Hey Gang,
Today I want to talk to you about freedom. Back in 1788 a guy named Immanuel Kant published a book called The Critique of Practical Reason. This was the follow up to the Critique of Pure Reason and, along with the Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant took a very good shot at figuring out how it is a person comes to be conscious, what it is possible for man to know, how we derive an ethical law and what it means for us to understand nature and art in terms of beauty.
In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant sets out to ground the basis of an ethical system in the possibility for human consciousness. This way, while relative to each individual it retains universality because it is one of the
“gainz bruh, get’m”
-Immanuel Kant
prerequisites for consciousness itself. I could go on at length about the subjectively universal ethics of Kant, but I want to focus here on the concept of Freedom that comes out of this book and how it relates to our lives in general and specifically the upcoming workout season.
Kant specifically points to freedom as what makes it possible to (amongst other things) hold humans accountable for moral and ethical action. But what is freedom? Often times we think of freedom as the freedom to do. Freedom to go where we want. Freedom to purchase something, to eat something, to travel, etc. But Kant says that this is wrong. Man has long been understood as being half way between angel and ape (or as Tibor Fischer eloquently puts it “a god who shits”). Like the angels we have a conscious mind and like the apes we have animal instincts.
So while it seems that our Freedom is based on how often we can say “yes” to something, Kant argues that it is
The struggle is real
how often we can say “no” that really expresses ourselves as free. A dog can stop and take a shit wherever he wants while we hold it until we get to a proper place. By denying our animal instinct to shit, to eat, to fuck or do anything that an animal can do with no higher valuation we are telling our animal selves “no” which is something an animal cannot do on its own, without repetitive training. The ability to restrict ourselves, for Kant, is something that is uniquely human in this physical world.
So you may be asking yourself what the fuck any of this has to do with the iron and with our upcoming lifting
It’s Sunday. It’s 75 degrees and clear skies. You are in your kitchen cooking because you exercised your freedom
season. That is a fair question. During this season you are going to be tempted by a lot of things; food, sleep, taking it easy because you are sore….all these things will be in your nature to listen to. You are tired and it is in your nature not to wake up at 430 am to go hit the gym. You are hungry and it is in your nature to grab a burger and fries. It is Sunday and it is in your nature to enjoy your day not to meticulously food prep. But this is not the action of freedom it seems. What this is is allowing you base animal instinct to over rule your mind.
This is not a game just for the body. I have said it a million times, two identical people can go to a gym and do the same workout and eat the same diet and get different results based wholly on one being focused and present and the other just going through the motions. If you want your results to be extreme you have to train extreme and part of that will be exerting your free will in denying some of the base things your body is asking for.
I would suggest you all try this at least once a week. Catch yourself being offered something you want and turn it
There are no shortcuts—everything is reps, reps, reps. If you don’t find the time, if you don’t do the work, you don’t get the results
down. Train your mind to know how to say no to your body. If reason is not guiding us, if we are going in blind, without our mind connected, without a plan and without our focus we will limit the ability of our body to grow. Think of our strength and our courage as two great horses and our mind being the carriage rider that drives them. It is only by telling them no that they will ever achieve the goal set for them.
Grind on!