The Philosophy of Boxing

People who learn that I box usually ask me some version of the same question. I spend most of my days writing code and papers, and several mornings a week I put on gloves and let someone try to hit me in the head. Why would anyone choose that? And why do so many people, most of them men, pay to watch others do it, when we now know what repeated blows do to the brain? At times the question baffles me too.

When I first wrote this essay, in the spring of 2024, I answered a narrower question, which was what boxing had done for me and what it taught me about flow. That answer still stands, and it makes up the second half of what follows. But the more fundamental question deserves a direct attempt. I have come to think that two answers, one from Freud’s Vienna and one from seventeenth-century Japan, between them cover most of the ground, and that the Japanese one, together with an older Chinese one, is closer to the truth.

How It Started

I have always had a problem with anger and anxiety, for as long as I can remember. Perhaps that is why I wanted to become a stronger person, not only physically but mentally. Our lives are always bound by constraints, whatever state we are in and whatever age we are, which makes the struggle a universal one. The summer and fall of 2023 were particularly hard for me, so much so that I had to find a way to harden myself. Without going into details, emotional turmoil and failures in my academic work left me with frustration and self-loathing strong enough that I needed an outlet.

I started in my old way, by reading books, this time the self-help bestsellers that preach positivity and, more recently, Stoicism. Stoicism is a school of philosophy well worth studying, but whenever something becomes this popular, one should keep a skeptical mind. Tyler Durden says in Fight Club that “self-improvement is masturbation,” and in my case the books did not work. After many nights of insomnia and days of what Thoreau called quiet desperation, I can say with some confidence that books do not solve problems. So instead of asking you to read a long article on self-help, I will simply give you the better way:

For me that activity turned out to be boxing. For some people who live near the beach it is surfing, but few are lucky enough to live near the beach. The word taxing is essential. The activity should demand a great deal of effort, which in practice means some kind of sport, because otherwise one loses interest too quickly, in the way a quick dopamine rush fades. It should also have growth built into it, so that you can measure yourself against yourself, since that is where the sense of fulfillment comes from.

Boxing did more than release the stress, the anxiety and the anger. It became a pursuit of its own and made me a more disciplined person. It also left me with the question that people keep asking me, which I want to take seriously before I describe what boxing gave me.

Why Fight?

Boxing is unusual among sports in that hurting the opponent is not a side effect but the objective. Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote the best book I know about it, began by refusing the usual defense: “I have no difficulty justifying boxing as a sport because I have never thought of it as a sport.” She also refused to treat it as a metaphor for something else. Life may be like boxing in many ways, she wrote, but “boxing is only like boxing.”Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, 1987 (expanded edition 1994).

The appetite for watching it is very old. In his Confessions, Augustine tells the story of his friend Alypius, a law student in Rome who detested the gladiatorial games until some friends dragged him to the amphitheater. He kept his eyes shut, resolved to take no part, until a roar went up from the crowd and curiosity made him open them. “For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness,” Augustine writes. He “was delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime,” and by the end he “was one of the throng he came unto.”Augustine, Confessions VI.8, translated by J. G. Pilkington. Augustine’s point is that the appetite belongs to the crowd and takes over the person who joins it. That is the spectator’s side of boxing, the side that sells tickets, and it is a different thing from what happens to the person in the ring, though the two are often confused. I can speak with any authority only about the second.

The cost is real, and any honest philosophy of boxing has to begin with it. In 1928 the pathologist Harrison Martland described the condition of retired fighters who had become slow, unsteady and confused, and called them “punch drunk.” The condition was later named dementia pugilistica, and is now understood as one form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. For professional fighters, the risk appears to grow with exposure: a long-running study of professional boxers and mixed martial artists has reported that more years and more bouts of fighting go with smaller volumes in certain brain regions and slower processing speed. For amateurs, who fight short bouts and often wear headgear, a 2007 systematic review in the BMJ found the evidence too poor to support firm conclusions either way.Martland, “Punch Drunk,” JAMA, 1928; Bernick et al., the Professional Fighters’ Brain Health Study, from 2013; Loosemore, Knowles and Whyte, “Amateur boxing and risk of chronic traumatic brain injury: systematic review of observational studies,” BMJ, 2007. An absence of good evidence is not evidence of safety. Whatever reasons I give below, I give them knowing that every blow to the head carries some cost.

