The Spiritual & Moral Significance of (Apparent) Violence in The Martial Art, Aikido
as presented at
PHILOSOPHY & The MARTIAL ARTS CONFERENCE
The University of Melbourne
14-15.10.2006
ABSTRACT
Aikido is a way of harmonising oneself with the natural energies of the universe. While people have attempted to achieve this same feat via such measures as throwing oneself into a volcano (al la Empedocles), or surfing the planet’s biggest waves, or playing sports like soccer, or even by meditating, practisers of Aikido use the physical bodies of their fellow partners as their cosmic sounding boards … and why not? What better, more nuanced and receptive part of the universe could a human being hope to find than in direct contact with another human being? But Aikido professes to be far more than a merely physical endeavour: it is, moreover, a primarily spiritual and moral art. However, such a claim – although not uncommon to the martial arts in general – is often met with incredulity by those unschooled in the attendant philosophies of martial arts such as Aikido. They ask, ‘How can what is seemingly a technique for fighting legitimately claim to be a spiritual and moral practise?’ It is this question that I shall seek to answer by drawing on the philosophy of religion advanced by Ludwig Feuerbach and later adopted by Sigmund Freud. The suggested thesis is this: the apparent violence of Aikido is indeed essential to its spiritual and moral claims.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper was inspired by a paper entitled, ‘The Spiritual Significance of Aikido’ by Professor Ralph Pettman (Department of Political Science, The University of Melbourne).
Those who are enlightened never stop forging themselves. The realisation of such masters cannot be expressed well in words or by theories. The most perfect actions echo the patterns found in nature.
The Art of Peace. #40
O-Sensei Morihei Uyeshiba
(Founder of Aikido. 1883-1969)
INTRODUCTION
This paper seeks to explain the moral and spiritual significance of (apparent) violence in the martial art, Aikido. In this endeavour, I shall first describe the philosophy behind the physical practise of the art. Then, moving on exposit the moral and spiritual dimensions this practise is commonly thought to bear, I shall spend some time establishing the thesis that a Cartesian disunity between mind and world is a phenomenon that is all too common in the life of most people, and that some of life’s pursuits are better than others at addressing this discord. Here, Aikido is argued to be a prime candidate, as it is conscientiously directed towards training one’s body in such a way that it will better allow the mind to happily reunite and harmonise with the world. Moreover, that it does so by transcending violence – an especially prevalent source of fear for many people – is shown to accord well with the theory that belief in God arises out of a psychological inability to cope with the thought that there are things beyond one’s own control. While this theory has traditionally been a particularly cynical one, I will attempt to rescue both it and Aikido from such a negative light.
THE ART OF PEACE
Aikido is, as it etymology suggests, a way (do) for achieving harmony or union (ai) with the universal energy or spirit (ki). In part, the way of attaining such a harmony of energy is thought to consist in the physical training of what may prima facie seem to be little more than elaborately graceful, techniques of self-defence. In this pursuit, the practitioner of Aikido learns (to the best of their ability) only the most rudimentary and stylised of attacks. These are necessary only insofar as they allow one’s partner to practise aikido proper. That is, it allows them to defend themselves against an attack. As Morihei Uyeshiba (the art’s founder) put it: “In [Aikido,] we never attack. An attack is proof that one is out of control.” Thus, in training, an attacker (uke) is only so in performance. The defender (nage), in remaining consistent with this essentially non-aggressive philosophy, must not become an attacker either. “To injure an opponent,” Uyeshiba tells us, “is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.” Such is the essence of aikido; the success of any engagement is determined as much by one’s ability to protect one’s opponent, as it is in protecting oneself. To accomplish this seemingly paradoxical feat, the Aikido practitioner will not meet force with force, for such conflict inevitably does violence to the pursuit of harmony and peace. Rather, Aikido single-mindedly seeks to ‘enter into’ and harmonize with the energy of another, so as to render any previous opposition as nothing. Again, as Uyeshiba says: “In our techniques we enter completely into, blend totally with, and firmly control an attack.” And again, though more poetically:
If your opponent strikes with fire, counter with water, becoming completely fluid and free-flowing. Water, by its nature, never collides with or breaks against anything. On the contrary, it swallows up an attack harmlessly.”
