In high school, I daydreamed about dying as I crossed the finish line. It seemed the only undeniable mark of seriousness, for a runner. I’ve come to understand this as a grave, albeit curable, sickness.
For many Americans today, sport is the noblest meritocracy. What is meant by merit is mostly hard work and suffering in the Christian mold, and perhaps some vestigial virtue left over from the Greeks and Romans. Athletes are adored when they prove to us the strength of these ideals—when success comes with sacrifice. We resent those who win by other means: cheaters, of course, but also genetic anomalies, prep school squash snobs and other lucky bastards.
The quest for a battle of pure merit—the hunger for a good war—finds its basest expression in endurance sports. This promise of righteous victory led me to spend countless dollars on running shoes and a somewhat larger number of hours running in them. This struggle secured me a spot at this prestigious institution and on its varsity cross country and track teams.
In running, at least the ascetic ideal is not hidden. Yet, intellectual pursuits require their own denial of self. The very conception of knowledge as the highest good implies a degradation of our feelings and intuitions in favor of alien concepts. More concretely, a penchant for taking intense classes and reading difficult books may be just another way of striving to suffer, rather than a genuine love of arcane mathematics or abstruse writers.
But if suffering made me worthy, what real nobility is there to strive towards? Might it be that all my seriousness is but the socially endorsed expression of masochism?
These questions are not new. Nietzsche, in anticipation of the age to come, attended to them in On the Genealogy of Morality. The third essay therein, aptly titled “The Meaning of the Ascetic Ideal,” alleges that Christian asceticism arises from our desire for meaning, which can only be established by suffering for a cause. The ascetic ideal thus transforms suffering from a sickness into violent enthusiasm. Nietzsche is disgusted by this. He writes, “Every such orgy of feeling must be paid for afterwards—it makes the sick sicker.”
The enlightenment and the secular world developing in Nietzsche’s time offered no easy escape from the ascetic ideal. Unrestrained skepticism is, in this way, remarkably similar to blind faith. Nietzsche writes, in the same essay, “science today has absolutely no belief in itself, let alone an ideal above it—and where it still inspires passion, love, ardor, and suffering at all, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and noblest form of it.” The appeal of science rested on knowledge as an ideal unto itself, and the will to knowledge is humble: it refuses easy truths accessible without suffering.
Nietzsche prophesies that both the ascetic ideal at the heart of Christian morality and the will to knowledge will soon come to an end, writing, “After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all Will to truth?’” Taking truth as an ideal demands that, sooner or later, we look for the truth behind the ideal itself—its authority is doomed as soon as we obey it. It is a basilisk, which destroys our old pretenses as soon as we behold it. Nietzsche had gazed into its eyes, and hell was soon to pay.
Concerns about the possibility of seriousness were swiftly gathering relevance as the old gods died and none rose to replace them. It would take another fifty years for the rest of the world to catch up with Nietzsche, as the overthrow of Christian ideals incarnated. But enough with the always tomorrow, the looming disaster, the end times and Armageddon! Now a century and a half on, we need not go to such lengths to find ourselves a hero.
One can read much of Susan Sontag’s criticism as an interrogation into what makes for serious artistic work in her time. In her essays, she attacks the ascetic ideal that she saw as stale and depressing. Take, for example, “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer”: Sontag reviews the journals of the late Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, which end with his suicide. Devoid of the rhythms of daily life or even any mention of literary works-in-progress, Pavese’s diaries instead expound “his reflections on how to use, how to act on, his suffering.” The writer is the modern equivalent of saints suffering for heavenly rewards, transmuting their suffering into the transcendence of art.
Pavese takes the Christian denial of self to its logical endpoint. He writes, “This is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.” Thus, Pavese’s suicide fulfills the will, rather than refuses it. As Nietzsche wrote in his Genealogy, “All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming.” The ascetic ideal, the will to knowledge, and artistic transmutation all deny themselves in the same way. Sontag finds the man somewhat pathetic. Pavese seems unable to live his life, caught up in what she calls “the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness.” In Pavese, the ascetic ideal has advanced to a terminal stage. Primed to take suffering as the highest value, Pavese accomplishes little else.
