Ancient Gyms

The student athletes in my course helped me realize that my “escapes” to the gym were not escapes at all. As often happens in graduate school, I had failed to connect my studies to reality. Today, philosophy is most commonly carried out in seminar rooms, libraries, and, if you’re like me, cafés. None of these are athletic spaces. At the heart of most modern campuses is a library or chapel. The ancient equivalent was a gym. The standard layout had an open yard for working out surrounded by classrooms where young people would receive their civic education through heavy doses of music, literature, and public speaking.¹ We see this neatly summed up in a fifth-century kylix that shows two boys paired with two men who are leading them through lessons in music and writing while the head of the gym looks on with his signature staff of office (fig. 1). In short, the original gyms treated physical training as part of a more holistic project. I knew all of this well before I started teaching. What I did not appreciate was just how much my weight room conversations with students provided a path straight to the heart of Greek philosophy.

The athletic context of the earliest philosophical schools shaped the course of philosophy itself. Plato opened his philosophical school in an existing gym, the Academy, and the main argument of his famous Republic relies on justice being a kind of mental health. Aristotle established his own rival school at another gym, the Lyceum, and used Olympic athletes as a model for the active life in his Nicomachean Ethics. Generations that followed Aristotle developed regimens of spiritual exercises, which helped shape the modern idea of religious practice. The goal of these regimens was to produce human excellence, what the Greeks called aretē, which we typically translate as “virtue.” In short, the gym was a place for physical development and character development, where the young trained to be full, flourishing human beings. This was a natural context for philosophy and its driving questions: What does human excellence mean? What does flourishing consist in? And how do we get there? If we assume philosophy is all about the mind and the gym is all about the body, this merely shows how our modern culture has strayed from its ancient origins.

Modern Education: A Trifecta of Challenges

These driving questions are just as timely today as they were twenty-five centuries ago. If anything, we have lost ground in addressing them in our education system. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the United States has confronted a trifecta of challenges that have pushed questions of character to the margins of our curricula. The result is a value vacuum, leaving students ill equipped to leverage their education to make the most of their lives as a whole.²

The first challenge is cultural. For most of its history, US culture was overwhelmingly Christian. Students moving through public schools would encounter Protestant values about working hard to provide for their families and serve their communities. And they studied a canon of literature carefully chosen to support these values. My own field of classics—the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature—featured prominently in this, though for reasons that classicists today have largely abandoned.³ In the culture wars of the 1980s, people started asking why schools taught the perspectives of only “dead, white men.”⁴ This was a good question. Today’s reading lists present a much more diverse range of perspectives. The tradeoff is that US schools taken as a whole no longer have a clear stance when it comes to questions of values. Add to this Americans’ tendencies toward political polarization, which extend into religion, and we are confronted with a splintered landscape of conflicting views. Public schools deal with these conflicting values most often by simply avoiding all of them. As a result, questions about moral values and the religions with which they are associated are often not broached in schools.

The second challenge arose from the government. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 sought to level the playing field by bringing high-quality schooling to disadvantaged communities. This was a noble goal, but the execution was ineffective: smothering K–12 schools with excessive assessment requirements, ranking children by their ability to memorize arbitrary information, and making school funding contingent on test scores. This created a culture of testing. Students moving from the K–12 schools into college are now really good at answering questions but really bad at asking them. This should not be surprising, given the more than thirteen years they spent training that way. They are also good at checking off boxes to get to the next step. But they rarely stop to reflect on where these steps are headed.⁵ Good grades in school get you into a good college; good grades in college get you a good job; a good job gets you lots of money; lots of money gets you … what? Students usually say something vague about success or making a difference. Many simply assume the more money they make, the happier they will be.

The final challenge is economic. Americans have faced increasing economic challenges in the twenty-first century, including the market crash of 2008 and COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Factor in new technologies, which make traditional jobs obsolete, and the result is an ever-widening wealth gap. For the vast majority of us, the American Dream of climbing the social ladder through hard work has been replaced by very real worries about simply paying the bills. The problem is particularly pressing for those starting out at the bottom of the economic ladder and those who, as I myself was, are the first in their family to attend college. Tuition costs, meanwhile, have soared as many colleges and universities add climbing walls, lazy rivers, flashy stadiums, and other state-of-the-art facilities to compete for enrollment. It is little wonder that students, and their parents, think about higher education in terms of return on investment (ROI).