So much, then, for the physical, technical side of things; but Aikido professes to be far more than a merely physical skill. It claims, moreover, to be a way to attaining moral and spiritual enlightenment – of achieving union with the spirit of the universe. Just how it is thought to do this should already be partly apparent from the physical aspect of the art: the Aikido practitioner trains their body so that, contrary to the untutored instinct of meeting force with force, it instead becomes second-nature to envelop the other’s energy and spirit into one’s own. That such ability will bring with it concomitant psychological and emotional changes should come as little surprise; it isn’t difficult to imagine, for instance, the intense degree of feeling that one must gain in knowing that, as a proficient Aikido practitioner, for you, there can be no attacker – no enemy. It is, however, more difficult to imagine the form this feeling ought to take.
To better illustrate this point, my own Aikido teacher, Ralph Pettman, relates the story of a young Terry Dobson (a student of Uyeshiba and the introducer of Aikido to America), who, on a busy Tokyo train, encountered a large, loud, and aggressive drunk, going about terrorising other passengers. Having long yearned to use his skills in a real-life context, Dobson felt that this drunk promised the perfect opportunity … and so he blew a provocative little kiss the drunk’s way. But, just as the drunk was about charge unsuspectingly into the highly talented Dobson, a little old man sitting nearby called out in a friendly way. As Ralph goes on to tell the story:
The drunk, distracted but still in a rage, went to menace the old man. But the old man wasn’t menaced. Instead he chatted on in a carefree manner about the pleasures of alcohol, about sharing a drink with his wife, and about his garden.
The drunk’s anger suddenly drained away. He began to cry. His anger had actually been despair. He began to sob out his story. He was lonely and homeless and unemployed. He had none of the things the Japanese good life was supposed to provide. By the time Dobson left the train, the drunk was lying with his head in the old man’s lap, while the old man, still chatting away, was patting head.
Dobson was mortified. He had wanted a fight. He had wanted to use his [training] to create order by force. He had been more interested in conflict than in conflict resolution. It was the old man who had defused the situation, and what’s more, he’d done so with just one strategic shout and his friendly chatter. It was the old man who had used aikido.
Dobson felt, he [said], “dumb and brutal and gross”. He had seen kindness triumph without violence. He had seen real reconciliation at work. He [had] seen real aikido.
MIND & WORLD
The underlying supposition of this story is that there can often be disunity between, what in West would be called, the Cartesian duality of mind and world. Both the practise and the philosophy of Aikido suggest that, insofar as one’s body can be trained to harmonize with, and thereby tame, what is all too often a hostile world, it can allow the mind to peacefully (i.e. harmoniously) come out of its Cartesian shell into the full light of the world. My teacher’s anecdote about Terry Dobson and the drunk suggests that Dobson had, up until that time, misconstrued the goal of his physical training. He had thought of it as physically generating for his mind (or, more properly, his ego) the confidence to manifest itself in the world as a dominating force; one that the old man revealed was not at all in harmony with the world at all.
To better illustrate how this disunity can take form in the first place, permit me to briefly recount a story from my own personal experience, of the first time I realised that I would one day die:
A mere child, I had gone to bed one night while my parents stayed up watching television. As I lay in the dark, trying to get to sleep, I semi-consciously overheard the program’s narrator discussing the year 1976 … two years before I was born! Without warning, my mind suddenly disconnected from the world that had until then been its assumed natural home, and instead I now found myself tumbling uncontrollably through the dark void of eternity: there had been a time when the world existed without me … and nobody had cared … nobody even noticed that I wasn’t there. Presumably, the same would be true when I died: private non-existence and public disinterest. The world as I knew it, had been revealed as nothing more than a dream-like window into an existence far beyond my influence and control. My mind raced as it considered what had previously been to me uninteresting notions of fame, power, money, adoration, progeny, etc. However, as I soon realised, all of these not uncommon goals, if sought after only in themselves, can be nothing more than thinly veiled, though utterly futile ways of trying to counteract this feeling of disunity between mind and world. In contrast to this, Uyeshiba wrote of his own enlightened aikido experience: “I had become free from all desire, not only for position, fame and property, but also to be strong.”
