Forums >General Running>Running as muse
I posted this over in another thread but I think it has additional independent merit for discussion. Nietzsche on Difficulty.
An excerpt -
Nietzsche wrote:
"What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?
[...]
You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.
I have wondered in running how much of what we are doing is creating difficulty for ourselves. Maybe not consciously but in a controlled fashion, putting running on a tightrope to use as our muse, a source of inspiration and subtle joy that can't be experienced without all the pain, in this case physical rather than spiritual pain. Assailing ourselves against a brutal mile, running ultras, miles on miles on miles, week after week, year after year. I've begun to see it with myself as regards running but also in other realms where walking a sort of tightrope, allowing difficulty, can bring on the pleasures that Nietzsche mentions above. In relationships, reading difficult books, warming to odd music, etc.
Maybe I've just got too much time on my hands and/or maybe it's all sublimation but I wonder, how do you look at it? Does running fall in step with his ideas about pleasure and displeasure, pain and joy?
interesting! Yes, I do use running for that: To add another dimension of experience to life, a little discomfort or a lot.
And what a privilege it is to be able to choose and self-dose your pain and suffering, to choose physical pain because your life is so comfortable. I wonder what a Kenyan runner would make of Nietzsche.
Why is it sideways?
I've written 15 posts on my blog about Nietzsche and running. Nietzsche wasn't himself a runner (I don't think running existed back then, at least what we mean by "runner") but was known for going on day-long walks through the mountains of northern Italy.
It helps to know a little about Nietzsche's personal life when he writes about difficulty. Nietzsche suffered for his whole adult life from intense stomach pains, which barely allowed him to work. The fragmentary, aphoristic nature of his text is a reflection of that suffering. I think it's also pretty clear that (like the other great champions of the strenuous life -- Emerson and James) he had a depressive personality. So, when Nietzsche is writing about difficulty and suffering and the struggle to meet them joyfully, I think he is talking more about these sorts of unavoidable difficulties and doing the work of trying to transform them into creative possibility, rather than seeking to create difficulty, for example, as a runner in training. In the end, Nietzsche failed at this, at least according to his own standards -- his illness took him before he was able to complete the work that he thought was the culmination of his philosophical ideas, so we are left with scattered notes and early texts.
Here's one post on Nietzsche that is a little long, but shows the Nietzsche that I know. Most images of Nietzsche in popular media tend to be one sided and cherry-pick his fragmented and incomplete text to support cliched ideas like his most often quoted line: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This -- to my mind -- is evidence that in Nietzsche's life and work, difficulty and pain outweighed joy and completion.
not bad for mile 25
I've written 15 posts on my blog about Nietzsche and running. Nietzsche wasn't himself a runner (I don't think running existed back then, at least what we mean by "runner") but was known for going on day-long walks through the mountains of northern Italy. It helps to know a little about Nietzsche's personal life when he writes about difficulty. Nietzsche suffered for his whole adult life from intense stomach pains, which barely allowed him to work. The fragmentary, aphoristic nature of his text is a reflection of that suffering. I think it's also pretty clear that (like the other great champions of the strenuous life -- Emerson and James) he had a depressive personality. So, when Nietzsche is writing about difficulty and suffering and the struggle to meet them joyfully, I think he is talking more about these sorts of unavoidable difficulties and doing the work of trying to transform them into creative possibility, rather than seeking to create difficulty, for example, as a runner in training. In the end, Nietzsche failed at this, at least according to his own standards -- his illness took him before he was able to complete the work that he thought was the culmination of his philosophical ideas, so we are left with scattered notes and early texts. Here's one post on Nietzsche that is a little long, but shows the Nietzsche that I know. Most images of Nietzsche in popular media tend to be one sided and cherry-pick his fragmented and incomplete text to support cliched ideas like his most often quoted line: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This -- to my mind -- is evidence that in Nietzsche's life and work, difficulty and pain outweighed joy and completion.
I like your caption on Nietzsche's portrait. Appropriate for Movember.
