Alan Saunders: There are many areas of human endeavour with which philosophy can be connected. The law, religion, science, mathematics, but martial arts?

Hi, I’m Alan Saunders, this is The Philosopher’s Zone and my guest this week is both a philosopher and a grappler. He’s Damon Young, Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Damon, welcome to the show.

Damon Young: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: To begin with, what is your martial art of choice?

Damon Young: I enjoy quite a few. I’ve trained in karate in the past, that’s what I started with, and then I’ve dabbled in a little bit of fencing and a little bit of aikido and then I found judo, which actually I think is my favourite, but it damaged my neck, and so I haven’t returned to it for awhile, but I think, given the chance, I will return to karate very soon.

Alan Saunders: And you’ve said that combat is at the heart of your scholarly character. What do you mean by that?

Damon Young: Well, there are several reasons. I think the most obvious is that combat teaches you to lose, and lose honestly. And I think sometimes philosophers and scholars in general can squirm and sneak and weasel, and use words to evade. Whereas in martial arts, if you lose, if you’re hit, if you’re put in an arm bar, it’s obvious and it’s often quite painful, and there’s a certain amount of humility involved in that. You get used to testing your techniques, testing your knowledge and they work or they don’t. And I think that’s a really valuable lesson for a lot of philosophers, sort of getting amongst it, so to speak, but learning how to lose with a certain amount of grace, and I suppose that’s the second bit, is that a lot of the martial arts have codified etiquette, where you bow and you say thank you. You must be respectful, and that to me is very good training in knowing how to lose well, knowing how to be grateful for someone despite the fact that they’ve shown you up.

Alan Saunders: Well, we’ll come back later, I think, to the question of etiquette and courtesy, but one thing we should say is that you’re not the first philosophical bruiser. Tell us about Plato.

Damon Young: Yes, Plato’s name was his wrestling nickname. Now, of course, the Greeks were a particularly physical people; they didn’t see the same divide between physical activity and mental activity that we often do. And yes, Plato enjoyed wrestling, and not only that, he recommended wrestling in his sort of utopian state. He thought it was firstly very good physical training, but also a kind of ethical training, a training in how to be patient and upright and courageous. It’s actually quite a shock as a scholar to see that, because there is sometimes a disdain of the fighting arts in the academy, whereas here we find at the very birth of philosophy, the philosopher who was also a martial artist.

Alan Saunders: And he refers in his dialogues to wrestling as a metaphor for moral struggle.

Damon Young: Yes, that’s right. He saw Olympic Games competitors, but also wrestlers, as people who had to control their most violent urges and control their emotions; overcome their weaker impulses for this higher goal. And he said, well, that in itself is an amazing accomplishment, but it’s even better when you do it morally. So for him martial arts were like a step on the path to being ethically righteous.

Alan Saunders: Well, let’s turn to Plato’s pupil Aristotle, and his distinction between ethos and techne. What does that mean, and how is it relevant to martial arts?

Damon Young: Okay, well, techne, a good translation of that is craft or skill, and that’s retained in our technology, for example. And for Aristotle, techne was realising possibilities that couldn’t realise themselves. So, for example, natural possibilities, so medicine was a craft, making tables was a craft, painting was a craft. These were things that wouldn’t happen without your help. They were teachable, they were able to be systemised and they had predictable outcomes. And the good thing about that was you knew what you were getting, so you asked the craftsman, ‘Can you make a table?’ You asked the doctor, ‘Can you heal this man? And they do, so it’s really about predictable skills, it has no necessary ethical dimension whatsoever. You could be a bad man and a fantastic carpenter. By contrast an ethos was a whole way of life, and for Aristotle to cultivate your ethos was to cultivate all your virtues, like temperance, like liberality, like courage, like justice. Now, why is that relevant to martial arts? Well, particularly in the Asian martial arts, but also in some of the western martial arts like fencing, they’re trying to cultivate not just techne, not just skills, but also a whole character, and they believe that the skills of fighting are incomplete without the moral skills to back them up and to compensate for them.

Alan Saunders: Right. And you can’t presumably do without either of these. I mean, techne might make you an effective fighter but it needs to be accompanied by ethos, and ethos won’t make you a good fighter, it might make you, in some sense, a better person. But the two really need to go together.