There are, however, innumerable ways of successfully achieving union and harmony with the energy and spirit of the universe – of overcoming the Cartesian divide of mind and world. Aikido is but one. Indeed, as I understand it, the ‘good life’ consists primarily of a personally tailored integration of many of the possible ways into a whole, well-rounded existence.
Some of the more typical sources of attaining such unity are found in friendship, charity, art, gardening, cooking, etc. Characteristic to each of these pursuits is a sense of harmony and peace. They are not competitive in any sense of conflict or domination.
Other, less common, though perhaps more blatant sources include downhill skiing, mountaineering, dancing, playing music, hang-gliding, tow-in surfing, Pure Mathematics, Philosophy, and love (both emotional and physical). That which distinguishes these examples from the previous ones is the magnitude of manifest energy and spirit that one must either succeed in entering into and harmonizing with … or else perish by. Take tow-in surfing, as a prime example: commonly associated with riding the Earth’s biggest waves, it is almost impossible to imagine what it must feel like, barrelling along, meters above sea-level, balancing precariously on thousands of tons of water that threaten to come violently crashing down on top of you if you make the slightest error in judgement and action. To think of these extreme sportsmen and women, I cannot help but be reminded of Immanuel Kant’s conception of the dynamically sublime:
… the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force … makes[s] our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with [its] might. But, provided our own position is secure, [its] aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call [such] objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of Nature.
And yet this account is no less a flight of the imagination than was mine: aesthetic enjoyment of the dynamically sublime, as Kant has it, is experienced by safely imagining oneself and one’s will in relation to the uncontrollable might and will of Nature. But, if this is the case – if it is merely a conceptual imagining – then it is essentially a lesser category of aesthetic judgement than its supposed counterpart, the mathematically sublime. In the latter case, one’s conceptual faculties are indeed happily constrained by the paradoxes of the infinite; but in the former, it is only via a degree of conceptual self-restraint that one can imagine their will being happily constrained by ‘the seeming omnipotence of Nature’; it is quite possible to imagine otherwise. And yet, rather than demote the aesthetic category of dynamically sublime, I suggest the tow-in surfer and their kin offer the perfect alternative as to how it may still be fully realised without compromise. By enveloping the might of Nature with both their mind and body, the tow-in surfer surely ‘discovers with them, a power of resistance of quite another kind’. That is, a resistance that is no resistance at all. As Uyeshiba wrote, “Your mind should be in harmony with the functioning of the universe; your body should be in tune with the movement of the universe; body and mind should be bound as one, unified with the activity of the universe.”
If this isn’t sublime, I don’t know what is.
With these alternative ways of successfully overcoming the Cartesian divide in mind, let us return momentarily to consider why other equally common goals of fame, power, wealth, adoration and the like, are, as I said, utterly futile if sought after in themselves.
Firstly, let us consider to what extent they can indeed be ‘sought after in themselves’.
The earlier examples of potentially successful ways of harmonise one’s mind with the world, can be legitimately sought after as ends in themselves. Indeed, if they are sought after merely as means to some other end, then surely the effect of metaphysical unity will be hindered. For example, one doesn’t need to learn how to garden for any other reason than for the sake of gardening itself. That, say, an apprentice to a gardening business can learn to garden merely as a means to earning a salary, only shows that –
in agreement with sentiment expressed by the anecdote about Terry Dobson, the drunk and the old man – disunity between mind and world can exist if one’s pursuits are misguided.
In the case of the ways of fame, power, money, etc. it makes little sense to seek after them in themselves; what good is fame, power and money, if not as means to some other end? For those who claim to seek after such things in and for themselves, I maintain that it is can only ever a thinly veiled, though utterly futile way of trying to counteract this feeling of disunity between mind and world.