More seriously, I do think that people live their lives, intentionally or otherwise, within a certain dynamic range of emotional and physical pain and pleasure. The more conservative and perhaps fearful a person, the more they want to compress that range to limit potential pain, but also potential pleasure. More adventurous people manage to live within a wider pain/pleasure range. Perhaps the famous people we hear of who live (and sometimes die) in their wild, bipolar lives are outliers in terms of their emotional dynamic range.
Also, it may be that a person's physical pain/pleasure tolerance does not necessarily correlate with their emotional.
I'm not suggesting that people have a lot of control over where in the spectrum they fall.
MTA: Nice post, Jeff.
Although sometimes even we can interpret someone's writings not how they intended and discover a personal philosophy full of truth. I have been living a life that has avoiding pain and suffering for the last 18 months and it is bland and unfulfilling.
I am fuller bodied than Dopplebock
Hey, thanks for that. I realized as I posted this that there is some danger in referencing a cherry picked site called "Brain Pickings" (to say nothing of mentioning Nietzsche at all when there is a philosopher in the house) but thought that discussion has to start somewhere and it was on my mind. I am aware of your blog but honestly haven't made my way through the whole thing or internalized much beyond some of the really great posts on training. I sort of presumed that he was talking about unavoidable difficulties and it's interesting to know exactly what those were for him. Maybe my thought process had more to do with the sort of sterile culture and avoidance of work that seems so prevalent and how maybe we are trying to create difficulty to transform ourselves...can we introduce difficulty or does it have to be unavoidable to realize the benefits? For a while now I've had the idea that somehow hope and striving for something was the key to happiness, you need to fight for something, overcome something, a comfortable life will not be sufficient. And I mentioned this to a friend and she said she didn't think so, she thought that you should be happy with what you have and that kind of annoyed me. Like it was too simple and "zen" to be useful. In your post, you mention acceptance and Nietzsche's idea of love of destiny. Maybe that was what she was alluding to, maybe not. You say that Deleuze and Nietzsche teach that transformation occurs through chance encounters with parts of ourselves we didn't even know we had. I see that and see that that kind of acceptance makes sense. That it can be unavoidable difficulties, or any other fertile soil that can transform us if we can see that part of ourselves and somehow fold it into our being? An internal shift that requires acknowledgement (?) and acceptance to transform or benefit us? Is some soil better than others for providing those chance encounters? Or is there no soil just the acceptance? Clearly my philosophical skills are rudimentary at best (and maybe I should apologize for that, maybe not) but in any case it gives me pleasure to search for truths and modify my own for whatever that is worth. And clearly, some study is in order.
All of that is true, and I think that Nietzsche would even agree that the truth of his readings lies more in the effect it has on the reader than on his intentions. I spent 9 years of my life studying philosophy, which sort of bewilders me even now, and Nietzsche was close to my heart that whole time. At the same time, when I discovered Nietzsche as a young teenager his words spoke to me and I felt like I had discovered a travelling companion. I guess I am just glad that my conversations with him have never really run dry after all these years.
Also (this is for Joann Y): philosophers and academics in general have a bad habit of making people feel incapable or not smart enough to read the same damn texts that they were fascinated by before they got all of that edumacation which they know in their heart of hearts has little relation to wisdom.
Jeff, from personal experience with academic types in both science and the liberal arts, I think this can be absolutely true. Sometimes justified and other times not. But in no way did I take any offense in this case, just clarifying my thoughts (which are often muddled).
Ledlincoln, what you say about our personal dynamic range sounds right. Maybe as we break down small and large barriers that expose additional portions of our possibilities we get excited and feel joy but the potential was there all along. It seems like the money is in the seeing and the noticing of the potential for change when it arrives and not setting up arbitrary barriers making us unwilling to acknowledge our possibilities. Maybe running and other habits can act as a pickaxe, of sorts, for the soul. I have also made the argument before (and not that long ago) that drinking and smoking can do the same thing, so what the hell do I know!
queen of headlamps
You might like the book The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits. He's a professional philosopher, and the book is a wonderfully witty dialogue on utopia and games. In it, he defends the idea that a game -- and I think running would count by his definition -- is a voluntary activity in which we decide to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (E.g., "run 13.1 miles as fast as you can, but don't take a car or a bike, etc.")
And so to my mind, it's not so much that we choose pain, but rather that we choose to try something difficult, simply because we can.