Damon Young: That’s exactly right, yes. So, when Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear, he was demonstrating that his ethos was flawed, but I don’t think anyone would fault his techne, that is, his boxing skill. He may have lost that match, but he’s still a very fine boxer. Daniel-son, in the Karate Kid films, was actually in many ways a very poor martial artist. His techne was not so fine, but he had a fine ethos, he was a good man. In real life, a great many martial artists are trying to combine those two, to have a whole life, a life of virtue that involves these skills.

Alan Saunders: Now, this brings us to the subject that you’ve already brought up, which is courtesy. Now, hitting people and throwing them across the room does not on the face of it look very courteous. So, how does courtesy come into the story?

Damon Young: Okay. There’s the most obvious form of courtesy, and that is that in order to train with anyone effectively, you can’t just be beating about the head and neck and breaking arms every day. In order to learn well in any kind of fighting environment you have to be able to trust one another. And so it’s really important to be courteous to maintain this sort of social glue in order to have this situation of trust where you can learn. Otherwise the whole thing falls to pieces, as it does in any situation of high stress. So that’s one example of courtesy, and in the martial arts tradition of Japan, this is a wonderful example of the Confucian ethic, where this is about building community, it is about being honourable, demonstrating respect and often having that formalised so you know just when to bow, you know just when to thank people and apologise. These aren’t hollow, these aren’t superficial, they’re the way we demonstrate our good intentions to people we’re working alongside.

Alan Saunders: So, in what circumstances would you, when you’re fighting, would you apologise to your opponent?

Damon Young: So, a good example of that is when you’ve hit someone when you’re, say you’re doing stand up fighting in karate, and I hit a younger, lesser-graded student in a little nerve bundle in his arm. So instead of blocking it I actually punched it away, and that caused him a great deal of pain. Now, if he were my rank or higher, I probably wouldn’t have apologised, but because he was lesser than I, I thought it very important to demonstrate goodwill to let him know there were no hard feelings, this wasn’t anything personal, it was a mistake on my part. And the way I did that was to bow to him, step to the side of the mat, to kneel facing the wall. And that is how in karate you demonstrate that you’ve made a mistake and you’re sorry. Now, again, with a higher belt I may not have done that. If I’d hurt him seriously, that would not be enough, I would have to demonstrate serious sorrow. So, the Confucian aspect of this is, it’s about demonstrating the right kind of ideas and emotions in the right place, and that’s how you keep the community together, it’s how you keep the goodwill.

Alan Saunders: It’s also important to be sincere, isn’t it?

Damon Young: Yes, that’s right, and that’s another part of the Japanese tradition that comes from Shinto. There’s a very strong theme in Shinto of purity. So that’s partly a kind of, a metaphorical idea, it’s the idea of being clean; of washing yourself, of clapping to clear away spirits, but the idea is also that your perception has to be pure and unclouded, and so when you fight in karate or in judo when you’re grappling or throwing, the idea is that you commit yourself purely to the fight. And you do that not simply to win, but because your opponent deserves it. They deserve to have committed attacks so they can learn, they deserve for you to be focused on them and not what you’re going to have for dinner, or your squabble with your girlfriend. So it’s basically fighting, again, with goodwill and showing that you care about them and the outcome.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you’re with The Philosopher’s Zone, and I’m talking to Damon Young from the University of Melbourne about philosophy and the martial arts.

Damon, let’s get back to the Asian martial arts, many of which were developed with philosophical ideas in mind, weren’t they?

Damon Young: Yes, that’s right. I think that’s partly why it’s so appealing to many in the west. I think they see them as sort of, ancient mystical traditions, and for people who are perhaps alienated from the west, they seem like a new kind of wisdom. Now, of course, this isn’t quite true, the versions we have have been filtered through the west and changed to suit our particular taste, much like Chinese food in the 1960s was in Australia. But it is true that they have very strong philosophical traditions, so Zen Buddhism for example has a very strong presence in the Japanese martial arts.

Alan Saunders: And what about something you’ve already mentioned, the philosophy that governed China for centuries and was essentially a system of ethics, Confucianism?