To illustrate this point, take Jean-Paul Sartre’s obsession with literary fame as a peculiarly explicit manifestation of such a phenomenon:
I had long been afraid of ending up as I had begun, somewhere or other, somehow or other, and that this vague death would be merely the reflection of my vague birth … [to counteract this] I would start by giving myself an everlasting body … I would not write for the pleasure of writing but to carve this glorious body in words …
… [as a book] my bones are leather and cardboard, my parchment flesh smells of glue and mildew, and I strut at my ease across a hundredweight or so of paper. … I flash, dazzle, impose myself from a distance; my powers traverse space and time, strike down the wicked and protect the good. No one can forget me or pass over me in silence … My consciousness is in fragments: all the better. Other consciousnesses have taken charge of me. They read me and I leap to their eyes; they talk about me and I am on everyone’s lips, a universal and similar language … I exist nowhere but I am, at last! I am everywhere …
… This conjuring-trick succeeded: I buried death in the shroud of glory. I thought only of the glory, never of death …
… I believed myself to be immortal: I had killed myself in advance because only the dead can enjoy immortality … I chose for a future the past of a famous dead man, and I tried to live backwards … I became entirely posthumous …
In this quest to achieve immortality through literary fame – to irrevocably secure his conscious mind its place in the world – it must be admitted that Jean-Paul Sartre had more success than most. For instance, it is estimated that over 50,000 people attended his funeral in Paris of 1980. However, in a description given by one of the mourners present that day, it is suggested that perhaps all was not as it should be:
I was surprised at the lack of fervor in the multitude. No one in that solitary, laconic, almost ironic coterie of mourners seemed willing to participate in the burning rituals of a true funeral as we understood it in the countries that Sartre had himself defended so fervently.
Not a shout, no tears, no fury. [It was] as if they were bidding farewell to a book rather than a human being. Only in the grieving face of Simone de Beauvoir — glimpsed through the window of her car — was the consternation of a lost love manifestly present.
Although it is fair to assume this elegist had also read Sartre’s autobiography, Words, the manifest futility of seeking fame and adoration in themselves is patently obvious here. As Martin Heidegger wrote when Sartre was only in his early twenties, “Dying, which is essentially mine in such a way that no one can be my representative, is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the “they” encounters.”
Money, fame, power, adoration, and the like cannot be sought after in themselves for they are never proper ends. They cannot be, for they are antithetical to peace and harmony; their nature is essentially conflict and domination. This is why so many people feel such a deep-seated disquietude at the ideologies of Consumerism and Capitalism, for they know that true happiness and unity cannot be brought about the greed of perpetuated discontent – of conflict and domination.
THE SACRED AND THE SCARED
“Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing. Bravely face whatever the gods offer.”
The Art of Peace. #70
O-Sensei Morihei Uyeshiba
But if there are so many different ways of successfully or unsuccessfully attaining harmony with the spirit and energies of the universe, what makes Aikido significantly unique? What distinguishes it from, for instance, Yoga, flamenco dancing, down-hill skiing, love-making, and the like?
The answer is, of course, its unique moral and spiritual claims. As the preceding sections have been geared to establishing, Aikido is a way of training one’s body to interact with the world in such a way that it will allow the once disconnected mind to happily reunite, harmonise and fully integrate with the world around it. However, in contrast to the other more mundane and/or secular ways of generating this phenomenon, in order to explain why Aikido claims an explicitly spiritual significance, we can draw upon a theory that has been held in various manifestations by such thinkers as Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and many more. This theory can be stated roughly as follows: belief in God arises when one is unable to psychologically cope with the thought that things are irrevocably beyond one’s own control.
So, for instance, in the earliest stages of human civilisation, the fact that the success of the harvest was so utterly dependent upon seasonal factors, and that the slightest aberration in these could spell complete ruin for a society, is thought to have lead to the people’s deep frustrations, anxieties, and desperation being placated by the very appealing thought that Nature has something of an anthropomorphic character; i.e. one that can be appealed to with sacrificial offerings and the like. Similarly, young children (and perhaps some puerile adults), with relatively unsophisticated conceptions of the divine, often will pray for the most trivial and otherwise seemingly random things to occur. (It is in contrast to this naivety that we (theist or not) can appreciate the wisdom of the serenity prayer.) Finally, even of adults of the highest religious sophistication, the theory holds that, although they may well acknowledge that God’s will is beyond both their influence and ken, the psychological significance of their belief in the divine is such that it provides comfort in the face of what may otherwise be seen as a blind, uncaring and absurd existence.
