Our new special issue fully devoted to the question “What is violence for?” came out last week—and today you can read the first in a series of online supplements to the issue, Gordon Marino’s reflection on boxing and the good life. “Cultivating courage requires sparring with fears,” Marino writes, and the best place to do so may in fact be your local boxing gym. His sage tour through the benefits of the school of hard knocks—as a way to handle anger, build moral muscle, learn the value of temperance and Kierkegaardian anxiety—also happens to be excellent companion reading to several essays in issue 35, from Jessa Crispin on jiu-jitsu to Oliver Bateman on his father’s rage to Theo Lipsky on Kierkegaard’s lessons in faith for the peacetime soldier.
Though I am no George Foreman, I have absorbed many jabs and left hooks in pursuit of what my philosophical colleagues regarded as paradoxical goals of building neural connections while offering advanced instruction in brain rattling. All these academics in their jeans and wire-rimmed glasses should calm down and take note of the overlap between sparring with ideas and with your fists. There is plenty of aggression at work in philosophy seminars, and I would prefer a punch to the snoot to someone knocking the pins out of an argument I had been laboring over for months.
“I don’t want to photograph the funerals of my fellow journalists who were martyred in the field in Gaza, or any of their families, or even their homes that were destroyed by the Israeli occupation. I don’t want to photograph any of my relatives or friends who were injured or harmed by the army. I feel that my duty here is to offer my condolences to them, not to photograph them.”
“Cover photos must fit some basic criteria ... But they have to be more than just attractive, more than just thematically relevant. They must also confront the viewer with a question.”
Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and academics but an ongoing conversation that helps us all live more examined lives. We rely on reader support to continue publishing.
