Running as Art: Tolerance, Temperament, and the Ineffable

This article gives a poetic argument that bodily practices such as those of the devoted runner can revitalize experience through regular encounters with the ineffable. It also argues that language—particularly the language of philosophy—tends to strip experience of its ineffable qualities, reducing lived experience to what can be expressed. Nonverbal and bodily practices can point toward a richer sense of experience, thereby offering a critical view of ways in which an overly linguistic form of contemporary life diminishes experience by ignoring the ineffable. A few critical concepts in the work of a set of antiphilosophers (Nietzsche, James, Wittgenstein, Foucault) are explored as entry points into a more robust philosophical discourse that does less violence to the ineffable qualities of experience.