Thanks to this trifecta of challenges, many students arrive at college stressed about money and unprepared to think about questions of values (but really good at checking boxes). In this context, major disciplines that seem to connect directly to high-paying careers (STEM and business) flourish, while those with less clear ROI (the humanities) wither. General-education courses, which offer the breadth of knowledge that has long been the strength of the US education system, are seen as obstacles to be quickly passed over on the way to what really matters: one’s major. Witness the huge number of high school students earning college credit early through advanced placement courses. In short, the more than sixteen years of schooling leading to a college degree have come to be seen as merely a race to a high-paying job. What is lost is the opportunity to ask why, to think rigorously about what all the pieces of one’s life will add up to. Such questions are the heart of Greek philosophy. So even if it was a fun course title that first brought all my student athletes to Philosophy at the Gym, the class became a chance to wrestle constructively with questions that were already weighing heavy on their minds. That kept them engaged through the end.

Pressing Forward: The Higher Ed Story So Far

I am not the first person to point out these challenges. Within the world of higher education, there is a whole genre of scholarship devoted to analyzing problems with school today. One of the more alarming studies addresses the question, How much learning goes on in US colleges and universities?⁶ Its answer: precious little. The reason for this is simple: most students do not spend much time on schoolwork, since, on the whole, they do not have realistic, functional motivations. A good number are simply unengaged. Others dabble in various things but lack commitment. Others dream big but have no clear sense of how to pursue their goals. And then there are the “motivated but directionless,” who check all the boxes but have no clear endgame.

Various individuals and organizations have noted today’s value vacuum and set about filling it through a mixture of ancient religious traditions and modern psychology. In what follows, I will lay out existing attempts to push back against our trifecta of challenges. Each makes valuable, albeit limited, contributions. This book is by no means meant to offer a complete solution. Yet it fills a gap left by the rest. And, to judge by my students’ responses, it does so in a way that is useful.

Attempts to undermine the culture of standardized testing are underway, though there is much work left to do. On the K–12 front, No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, leaving individual states to decide how to proceed. Meanwhile, groups such as the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) and the National Middle School and High School Ethics Bowls are developing age-appropriate ways to integrate philosophical thinking into the K–12 curriculum. Within higher education, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has sought to keep the traditional US liberal arts curriculum, with its hefty dose of general-education courses, relevant to students today. Given that most students today are stressed with ROI, this plays out mostly in showing how, appearances to the contrary, a traditional education is a recipe for financial success in the twenty-first-century economy. While this brings concerns for civic values into the mix and highlights the usefulness of skills in critical thinking, information literacy, and so on, it leaves students’ concerns about ROI largely untouched.

The new field of positive psychology confronts assumptions about happiness and income more directly. This movement within psychology has turned away from the traditional task of fixing problems and focused instead on what it means to live well.⁷ A groundbreaking 2010 study shows that one’s happiness in fact goes up with one’s income, but only to about $75k a year.⁸ After that, it does not much matter whether you are making $80k or $800k. So, if making money is only one part of what makes a happy life, what are the other parts? Through quantitative study, psychologists have attempted to pin down the importance of factors such as flow, gratitude, and transcendence. One particularly useful concept for undergraduates is purpose. If interests are what you like doing and strengths are what you are good at, then purpose arises when you use those interests and strengths to meet a need in the world. When academic advisers ask undergraduates, “So, what do you want to do with your life?” positive psychology suggests the happiness trifecta is to figure out a need in the world that calls on you to do something you are interested in, that you are good at, and that you can get paid at least something like $75k a year to do. In practical terms, it is good for students and their families to be concerned with making money. It is even good for some to have this as their top concern. Nevertheless, this should not be their only concern. Today, courses such as Science of Happiness fill a need similar to what my student athletes felt. As a result, these courses are quickly becoming some of the most popular on college campuses.⁹ Yet the gratitude journals and other resources such courses offer often bear the stamp of the lab experiments in which they were born.

Happily, most of the concepts studied by positive psychology have already been articulated in ancient religious and philosophical traditions around the world. As a result of this overlap, cutting-edge science has sparked renewed interest in centuries-old traditions. On the religious side, the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) has developed programs in purpose exploration.¹⁰ These build on Christian colleges’ theological concepts of vocation, calling, and service to help students connect their academic studies to life goals in ways that go beyond merely making money.¹¹ This fusion of approaches adds depth to the insights of positive psychology by bringing centuries of literature, art, and lived practice into the mix. NetVUE’s commitment to explicitly Christian values, though, limits its ability to scale up in our post-1980s, pluralistic society.¹² In some cases, this is harmless. If Christian values work for Christian students at Christian schools, that is not bad; it is just limited. When applied to public schools, however, it can be problematic. In a recent flare-up of the culture wars, various politicians have sought to censor curricula, restrict the topics teachers may discuss, and vilify current scholarship in the social sciences. The fallout of this censorious activity is to push diverse people and voices back into the closet and onto the margins of society. Rather than get bogged down in partisan politics, I suggest we come at the problem from a different angle.

