Skip to main content

A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body


 Latin phrase, "mens sana in corpore sano," originally from a poem by Juvenal, didn't mean in context what you probably think. 

It is usually quoted as an ideal. "We should be more like the ancient Romans, who knew that the healthy mind requires a healthy body and vice versa." 

It is used to encourage bookish wonks to get out of the library and spend some time in the gym. It is also used in contexts like that of Simone Biles' withdrawal from most of  her Olympic events, to explain that, though her body has been gloriously healthy for years as exhibited in many competitions, she is wise for her to realize that her mental health needs attention too.

But, the thing is, that isn't what Juvenal mean. He wasn't using the phrase "mens sana in corpore sano" as an ideal. He was objecting to the decay of morals.

Here is a rough paraphrase of the sense of the passage:

"In my day, we were Stoics. We did our duty in serving Rome whatever it cost us. We thought nothing of sacrificing life or limb for Rome. We undertook tasks that had a good chance of driving us MAD for the sake of Rome.  But these selfish kids of the new generation? Nooooooo. They just want their healthy mind in their healthy body." 

It cheers me immensely to learn of this original significance. 

On the other hand, anyone who thinks the phrase does state an ideal is entitled to that view. Original intent is no kind of rule either in literary criticism or in its lawyerly constitutional analog. 

You take your inspiration where you find it.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more