So the question stands. Why do people, mostly men, although women’s boxing has been an Olympic sport since 2012, choose this?

The Death Drive

Sometimes I explain it to myself in Freud’s terms. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud was puzzled by the way people repeat painful experiences, as when soldiers relive their trauma in dreams night after night, or when his grandson played a game of throwing his toys away and pulling them back that seemed to rehearse his mother’s absences. To account for this repetition, Freud proposed that alongside the drives that preserve and extend life there is a drive toward death, a tendency of living things to return to an inorganic state. “The aim of all life is death,” he wrote. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he argued that this drive, turned outward, appears as aggression, and that civilization’s hardest task is to restrain it, at the price of the guilt and unhappiness its members carry. When Einstein asked him in 1932 whether war could be prevented, Freud replied, in the exchange published as Why War?, that human aggression could not be abolished, and that the realistic hope was to divert it so that it need not find expression in war.

Read this way, the ring is one of the places where aggression is diverted. Two people agree to release what civilization asks them to suppress, inside a roped square, under rules, for three minutes at a time. Something in this rings true to me. The anger that brought me to the gym was real, and it had to go somewhere.

But as an explanation the death drive is weak, and Freud knew it. He introduced it by warning that “what follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation,” and most psychologists, and many psychoanalysts, have since set it aside. Its main problem is that it explains too much. A drive toward death can be found behind anything risky that people do, which means it predicts nothing in particular about boxing.

The sociologist Norbert Elias offered a version of the same idea that can actually be tested against history. In The Civilizing Process (1939) he traced how, over centuries, as European states took over the monopoly of violence, people learned ever tighter control over their impulses. Later, with Eric Dunning, he argued that modern sport grew up as an answer to the resulting tedium. Their phrase was “the quest for excitement in unexciting societies”: sport provides a protected space in which feelings that are normally held in check can be released, within rules that keep the release from becoming real violence.Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, 1986. Elias also wrote on the history of boxing in particular. Boxing’s own history fits the argument well. Bare-knuckle prize fighting in England became the modern sport by acquiring rules, and the Marquess of Queensberry rules of 1867 required gloves, three-minute rounds and a count of ten. In Elias’s terms, boxing is not a relic of an age before civilization but one of civilization’s own inventions, a way of keeping a little danger available to people whose lives have otherwise been made safe.

The Sword after the Wars

At other times I think of Miyamoto Musashi, and of a question his life raises. Musashi was born around 1584, near the end of the Sengoku period, Japan’s century of civil wars. Those wars effectively ended with the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and the siege of Osaka in 1615, after which the Tokugawa peace lasted more than two hundred and fifty years. Musashi therefore spent most of his adult life in a country at peace. By his own account in The Book of Five Rings, which he wrote in the cave of Reigandō near Kumamoto in the last two years of his life, he fought his first duel at thirteen and won more than sixty contests by his late twenties. Then, at thirty, he looked back and concluded that those victories had not come from real mastery of strategy. They had come from natural ability, or chance, or the weakness of other schools. He spent the next twenty years searching for the underlying principle, which he felt he finally grasped around the age of fifty.

So why keep perfecting the sword when the wars are over? Musashi’s contemporaries faced versions of the same question, and their answer turned the art of killing into what the Japanese came to call a Way. Yagyū Munenori, sword instructor to the Tokugawa shoguns, wrote in 1632 of the “life-giving sword” as opposed to the “death-dealing sword”: in a time of peace, the sword exists to preserve order and to cultivate the person who carries it. The Zen monk Takuan Sōhō wrote to Munenori, in the letters translated as The Unfettered Mind, that a swordsman’s mind must not stop anywhere, not on the opponent’s sword, not on his own technique, not on the thought of winning, because the moment the mind stops on something, it is caught there and the swordsman is cut. It is the closest thing I know in the older literature to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would later call flow.

Musashi himself carried the answer beyond the sword. In his later years he painted, carved and practiced calligraphy, and The Book of Five Rings says that a person who understands the Way broadly will see it in everything. The painting above is his: a shrike at the tip of a long, bare branch, done in very few strokes. The Japanese martial arts later made the shift explicit in their names. In 1882 Kanō Jigorō founded judo, the “gentle way,” out of jujutsu, the “gentle technique,” and jutsu became dō across many arts, from kendo to karate-do. A technique serves a purpose outside itself; a Way is practiced for what it makes of the practitioner.

