Gordon Marino, philosophy professor and boxing coach, opens Boxing and the Cool Halls of Academe with quotes from Socrates and Tyler Durden:
‘Know thyself’ was the Socratic dictum, but Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the movie Fight Club, asks, ‘How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?’
His comparison of boxing and philosophy could come straight out of a Conan story (where the civilized tend to be decadent and cruel):
For a decade, I have been teaching both boxing and philosophy. My academic colleagues have sometimes reacted to my involvement with the sweet science with intellectual jabs and condescension. A few years ago at a philosophy conference, I mentioned that I had to leave early to go back to the campus to work with three of my boxers from the Virginia Military Institute who were competing in the National Collegiate Boxing Association championships. Shocked to learn that there was such a college tournament, one professor scolded, “How can someone committed to developing minds be involved in a sport in which students beat one another’s brains out?” I explained that the competitors wore protective headgear and used heavily padded 16-ounce gloves in competition as well as in practice, but she was having none of it. “Headgear or not,” she replied, “your brain is still getting rattled. Worse yet, you’re teaching violence.”I countered that if violence is defined as purposefully hurting another person, then I had seen enough of that in the philosophical arena to last a lifetime. At the university where I did my graduate studies, colloquia were nothing less than academic gunfights in which the goal was to fire off a question that would sink the lecturer low. I pointed out, “I’ve even seen philosophers have to restrain themselves from clapping at a comment that knocked a speaker off his pins and made him feel stupid.”
I have to agree with Marino and Aristotle here:
According to Aristotle, courage is a mean between fearlessness and excessive fearfulness. The capacity to tolerate fear is essential to leading a moral life, but it is hard to learn how to keep your moral compass under pressure when you are cosseted from every fear. Boxing gives people practice in being afraid.