from? Well, not straight from philosophers. Thinkers like Plato and Descartes tweaked the ideas, but they had ordinary human origins and still do.

For example, dualism is partly born of social and economic circumstances. In the Western world, white-collar work is the most common occupation. Professionals, knowledge workers and low-paid service-sector employees have one thing in common: like me, they spend most of the day talking, reading and typing, and doing very little manual labour.

This would be fine if transport were a workout. But most workers drive, or are driven, to the office, in private cars or public transport. And over the last few decades, this has worsened: we are now walking less than ever before. And this is true for grocery shopping and other daily errands: the feet hit more accelerator and brake pedals than paths. While cycling is a boom sport worldwide, it is not yet mainstream as transport: bicycle trips represent only a tiny percentage of the worlds daily trips. Forget biking to the office many fans prefer to watch broadcasts of others cycling up hills in Porto-Vecchio.

The overall impression is of a civilization of mind workers, for whom walking is a brief transition from home to car, car park to office, car to shops often while tapping screens and buttons, and taking calls. We grow accustomed to a professional life in which labour and often identity is chiefly mental not physical, and interaction virtual. We still have bodies, of course, but their contribution to character is diminished. In short, we live seemingly disembodied lives. This does not necessarily cause dualism, but it certainly promotes it, and is promoted by it.

Platos and Descartess wariness of the body also makes a lot of sense, even today. For all our medical advances, we are still fragile, fickle creatures, whose lives begin and end with pain and weakness. The proper form of address between man and man ought to be, wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, not... sir, but fellow sufferer. And our better motives are easily undone by hunger, sexual desire and illness. We can promise to jog weekly but slump on the couch instead, can try to stick to lean meats and steamed vegetables but get stuck into bowls of heaped pasta and glasses of Syrah. The mind, with its clear ideals and visions of happiness, seems foreign to viscera and hormones compromised by strange association.

We Are Bodies

But this is no argument for dualism. The mistake made by Descartes, Plato and their kindred thinkers today, is to blame the body for our flaws, as if the flesh might be carved away from an otherwise pure mind. Others take the opposite position: they blame the mind for making the body weak or uncoordinated for being off in the clouds, as if the flesh could work robotically without a psyche. Yet both dualisms are false: there is no thinking substance, and thinking is not something we do in our mind, as if this happened away from the body.

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, noted that this is basically a dodgy metaphor: we see thinking as a kind of private conversation with ourselves. We believe that thoughts are words that are silently spoken in here, and then translated into public words with the throat, tongue and lips, or fingertips.