(Hi Jeff! Nice to meet a fellow professional!)
Hey, another running blog.
You might like the book The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits. He's a professional philosopher, and the book is a wonderfully witty dialogue on utopia and games. In it, he defends the idea that a game -- and I think running would count by his definition -- is a voluntary activity in which we decide to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (E.g., "run 13.1 miles as fast as you can, but don't take a car or a bike, etc.") And so to my mind, it's not so much that we choose pain, but rather that we choose to try something difficult, simply because we can. (Hi Jeff! Nice to meet a fellow professional!)
Very cool, thanks for the suggestion!
Hmm, I put my own emo spin on this the other day. Sorry, Nietzsche.
Thank you, Jeff, for that fantastic blog post...
I like the idea of running as a form of play; this seems to be what embee is saying when she defines it as a game, and Joann Y there is something playful about your original metaphor of "putting running on a tightrope" and seeing what happens (do you think?)
At least, I have the best relationship to running when it becomes play, which to me means self-directed (I make the rules!), voluntary, creative/fostering creativity, and its own sphere separate from general life responsibilities. Difficulty, pain, discomfort, walking a tightrope can all be a part of that. Watching my kid play, I think playing can definitely involve risk, difficulty, and testing boundaries in order to learn about yourself and the world, like jumping down from ever-higher places, or playing hide and seek in the woods, or (ahem) pretending you're going out for a run and making your mom stand in the middle of the park while you run very big laps all by yourself, which for a 3-year-old is both fun and scary...it doesn't always have to be sunshine and candy. As adults, play is probably never 100% play; depending on the person and the life phase, other motivations or purposes are always going to be mixed in...
I see this as related to the idea that running can be a "pickaxe for the soul" (a notion I completely agree with) because I see play as something totally natural and essential to both children and adults - at least, adults of other species like cats, dogs, and horses, why should we be any different - that we adult humans are supposed to suppress in favor of other distractions like being good consumers and living up to other people's expectations. To be good at both those things, it's best to keep your range of emotion compressed and your brain shut off; running, or reading difficult books, or listening to challenging music, all of these do the opposite, enabling physical or intellectual highs and lows, provoking thought, making you figure shit out...and in the process, decrust the soul from all that daily-life-good-consumer junk and let us figure out who we really are.
Holy crap, I started this like three hours ago, got distracted by non-fun things, and now am not confident I even know what I was trying to say, but I'll post the novel. Although I really am tempted to delete my blather and just insert the dog-on-a-treadmill gif from one of the other threads, because I'm pretty sure that gif is the actual answer to everything in life.
I'm not sure why, but I have some kind of aversion to comparing running with play or a game. This is completely nonsensical I know but for some reason it diminishes it somehow in my mind. My husband recently referred to my running as being more than a hobby for me and I about lost it when he used the word hobby. I guess the point really was that he "got it" but still, I cringed. Aren't hobbies and games things that we do to distract ourselves from living? I don't have a good grasp on this. Probably I just need to expand my emotional range and loosen the fk up
completely agree about the word hobby. Awful. I get where you're coming from. I don't call running a hobby either, it's just what I do and I take it seriously in that I read about it, I make time for it, I take care of myself in ways that allow me to run more and faster. But I don't mind thinking of it as a kind of play; which doesn't at all exclude a more serious aspect. In fact I think the act of running can lead to exactly the right state of mind for spiritual awakenings, epiphanies,bursts of creativity,spontaneous intellectual theses, suffering that leads to joy, etc. But I don't mind if it doesn't
does playing distract us from living? Hmmm. the need to play is ingrained in us and thus has to be part of the real business of life, i feel. i think of running as one of those moments when I'm "really living," body and soul, even (or especially?) when it sucks.
Might be similar to the word "play" in the sense of playing an instrument. A professional musician who put in their 10000+ hours of work getting good enough to make a living at music is not exactly "playing."
Warm&fuzzy
My run time is my recess. I sometimes even get the feeling I did in elementary school when we hit the playground. No MORE SERIOUS STUFF- JUST PLAY FOR AWHILE. ( But, running is also very serious to me. Hmm, too much wine, not enough brain)
Runner with a riding problem.