The Ultraphysical Newsletter, #1
Thank you for your support!
As the editors of Ultraphysical, we are committed to fostering a heterodox political environment. Writers on the left and the right are represented throughout the journal, articulating how they understand what the athletic performance of their bodies means to them. Open-ended, yet intuitively understood, it’s what we call the active body. And it is often by virtue of reflecting on our active bodies where we consider their placement in the matrix of what we believe and what we stand for. And so each of our contributors have, in their own way, touched on a particular cultural nerve they have found relevant. Whether it’s the debate on obesity, body positivity, the definition of fitness, or suss out age in a youth-obsessed culture, it is nearly impossible to not see our bodies as somehow disconnected from our political tendencies and moral scruples.
Why bother with a journal on these topics, when they appear to be well into the wide-open eye in the media and social media? Because the general conversation on the body grossly lacks any real discussion of substance.
Quick to adopt knee-jerk polemical stances, the two camps which ostensibly emerge in the debate rarely meet their opponent on the field. They seem to prefer shouting from the sidelines, rarely making eye contact. One side goes into considerable apoplectic rage, sputtering invectives against fat people for lacking motivation, while the other, socially-savvy resorts to a kind of standpoint epistemology which seems to almost smirk and respond: “my body, my truth.” Perhaps the reason for such high volumes in these debates is that at their core there is something innately familiar, a kind of deep-seated mood which resides in our intellectual genes. Our bodies are not neutral encounters. Neither in terms of how we directly experience them, nor how others perceive them. There is always a critical aspect of how we and the other makes sense of our very physicality, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthy of considering why that is so.
Consider Plato’s Republic where Socrates relates how the proper functioning of the body is analogous with the proper ordering of the just society. It is a society in which each individual tends to their own development in pursuit of the good. And it is in this text where we find the body politic, the oldest of metaphors which establishes our very mortal anatomy as a means to explain governance. Is there any wonder, then, that most of today’s discussions on the body necessarily take on the personal and political tones that they do?
Ultraphysical remains committed to political heterodoxy because we the editors have found as a common point of departure, that in putting our bodies through voluntaristic regiments of pain and discomfort in hopes of achieving an athletic aim, they become less terra incognita and more of a proper category worthy of reflection. Physical training for us brings into sharp relief a whole swathe of existence to ponder and consider–converse, even–with our wholly rational and intellectual selves. It comes as no surprise that in many of the essays we’ve published since launching the journal last July, each captures some form of political sentiment, a philosophical insight, and mind-over-matter struggle.
The active body is the body in motion, one that helps jog our ideas. It was no wonder that Nietzsche once advised his readers to “never trust a good idea sitting down.” We too, prefer the glistening clarity of thought after a hard workout. We therefore want to thank you for reading Ultraphysical, and hope that it has provided you with insight into your own fitness journey. If they have, we also invite you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll not only be helping to grow the journal, but have exclusive access to new and exciting content, like a podcast, conversations with athlete-writers, and more. So make a monthly or yearly contribution now, and don’t miss our midsummer reading list coming soon.
We’ll return with more thought-provoking essays and short stories in September.
Train hard,
Joe and Dan