Damon Young: Yes, that as well. In fact, it was very strong in Japan. Sometimes it was used as a sort of form of social order, so its ideas of filial piety, duty towards the family, were extended to the whole state, and so you were the children and the state was the parents. That is not necessarily very helpful and doesn’t always apply to a western, liberal democracy, but within the dojo, that is the Japanese school, there is a very strong idea of duty, of filial piety and of respect for the group, which actually, is very important often for sort of young men and women who don’t have a strong sense of responsibility; they learn that their actions are not simply their own, that they have consequences, and sometimes they are acting on behalf of the group. And when it comes to something like fighting, the stakes are actually very high, so they learn that their violent urges, their lack of restraint, is not just about themselves, others are involved.

Alan Saunders: And one Japanese writer spoke of the kara in karate as the emptiness, the void that lies at the heart of all creation. What do you think he meant by that?

Damon Young: That’s partly a Zen idea. There is, in Zen philosophy a very strong theme of what might be called ‘no mind'. Now, by that they don’t mean just getting paralytically drunk and forgetting who you are. What they mean is unleashing a kind of uncalculating spontaneity. Martial arts are known for this, there is a sense that you’re fighting, you’re responding to someone’s attacks, but you’re doing so rationally; you’re not thinking about it, but you’re clearly acting with some purpose, some goal. That is a state that a lot of the Japanese martial arts, inspired by Zen, aspire to. And you still find it now, so a lot of the karate teachers will emphasise you need to stop thinking about this, you need to learn the motions, you need to master the techniques and eventually you’ll gain this kind of intuitive spontaneous approach, and in the west philosophers like Dreyfus for example have spoken about these steps. It’s not necessarily mystical, this is how we progress from being a novice to being a master; we first start off sort of adding little techniques, one by one, piecing them together. We have to think about it, it’s very calculative. Over time we learn to respond spontaneously, intuitively, without having to over-think it. I think that’s a very good western intellectual account of what can sometimes seem a little mystical in the Zen traditions.

Alan Saunders: And Zen Buddhism stresses not study or prayer, but very often humble everyday activities; cooking, cleaning, eating and indeed fighting.

Damon Young: Yes, that’s right, it’s very unpretentious in many ways. The basic idea is that you don’t have to become Buddha, you already are Buddha. What you’re trying to do is involve yourself mindfully in everyday actions so as to become this Buddha, to free yourself of the paralysing effects of the ego. And there is a tradition also in Zen philosophy of striking students, sort of whacking them about the head in order to jolt them out of their delusions and illusions, and of course that can happen in the martial arts. And in fact it is no exaggeration to say that a sort of swift punch to the nose can actually be quite enlightening.

Alan Saunders: How would you describe your own state of mind when you’re fighting? I mean, are you actually thinking, oh I can do this, I can get him that way, I can get him this way, or are you in that sort of spontaneous state?

Damon Young: Now, there are actually two kinds of state for me, and that may be because I’m a novice in some styles rather than others. I’ve noticed in grappling it’s sometimes much more like a slow chess game, so your opponent and yourself are pinned on the ground very closely together and you’re trying to very gently move your arm this way or that or change your centre of balance to throw the person off. This happens very slowly, and I think there is some, sort of, conscious thought involved, there is a kind of game being played. But my experience of karate is quite different; it’s this state of mind that involves that purity I was speaking about where most of the day’s worries somehow fall away and you’re focused quite intently on the task at hand. But it’s not a narrow focus, it’s not the kind of focus you have when you’re thinking about an intellectual problem, it’s more a kind of broad awareness of the environment and your opponent, which allows you to respond very quickly but often quite thoughtlessly to their attacks. Bruce Lee, actually, spoke about ‘it’ fighting. He said, ‘It’s not me that’s fighting, it’s it.’ And I think that’s a sort of shorthand for this process where the training takes over and it sort of allows this spontaneity to occur. It’s still you, it’s still your style, you’re still being rational, but you’re not thinking about it like you would an essay.

Alan Saunders: Has this all got something in common with good sex?

Damon Young: Yes, I believe it does. I mean, ultimately the climax is slightly different, possibly more painful, but yes, I think sex and martial arts and mountain climbing and performing surgery are all examples of what the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow experiences'. They all involve some kind of challenge, and concentration and constant feedback, but you lose a sense of time, you lose a sense of yourself., Csikszentmihalyi argues these are intrinsically rewarding activities; you don’t do them for what you’ll get, you do them because the activities themselves are rewarding often in very enduring ways, and in fact he says that jobs that involve these activities are often far better for your mental health than jobs that don’t but pay well.