However tragic, Pavese’s failing remains particular. It is difficult to generalize beyond one suffering artist who, Sontag reminds us, did create works of considerable literary merit. But, as she writes in another essay, “what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture … tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established.” In “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag unmasks the cult of suffering in a more insidious form, embodied by the Third Reich.
National Socialism arose from the very same post-Christian roots as the cult of suffering. Leni Riefenstahl, who worked as an artist before and after her service as propagandist for the Third Reich, insisted that, rather than any ideological framework, a deep attraction to everything beautiful, strong, and harmonious was the sole guide of all her work. But Sontag’s central claim is that ideology and aesthetics are not so extricable. The sensibility behind Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s depictions of a Nazi rally and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, animates her earlier films where mountain climbing “was a visually irresistible metaphor for unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal,” as well as her 1973 project photographing the Nuba tribe of South Sudan.
Rather than a break with the Nazi agenda, Riefenstahl’s oeuvre shows remarkable continuity. Central to Riefenstahl’s interest in the Nuba were their ritual wrestling matches—glory in the arena represented the highest ideal a Nuba man could strive for, the perfect distillation of a virile spirit. After all, “Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” Our automatic revulsion to fascism prevents us from contending with it when it presents itself. But hate, even desperation, cannot fully explain the appeal of Nazism, which strikes closer to home. As Sontag writes in the climax of the essay,
It is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage.
While National Socialism remains the ultimate anathema, its ideals have advanced far under these other banners. The cult of suffering is yet another appearance of this yearning for transcendence through sacrifice. Despite every protest to the contrary, the thirst for specific types of dominance remains much of the appeal of sports today.
In “Simone Weil,” Sontag maintains that it is not such a different standard against which our “culture-heroes” are chosen. Nietzsche, Weil, and Kierkegaard are not beloved solely—or even primarily—for the truthfulness of their views, but rather for the passion and seriousness with which they held them. Truth is obvious; strength of feeling is elusive. Thus, “We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering” and, for our biggest idols, “Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.” Suffering is the only guarantee of seriousness.
Pavese was anomalous only in his open embrace of unhealthiness. The rest of us harbor quieter convictions, and we are saved from his fate only by a lack of follow through. Ideals fervently held today—extolling hard work as the only path to nobility and overwhelming passion as the highest good—are the same ideals once key to the appeal of National Socialism. As moral judgement, this is of course absurd: the guilt of Nazi Germany is not in its ideology but its murders. But as prognostication on the potential for seriousness today, the persuasiveness of fascism and its attendant cult of suffering darkens every hope of transcendence.
Running is plagued by the ascendance of suffering as an ideal. It pervades both outsiders, who think we’re nuts, and dedicated adherents, who think running is really about “mental strength” or some such bullshit. I still remember seeing “my sport is your sport’s punishment” printed on the back of a middle schooler’s singlet. Supposedly, we runners just love to punish ourselves.
The implication is that through suffering, a person’s honor or nobility is revealed. American runner Steve Prefontaine (beloved for such quotes) once said, “The best pace is a suicide pace, and today looks like a good day to die.” For Prefontaine and those like him, the true subject of a race is not physical performance, but moral virtue. Thus, a certain type of runner develops immense anxiety not about the outcome of the race itself but about whether or not they tried hard enough, whether or not they are suffering enough.
One might hope that the new wave of running influencers could correct this. The emphasis these days is on fitness for everybody, on welcoming newcomers, on body positivity rather than the grind. But as running becomes more relative, and comparison with others is discouraged, the only person left to compete with is yourself. Once again, all that remains is the exhausting, boring obsession with doing your best. In this way, the contemporary turn against hardcore fitness is ironically the most hardcore thing possible.
Sontag’s alternative to suffering as an ideal emerges most clearly in her approach to art and criticism. Sontag still believes that seriousness is possible for the artist and the critic. It is this alternative which can save us from nihilism. She makes this explicit in “One Culture and the New Sensibility.” Art, to Sontag, is an extension of life rather than merely a means of its study or critique, and the humanist Luddite’s anxiety that we will descend into an artless world is really an anxiety that the old standards of seriousness are no longer relevant. But “there are new standards, new standards of beauty and style and taste,” Sontag writes. “The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia.” The demise of old gods opens the door to radical freedom as well as stifling nihilism. The new sensibility chooses the former.
