Tyler Cowen has had a recent conversation with Rebecca Kukla, a philosopher at Georgetown. She's also a serious boxer. He asked her about it:
COWEN: From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for you? And who’s the philosopher with the best theory of exercise?
KUKLA: From a philosophical point of view, why is boxing good for me? I don’t know if this is technically from a philosophical point of view, but here’s two things. One is, I think philosophers who only do philosophy and nothing else tend to be bad, boring philosophers. Closely related to everything I’ve already ended up saying today, and closely related to what I just said about Rousseau.
I have a new colleague this year at Georgetown, Femi Taiwo. He just finished his PhD at UCLA. Fantastic young philosopher. He gave an interview recently, and one thing he said really stuck out for me, which was that so many philosophers think that philosophy is about responding to other texts and other people, and they forget that it’s, first and foremost, about responding to the world.
And I think that if you just do philosophy, you literally don’t have material. You can read other people’s philosophy books and respond to them, but you don’t have any actual, rich, juicy material. So, for me, having a lot of other things in my life other than philosophy has always been where I’ve got . . .
Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material. I don’t actually think it’s very different. Philosophers and comedians have almost the same job, which is to come up with sharp, penetrating, quirky insights about the world, so you need to be out there in the world.
Imagine if you were a stand-up comic, and all you did is sit there and try to write comedy all day long. You wouldn’t have any material. I don’t actually think it’s very different. Philosophers and comedians have almost the same job, which is to come up with sharp, penetrating, quirky insights about the world, so you need to be out there in the world.
So I’ve always had a lot of things that I’ve done, other than philosophy, that have mattered to me intrinsically for their own sake, but also instrumentally. I think they’ve made my philosophy better. Boxing falls under that general category.
The other thing is, though, I don’t regulate my emotions very well unless I can exhaust myself, honestly. And I just write better and work better and think better, and I’m a calmer and more level-headed and smarter person, if I have managed to get out my rather large amount of energy and aggression. So it’s extremely helpful for me to exhaust myself in the ring many times a week in order to do the rest of what I’m supposed to do.
Compare this with Joe Rogan's remarks about martial arts.
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