Alan Saunders: And of course, just as honesty is important in sex, it’s also important in the practice of martial arts.

Damon Young: Yes, that’s right. It really is a partnership, it’s very intimate, actually. It’s partly physically intimate because you are hurting, or you are touching this other person’s body. But it’s also intimate because you start to understand that other person’s rhythms, their cadence, their sort of physical style. In order to do that, you have to be honest. There’s really nowhere to hide when you’re fighting. And I think a lot of the time, whether it’s in philosophy or just in daily life, we often have a facade of sorts, and we are used to putting up a false image of ourselves as more confident, or more accomplished or some such thing, but yes, you cannot fake this stuff. You block the punches or you don’t, you achieve the arm lock or you don’t. And the stakes are obvious; it hurts or it doesn’t.

Alan Saunders: That’s interesting in contrast to philosophy. I have often had the experience of getting halfway through a philosophy paper, reading one, and eventually I find, this has just been written for a tenure committee somewhere. It’s not adding to the sum of human knowledge, or it’s at least not adding to my knowledge. Whereas, in martial arts that sort of ignorance is going to be easy to spot.

Damon Young: Yes, that’s absolutely right. So it’s what you’d call an epistemological point; it makes what you know obvious. There is a certain amount of fakery in intellectual activity, and of course becoming a better philosopher is learning to judge a fake when you see it; developing a kind of scholarly intuition. But understanding what you know and how you know it in the martial arts can be much more straightforward because as a craft, as a techne, it works or it doesn’t. It cannot be faked. Of course, the movies can fake it, and you see the rise of some styles that don’t necessarily help you very much fighting, but they look like they do on film. But when you actually step on the mats, or step in the ring, you learn very quickly what works.

Alan Saunders: And you have to learn one step at a time, you have to be unhurried, you have to be meticulous.

Damon Young: Yes, it’s wonderfully humbling in that. I think one of the problems with education, this is a problem with students, not necessarily with teachers, is that you find first year students, for example, laughing away at the ideas of great thinkers. So they might read Descartes and sort of, dismiss his sort of, twofold existence as patently silly. Of course we’re not split, of course there’s no thinking things and extended things. But Descartes took a lot of time and effort to make those arguments, and they were very persuasive at their time for a great many people. There’s a certain amount of arrogance in the beginner, whereas when you take up martial arts, that arrogance can be quite literally beaten out of you. You cannot pretend to know more than you do, you have to work your way one step at a time until you understand it. And you don’t understand it until you can do it. So you can intellectualise it, you know, I remember saying, ‘Right, so the punch goes this way and then you move back and you block and you hold their arm.’ Well, that’s all well and good, but I couldn’t do it.

Alan Saunders: Finally, Damon, do you think you’d be a different philosopher if you were not also a practitioner of martial arts?

Damon Young: Yes, without a doubt. Whatever I have of a kind of visceral discipline, of a willingness to be wrong, a willingness to lose, a willingness to admit my mistakes, whatever I have of a kind of collaborative attitude, a willingness to work in partnership, whatever I have of that has been bolstered by the martial arts. It really is a training in a kind of maturity and restraint and, willingness I suppose to mix it up; to go in there, to put forth your argument, or in the case of martial arts your techniques, and to see if they work. And in that I think it’s an invaluable exercise in courage. I think sometimes scholars in general and philosophers in particular can lack courage; they prefer to speak to and deal with people who hold their opinions or at least have some common background of agreement, whereas I think sometimes the task of the philosopher is to sort of boldly go forth into the unknown to deal with people who don’t have that common background and see how their arguments stand.

Alan Saunders: I think the history of philosophy would be very different if Descartes, for example, had gone in for a bit of karate.

Damon Young: Yes, I daresay he would be a little more embodied.

Alan Saunders: Damon Young is the editor with Graham Priest of Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness. Details on our website, abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone. Damon, I’ll let you go now and put on your black belt. Thanks very much for joining us on the mat.

Damon Young: My pleasure.

Alan Saunders: Damon Young is Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. The sound engineer on this week’s Philosopher’s Zone was Luke Purse. I'm Alan Saunders and I'm off now to crouch in the corner in my usual cowardly fashion.