With this in mind, it is illuminating to note that the idea of physical violence perpetrated by the other is, for many, a great source of fear and, as such, a not uncommon cause for disunity between the mind and world. Aikido explicitly claims, both in philosophy and in practise, to be able to control and overcome this source of fear. As Uyeshiba wrote: “Life is always a trial. In training, you must test and polish yourself in order to face the great challenges of life. Transcend the realm of life and death, and then you will be able to make your way calmly and safely through any crisis that confronts you.”
Of course, a person without this particular source of anxiety may not find the same spiritual significance in Aikido as others do. Take the amazing case of Sophie Delezio, for instance: severely injured in 2003 when a car crashed through the wall of her childcare centre as she slept, just this year she was again hit by a car as her parents pushed her in her pram across a pedestrian crossing. Imagining that she (quite understandably) grows up with a fear of cars, for Sophie Delezio, a spiritually liberating martial art may have to able to train her to jump with lighting quick reflexes into a roll that not only would prevent her from making anything more than a gentle caress of an oncoming car’s hood, but also would allow her to seamlessly slip her hand in through the sun-roof or window so as to turn off the engine with just enough to time to stop the car from crashing.
While this scenario may seem somewhat fatuous, when we take into consideration that Morihei Uyeshiba, as a child, was deeply traumatised by witnessing his own father being severely beaten by a group of thugs, we can better sympathise with this way of thinking whilst reading Uyeshiba’s description of the enlightenment and the knowledge of ‘God’s love’ that he gained when he first ‘discovered’ Aikido: as he wrote, “God’s love [is] the spirit of loving protection for all beings.”
CONCLUSION
As Charles Taylor points out in his homage to William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, theists are often regarded by atheists as being too scared to face up to the realities of the world. It is unmistakable that such a view is intimately connected with the theory that belief in God arises out a psychological inability to cope with the thought that certain things are irrevocably beyond one’s control. However, I do not think that with respect to Aikido, the latter theory warrants the former censure. Indeed, with respect to the spiritual and moral claims of Aikido, I suspect that the latter theory, in its tendency to evoke the former censure, also requires something of a reinterpretation if it is to be deemed acceptable.
To claim that the Aikido practitioner is psychologically unable to face up to the reality of the world being a violent place is true only insofar as they have taken steps to change this fact. For the proficient Aikido practitioner, the very possibility of violent hand-to-hand engagement has vanished. This is not a religion of smoke and mirrors. As Uyeshiba wrote: “[Aikido] is the religion that is not a religion; it perfects and completes all religions.” In part, at least, it must do so by providing pragmatically meaningful and effective rites and rituals.
Speaking personally, I have been a long committed Pacifist; morality, as I understand it, consists in living the way you want the world to live ideally. So, if you think that the world would be a better place without violence, then, you yourself must not be violent. It’s much like when people attempt to quit smoking: the only way to stop smoking is by not smoking; all the other nonsense that people might tell themselves is superfluous to the fact of whether or not they put a cigarette in their mouths and smoke it.
The problem with this, though, is the thought that, if faced with a violently threatening situation, one’s emotions and instincts might get the better of one – that one’s Pacifism was only academic. Of course, this is exactly the same kind of nonsense that smokers will say to themselves and thereby undermine their commitment to the facts of the matter. But, Aikido promises, here and now, a pragmatic means of securing to the world what might have otherwise been only an academically fantasy of the mind. That is, it silences the nonsense with pragmatic means.
I have only been practicing Aikido for a very short time. I have yet to experience the enlightenment and knowledge of God’s love that Uyeshiba spoke of. And yet, nonetheless, from my other experiences of more or less mundane ways of transcending the Cartesian divide, coupled with my understanding of the morality of Aikido, I have a confidence in the spiritual and moral significance of the martial art, Aikido, and I hope that I have gone some way in explaining how this is understandably so.
ROSS BARHAM, 2006