The Chinese tradition reached the same place much earlier. In the Zhuangzi, Cook Ding carves an ox for Lord Wenhui so smoothly that his movements fall into the rhythm of a dance. He explains that he no longer sees the ox with his eyes but meets it with his spirit, moving his blade through the natural spaces between the joints, which is why the same knife is still as sharp after nineteen years as the day it was made. The lord says that from the cook he has learned how to care for life. In another chapter, Ji Xingzi trains a fighting cock for a king. Every ten days the king asks whether it is ready. Not yet, Ji Xingzi says the first time: it is vain and relies on its spirit. Not yet, the second time: it still reacts to every sound and shadow. Not yet, the third time: it still glares and bristles. The fourth time he says it is nearly ready. Other cocks crow and it does not stir; it looks like a cock carved of wood. Its virtue is complete, and other birds will not dare to face it but turn and run. The Chinese idiom that comes from this story, 呆若木鸡, “dull as a wooden cock,” now means dumbstruck, but in the story the wooden cock stands for mastery.

My own answer to the question of why anyone fights runs through these stories. Freud is right that the impulse is real; I came to the gym angry. Elias is right that a pacified society needs places where the impulse can be released under rules. But what a practitioner can make of the impulse is what Musashi, Munenori and Zhuangzi describe. When the sword lost its use, its value moved into the person holding it. Nobody today needs to win a fistfight, and boxing has, for a practitioner, lost its use in the same way, which leaves its value in what training makes of you. Done well, training does not make a person more violent but calm in the presence of violence, and the point of all the hours is to become the wooden cock, which wins without needing to fight. That is also why most of the anger that brought me to the gym is gone. I did not vent it so much as outgrow it.

None of this makes the risk disappear, and the spectator who comes for the blood is still at the ringside. But I no longer think the question “why would anyone choose this?” has no good answer.

Discipline

The first thing boxing gave me was discipline. Musashi’s teaching on the subject is the Dokkōdō, “The Way of Walking Alone,” twenty-one short precepts he wrote out a week before his death in 1645. Solitude, discipline and a minimal, self-reliant way of life are its essential themes. Reading them in my room, sitting on a chair, I could follow them intellectually, but they stayed an abstraction, and something crucial was missing. People like Musashi did not have this problem. Those of us living in a modern world full of technology and convenience do, and the problem is this:

That is, get out of the comfortable room and go outside. I began to understand what made Musashi so formidable only when I started practicing his teaching myself: be disciplined, even when you are alone. This first principle turned out to be the hardest, and you may be surprised to find that, before anything else, it requires courage.

Discipline is not a mind trick. You cannot tell yourself to be disciplined and become disciplined; it has to be something you do. It starts with the courage to accept, and then to enjoy, doing difficult things that go against the easier route, and by doing them you overcome yourself. There is a line often attributed to Alfred Adler, though I have not been able to find it in his writings, which says that if you do not strive to be the best version of yourself, you risk becoming a poor copy of someone else. Being the best version of yourself takes courage, and it takes a strong body as well as a strong mind.

This is why boxing has done so much for my discipline. It begins with mastering fear. You have to deal with other people’s punches to your head and body, and in boxing you never close your eyes or look away; you keep your eyes on your opponent’s eyes, or neck, and you do not flinch when a punch comes close. This physical training lays the foundation for facing your other fears. The training is also taxing, with its intense calisthenics, explosive work and cardio, and it forces you to eat better and to pay attention to your choices about pleasure and indulgence. If you are lax, it shows in the ring, and you get beaten. Finally, boxing is an art of solitude, just like the art of the sword. Much of the time you are without a partner and must master shadow boxing, which trains the body and the mind together: you are playing chess with yourself against an imagined opponent, and your mind has to be fully engaged, alone.

For the professionals, discipline is a must even after they have made millions. Marvin Hagler, the undisputed middleweight champion from 1980 to 1987, held his training camps for a decade in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in the dead of winter, when the summer town was empty. A 1982 Sports Illustrated profile describes him running before dawn in army boots along the path from Herring Cove Beach into the dunes. He was mostly alone during those camps, doing roadwork in the morning and training through the day, repeating the same days for weeks. That journey is not so different from Musashi’s, and Hagler remains a great inspiration for young boxers.

