The martial arts as Ars Concordia

In the age of the atomization of contemporary aesthetic practices, this essay investigates the aesthetics of Japanese martial arts, as a coherent system of practices and values, too often mistaken for “combat sports.” The former arguably do amount to a specific form of “art,” i.e. behavioral rules aiming at bringing a specific praxis or production to the highest degree of perfection, ultimately leading to the notion of the perfection of the self (a concept susceptible to being defined in various ways, depending on localized cultural conceptions). We will compare the aesthetics of ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arrangement) and of Shinto religious practices such as kototama with the notion of martial arts or bugei, literally the art (gei) of blocking up a spear (bu). What Western interpreters often mistook for an “art of war” is actually an “art of peace.” Japanese martial arts thus often rely on notions that came to be well-known in the Western world, such as ki (energy), but also on a series of concepts that remain thoroughly misunderstood to this day, such as shin (heart-spirit), ma (space-time) or aï (the One). This article tries to clarify these notions, based on a detailed analysis of an artistic practice known as kinomichi, founded by Masamichi Noro as a new version of aikido: ultimately, bugei amount to a form of education, an attempt at elevating the body and the soul similar to other artistic practices such as music or dance.