Games of Sport, Works of Art, and the Striking Beauty of Asian Martial Arts

Abstract

Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and works of performance art, especially dance.

KEYWORDS:

• Martial Arts
• sport
• dance
• aesthetics

Notes

1. For observations on the contemporary practice of Asian martial arts in Western countries, see Cox 1993, Donohue 1994, McFarlane 2001, Nosanchuk 1981, Wai Man Tsang et al. 2008.

2. On Indian martial arts, Alter 1992, Draeger and Smith 1969. On Mesopotamia and Greece, Poliakoff 1982.

3. On Bodhidharma, McRae 2003, ch. 2. On his connection to martial arts and its late coming, Henning 1999, 324–5.

4. Bäck (2009) also emphasizes the difference between martial arts and sport, especially in terms of competition, and the difference from dance. He thinks the preoccupation with handling violence gives martial arts practice a realism sport and art lack.

5. See Morgan 1994, Weiss 1969.

6. On constitutive rules, Searle 1995.

7. On internal goods of practice, MacIntyre 1981.

8. See for example Lowe 1977, Whiting and Masterson, 1974.

9. I defend the assumption in Allen 2008.

10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment sect. 16.

11. Sparshott 1988, 253. On ‘endotelic’, see Ducasse 1929..

12. White 1966, 293–4; Sparshott 1988, 318–22.

13. For the record I have trained Asian martial arts (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) for 10 years, and hold a black belt (first dan) in Korean Hapkido.

14. On the history and theory of kata, see Johnson 2000. I cannot concur with Bäck’s explanation of a ‘(traditional) martial art’ as ‘a way or method for enlightenment on the human condition through the ritualized practice of techniques designed to neutralize violence’ (Bäck 2009, 217, my emphasis). If he had said conventionalized practice, that is, practice governed by certain conventions, mainly for safety, I would agree. But I understand ‘ritual’ to imply symbolic reference, and that, I argue, has practically no place in ‘traditional martial arts’.

15. See Bäck and Kim 1982.

16. Sparshott 1995, 62.

17. On gender and martial arts, Petersen 2010.

18. On corporeal understanding, Csepregi 2006, Sheets-Johnstone 2011.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barry Allen

Barry Allen is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]