Fear and Flow

As I said, the fear in boxing is the fear of being hit and dropped. In the early stages you train not to flinch when a punch comes, and to slip or block it with your eyes wide open. But our animal instinct is to tense up when attacked, and to be truly good, a boxer has to master the art of flowing.

The line was coined by Ali’s cornerman, Drew Bundini Brown, before the first Liston fight in 1964, but it describes Ali exactly. If you tense up, especially in the shoulders, you gas out. If you float, you move better, you are more flexible, and your reflexes may even improve. Ali was a master of this, as his head movement showed, and the same can be said of Canelo Álvarez and Floyd Mayweather. So the second thing boxing teaches is the art of flowing, and analyzed more closely, it is still about overcoming a basic fear.

Tension follows the natural instinct of fear, and relaxation is not a natural state in a combat sport. It is natural to be relaxed in bed or in the bath, as modern comfort has taught us, so how do elite boxers and martial artists train themselves to stay relaxed in intense professional bouts, and especially in heavyweight fights, where one punch can end it? This is exactly Takuan’s question. A mind that stops on the incoming punch freezes the body around it, and a mind that keeps moving lets the body move with it.

My coach says that boxing is about 80% mental and 20% physical, and he is right. This flow requires confidence. An absence of fear is not enough; you also need confidence in your skills. And how do you become confident in your skills? The answer is simple: work hard to improve them. Get the training, overcome the fear, and the confidence follows. It is all easier said than done, and cultivating the flow of boxing can take years of hard work.

The same holds for ordinary work, where we also enjoy entering a state of flow. In my experience the biggest fear there is the fear of being judged by others, and overcoming it, so that you can focus on improving your craft, is the key. Much of the time the fear is entirely self-imposed. Everyone has their own life to get through, and most of the time people care far less about what you do than you imagine, so you might as well do it your way, with the sole aim of not disappointing yourself.

Confidence at work comes from the same place as in the ring. If you are a researcher or an engineer, you know that flow usually arrives in long sessions of deep work, free of distraction, on a craft you enjoy and are good at. So the first step is to find the work that you both enjoy and are good at, and then to stick with it until you feel the rush of confidence that comes from doing it well. But confidence is not contentment. To keep it flowing you have to keep raising the challenge along with your skill. Csikszentmihalyi’s research found the same thing: flow comes when the challenge is matched to your skill and stretches it a little, and it fades into boredom when the challenge stops growing.I wrote about this at more length in The Virtue of Friction.

Dancing and Boxing

Great boxers like Ali and Mayweather dance in the ring, and like dancers, boxers need rhythm to fight. Rhythm shows in their footwork, and a large part of counterpunching is breaking the opponent’s rhythm. This brings me back to the quote from Nietzsche at the top of this essay, that one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

A truly free flow requires an element of chaos. In boxing this is why, at the highest level, we can always expect surprises, with underdogs beating champions. Bruce Lee’s advice to “be like water” need not refer only to laminar flows; it could include turbulent ones as well, to any fluid mechanics readers.

In everyday life, I think we should embrace uncertainty, deliberately inject a little chaos, and treat life somewhat like dancing. Rather than being rigid, try something new each day, challenge yourself in different ways, and explore different opportunities. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of my inspirations, argues that a life lived the same way every day, closed off from uncertainty, is fragile rather than antifragile, and shuts itself off from positive black swans, the unlikely but possible events that can change a life for the better.

Nietzsche loved dancers. His Zarathustra says he would believe only in a god who could dance. I once wondered whether he would have loved boxing too, had it existed in his time, but it did. The Queensberry rules were published in 1867, and John L. Sullivan was a celebrity in the 1880s, though the sport was an English and American spectacle that may never have reached Nietzsche in Basel or the Swiss Alps. Hemingway did box, and it once cost him some pride. In Paris in 1929 he sparred with the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, with F. Scott Fitzgerald keeping time. Fitzgerald let a round run long, Callaghan knocked Hemingway down, and Hemingway blamed the timekeeper. At their highest level, though, boxing and dancing show a similar art, even if one is far more brutal than the other, and as someone who valued creativity and sincerity so highly, Nietzsche would, I think, have recognized the virtue in both as an elevated way of being.

I wrote the first version of this essay, “Boxing and Flow State,” in April 2024, and expanded it in October 2026. I wrote separately about my first bout.