Sontag gives this sensibility a name in “Notes on Camp.” The essay, if one can call this fifty-eight pointed saunter an essay, describes a certain kind of taste arising in sophisticated urban cliques around the turn of the twentieth century. Camp takes the inadequacy of the old standards as a given. It has, as Nietzsche did, looked into the eyes of the basilisk. Since failure is expected, “in naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” It might appear that this is no more than another variant of the cult of suffering—the appreciation of works of art merely for the great ambition and effort exhibited therein. But this is not quite right.
Camp aims for the extraordinary, “not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort,” but also in aesthetics, theatricality, and humor. Sontag writes, “Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.” It exists in relation to these two ideals, championed by Pavese and Riefenstahl, respectively. Next to their quasi-spiritual aspirations, the Camp sensibility may seem hard to justify. But, however frivolous we think its masterpieces (King Kong and Swan Lake included), it enjoys them without reservation and without the demand of sacrifice.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote that, “We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float above it and play.” For Sontag, the new sensibility offers just this possibility of transcendence that she hopes to achieve through Camp. Serious intellects can turn away from the fetish of suffering. We need not shroud our desires in cloaks of suffering. The alternative is intimidating, but it is earnest, and it is noble.
Steeped in the old academic seriousness but longing for a new transcendence, Sontag personally sought an alternative to the ascetic ideal. While still in college in 1949, she wrote, “I intend to do everything…to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful.” For the most serious American intellectual of the past hundred years, suffering was a temptation to be avoided. Reading her journals, one wants to tell her to stop trying so hard, to relax every once in a while. But the strength of Camp is that exertion need not carry the burden of suffering. Free of the old contradictions, Sontag emerges a master of herself.
It is true that running races can be very painful. But the ability to suffer is not what holds mediocre runners back from being great ones. Professional runners are not (for the most part) ascetic monks or spiritual fanatics. Like most professional athletes, they are usually disciplined individuals blessed with extreme talent. Some of them upload their workouts to YouTube—you can watch the gracefulness of their stride, their playful banter under exertion, and their control at unthinkable paces. Sometimes, one does get the impression that these are born competitors, racing a 200 just for kicks or emptying the tank to see what they’ve got. More often, one senses that they just love running.
I am not a professional runner, but I am okay at it. So, I conclude with some advice to fellow runners.
One, do not stress too much about doing your best. It is not, in the end, all that complicated. It is vital that you try, but effort does not come in degrees. You are either trying, or you are not.
Two, do not glamorize the pain of racing. The theater of suffering serves no noble purpose. There are other, worthier ideals. They include self-control, discipline, and excellence as well as sportsmanship, teamwork, and love.
Three, enjoy running. Hopefully one can still summon some of the naïveté of children darting about to blow off steam. But if not, there are other ways of appreciation, sensibilities which see beauty and find joy in the striving itself.
Fourth and finally, take running seriously. It is easy to misinterpret Sontag as an advocate of taking art less seriously, of “letting people enjoy things,” as we might say these days. But, thirty years after the publication of Against Interpretation, Sontag bemoans that “the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendency of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries.”
Camp of a degraded sort is now the default position, bastardized from its original conception. Camp, utilized properly, is not an excuse for frivolousness, but “a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’” Sontag dismissed the old seriousness because she found it depressing in Pavese’s martyrdom, disturbing in Riefenstahl’s politics, and limiting in Weil’s appeal. But this is no reason to abandon the serious. If we hold the basilisk’s gaze, a rebirth is possible.
Sontag still believed that transcendence through ideas, through art, was possible. Just so with running. We are free to treat it like the trivial, earthly pursuit that it is. But if life is to be worth living (and we are to live honestly), then transcendence must be possible here on the dirt: eyes forward, arms pumping, knees driving, one foot after the other.
Image: Robert Delaunay, Les Coureurs, oil on canvas, 1930 (private collection).