Greek thought, particularly Aristotle’s, has been hugely instrumental in the development of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam alike. Within these major faiths Greek philosophy presents common, neutral territory because Greek philosophers worked from the ground up, setting any claims to divinely inspired knowledge to the side. The resulting body of thought is equally useful to students from any religion or no religion at all. Perhaps because of this, Aristotle is alive and well in the current self-help market, and ancient Stoicism is outright trending in hundreds of podcasts, vlogs, conferences, and popular works.¹³ What all such approaches have in common, though, is that each draws its framework from a single ancient school. In this, they run into the same problem as NetVUE. While the revival of Aristotle or Stoicism is a step in the right direction, neither goes far enough.

If a fusion of modern psychology and ancient traditions really is the way forward, we need to find such an approach that meets the demands of our pluralistic society as it actually exists today. For example, Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom comes closest to offering a pluralistic approach to filling the value vacuum.¹⁴ Haidt’s book, which arises from his Intro to Psychology course, is not bound to any particular ancient school. In fact, Haidt does not limit himself to just Western philosophy but brings in Eastern thought as well. The end result is a splendid read with compelling connections. Yet, his survey of ancient philosophy, east and west, is limited mostly to bits of Stoicism that line up with bits of Buddhism, that line up with current thinking in cognitive behavioral therapy. While this is an impressive synthesis of ancient and modern, east and west, the end result still speaks with basically one voice.

Next Steps: Greek Philosophy for a Pluralistic Time

My strategy is to approach Haidt’s project in reverse, using big ideas of happiness, purpose, and flow to anchor ancient philosophical speculation in modern evidence-based science. My goal is not to prove that the ancients were right but to use positive psychology to connect ancient thought to modern life. Through engagement with ancient literary texts, readers will be challenged to ask questions for themselves and construct pluralistic perspectives for navigating the complex world we live in. What is more, the centrality of the gym to ancient Greek culture helps Greek ethical theory fit our pluralistic context all the better. There is no one way to get in shape. But once you start making choices, say, by picking a particular sport, the range of possibilities for what works narrows. Add to this the competitive spirit that spreads easily from athletes and coaches to philosophers and teachers, and you have a recipe for a lively and flexible approach to life’s big questions.

Part of going to the gym or hitting the field is trying out different strategies to prepare for unexpected situations athletic play might present. Likewise, students need different value frameworks to try on as they weigh future life choices and prepare for life’s unscripted challenges. Philosophy at the Gymnasium seeks to fill this need by providing a series of competing frameworks. Central to this project are three interrelated ideas:

• flourishing/happiness (eudaimonia)
• human excellence/virtue (aretē)
• spiritual exercise (askēsis)

We tend to think of happiness as a feeling that comes and goes. The Greek notion of eudaimonia, which literally means “good spiritedness,” is much more expansive: something like the objectively best life for a human being or human flourishing. How does one obtain eudaimonia? By doing the human thing well: that is to say, human excellence or virtue. Thanks to Christianity, the term virtue has a mostly moral sense today. That sense was present to some extent in the pre-Christian world, but the Greek idea of virtue is less being a good person and more being good at being human. The two ideas overlap, yet they also pull apart in ways we will explore. No matter how we conceptualize virtues, a final question remains: How do we acquire virtues? Here competing ancient schools agreed on a single answer: practice. Yet they disagreed about what that practice should look like.

In the chapters that follow, we will explore the meaning and interrelation of these main concepts: happiness, virtue, practice. Part 1 looks to Socrates, who through a series of dialogues set in athletic contexts calls existing understandings of these concepts into question but provides no definite answers. Part 2 turns to Plato, who views happiness as a form of mental health and advocates an elaborate program of physical and musical training as the key to a flourishing life and functioning society. Part 3 concludes with Aristotle, who takes elite performers – athletic, musical, and intellectual—as his model for happiness and works out an account of character formation that uses athletic conditioning as its model. While it might seem odd to modern sensibilities, the ancient connection between philosophy and the gym provides a useful thread for stringing all these ideas together. Approaching Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle from this perspective gives first-time readers an engaging entry point to the world of Greek moral philosophy while simultaneously providing fresh perspectives on a number of standing scholarly debates. Review of the scholarly literature will, however, be relegated to the notes. The primary task of this book is practical: to provide students figuring out what to do with their lives a set of ideas to wrestle with.¹⁵