In class this week, I asked my students to read and discuss Leo Tolstoy’s 1897 piece “What is Art?” The ensuing discussion from the implications of the essay led me to reframe my understanding of BJJ within a historical context of the discourse of martial arts.

Tolstoy’s essay is one in which, as readers in the 21st century, we cringe in moments where his conception of art “seems” rather naive. To be clear, Tolstoy is a titan of the novel (War and Peace and Anna Karenina are some of his, and the world’s, greatest narratives). So, it is embarrassing to read his philosophy on art. It feels provincial, quaint, and judeo-centric. That is to say, it reads like a philosophy of art from 1897 in his part of the world would read.

Among its many claims is that good art is one that brings us in unity with Christ and/or in full-human-fellowship with others. Bad art is one that divides us into sects (such as nations or social class) or draws us away from God. Thus, the “scandal” near the end of the piece occurs when Tolstoy judges Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony as bad art. Tolstoy claims that that particular symphony is exemplary of a type of art that only the secular upper social class can appreciate.

As an object lesson, I asked my students to write to Tolstoy, pretending we had a machine that would send their letter back in time. I told them to describe art as it is today and to point out some of the flaws in Tolstoy’s argument. Then, I told them to imagine that Tolstoy reads our letter, and he responds. One of the possibilities is that Tolstoy thinks we’ve lost our minds in the future. Another, more probable (if time-machine what ifs can in any way be probable) is that he asks us the simple question: what happened to the world that its art has changed so drastically?

The point of the question is to historicize our own understanding of art as it is today. For Tolstoy and many of his contemporaries in the late 19th century, art is nothing like someone would describe it today. Moreover, people in his time would agree with his description of art rather than ours. Art was that which Tolstoy described. Art was an ideology whose goals (among others) was to reunite one with God in an increasingly secular and modernizing world. It’s other goal to unite people with good feelings towards each other is evidence of a rapidly splintering society based on social class as capitalism exerts its social force. (Remember, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was on the horizon, twenty years away.)

One of the ways we jiu-jiteiros make fun of traditional martial arts is by ridiculing their particular reliance on concepts like inner energy, chi, spirit, etc, words that reflect an old-form of thinking about the world and combat. In fact, if any martial art is labeled a TMA (traditional martial art) it is often immediately disregarded and subject to ridicule precisely because of its peculiar language. Brazilian jiu-jitsu, on the other hand, has often been termed a “modern” martial art. That is, BJJ is “reality-based,” very secular (nearly no “spirit-talk” or “energy” but rather “leverage” and “fulcrum,” physics-based terms), and is in constant evolution through experimentation.

What this says to me is this. As opposed to seeing BJJ as the apogee of martial arts thinking, one can rather claim that more than any other art, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu resonates the best with contemporary discourses of modern life.

We are moderns. We are secular, we are pragmatic; we are skeptical of cult-like words, we believe in progress and science. We believe in the necessity of experimentation and that stasis is the death of us. TMAs are rather like Tolstoy’s views of 1897. They worked “discursively well” within their time but that time has passed. However, that is not to say there is no-value or that people were under an illusion with TMAs (as they are not when reading War & Peace or Anna Karenina, where the times and life they reflect feel nothing like our lives). TMAs worked prior to a shift in the world, in which BJJ as it developed in a modern nation like Brazil and then the United States, filled in rather nicely with our new way of understanding and explaining and working-in the world.

Moreover, it is absolutely no surprise that BJJ took off here in the United States, the birthplace of William James and the philosophical pragmatists. What better motto could BJJ have than the “pragmatist maxim” as conceived by Charles Sanders Pierce and expounded upon by James:

Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP1: 132)

Rephrased for our ears, it simply states that the the object of our philosophizing is simply the effects it has in real, practical terms. It would be hard to see the effects of our “chi-alignment” and therefore base any philosophy of a martial art on that. It is much easier to see the effects of the proper technical application of a triangle choke as it defeats a large opponent. BJJ represents the philosophy of the pragmatic. The pragmatic is our current discursive orientation through which various “metaphysical” elements are thought-through.

The mat and the tap is BJJ’s form of thinking through its art.