“I looked at the moon, so full and so bright,
And found she was black, had there not been light.”
The Watts Prophets (for the first line only)
Prologue
A long time ago, I passed my French baccalaureate by commenting on a well-known satire by Montesquieu entitled ‘On the Slavery of Negroes’. The first reading of this text aroused in me a feeling of closeness, without my being able to define exactly what I was feeling by it. Aikido, which I was about to start practising at the time, now brings me back to a reflection on the painful relations between Europe and Africa, and allows me to link this episode of my youth to the more general meaning around which the course of our lives is organised. I realise that it may seem unexpected that a martial art should provide the means of addressing such a subject, but let's see how.
To Evariste Galois, for his mathematical intuition of the symmetry of an ambiguous world.
I like Heraclitus because he wrote without worrying about whether he would ever be understood. I borrowed my title from him, and it is possible that this choice will not be understood either, but the writer writes first and foremost to touch his own conscience. If by chance his words meet another conscience, what follows is only beneficial, even if a single reader were to read them... Such a statement obviously requires an explanation of what is meant here by conscience.
The words of people who have suffered extraordinary trauma must be received with humility, because the intensity of certain sufferings is such that one should have endured them oneself to make anything other than an idea of them. In the villages of France after 1918, over a glass of wine and a pan of chestnuts, the survivors of the trenches would talk among themselves about the war they had been through, but they instinctively remained silent in the presence of anyone who had not known the front... he was not ready to hear. They were old at thirty, and knew from experience that the listener must have travelled a certain path himself to grasp the meaning of painful words. Words cannot communicate the actual feeling of extreme suffering, pain is pain and there is nothing to be said to those who have not experienced it. Anyone who wants to truly understand the suffering of others must experience it in their own flesh, embody it. Empathy does not consist of suffering from the suffering of others, but of suffering their suffering. Death on the cross is a symbol of this truth, and what we commonly call empathy is only a way of paying for this feeling with words and emotions; compassion is a pretence, a sentimentalism.
Norman Ajari, whose book I have just read, entitled ‘Dignity or Death’, is a contemporary. He did not physically experience the violence and crimes of the slave trade, nor the desperate non-existence to which it confined the men it treated as merchandise. But he believes that ‘suffering induces silence and prevents the expression of thought’, and acts as spokesperson for those who, in his words, have physically experienced the West as ‘a principle of destruction, enslavement and devastation of otherness in history’. He claims the legacy of suffering, grief and anger generated before him through generations of victims of a serene trivialisation of inhumanity. He believes that his negritude gives him the mandate to summon a memory that no White man could ever possess. The White man, who cannot ‘escape his belonging to the camp of the oppressor’, remains suspect to him, even Sartre in his ‘posture of reserved friendship’. Only the Black person can ‘embody indignity’, because it is he who is ‘linked emotionally’ to enslavement, and this is a necessary condition for the initial stupor of the victims to be expressed through the legitimate discourse of their descendants in a world founded on ‘predatory white supremacy’.
To deny White people the understanding of a suffering that the colour of their skin has spared them is in line with my point about the impossibility of truly representing the pain of the other unless one has experienced it oneself, and it is a vision to which I therefore subscribe. In saying this, I am not forgetting that Black people were not the only ones in history to suffer slavery, but they were the only ones to endure in a systematic, lasting and large-scale way a race-based dehumanisation process. I can therefore understand that a Black person has an emotional connection with slavery, and that a White person cannot have the same emotional connection, for the same reason. But that an emotional connection makes it possible to understand the actual suffering of others, in other times, is to accept the idea that the representation of the suffering of others is sufficient for empathy. I do not share this idea.
The relationship of the European continent to existence is one of devastating violence, and the history of the twentieth century is sufficient to demonstrate this. Two world wars in less than thirty years, a total of eighty million deaths, one for every copy of Mein Kampf sold, the extermination of men by other men in barbaric conditions that make the savages of the past seem gentle, this is our... Civilisation, with the sole consolation that young people may have the heart to read Georges Duhamel today. We also know that agricultural slavery contributed greatly to the wealth of today's developed nations by laying the financial foundations for their future industrialisation, whether they are European or born of Europe, such as the United States. A mode of production established by the raiding of men, women and children captured like game, separated, chained, transshipped in the bellies of slave vessels, raped, beaten, sold, deprived of their freedom for life, punished by amputation when their work was too slow, or hanged as an example... the cataclysm of the transatlantic slave trade has happened, it has lasted, and it was driven by the appetite for profit of American planters as much as European traders. Ajari's observation therefore does not seem to be refutable; violence, and in this case the violence of slavery, are indeed among the driving forces of modern society. He is right to reflect on such events, because a society based on violence and slavery cannot be considered a society of progress. On the contrary, under the appearance of culture and civilisation, it is a society in which the most archaic elements remain unchanged in their essence.
Before his execution in Virginia in 1831, Nat Turner declared that his master was very benevolent, that he was ‘a good master’. He had mercilessly slaughtered him a few weeks earlier, along with his entire family. Then, with a few companions, he had massacred all the Whites on the neighbouring tobacco plantations, men, women, children and infants. He explained that he had taken particular satisfaction in dismembering his victims with an axe. The target of this extreme violence was not the men, but the good conscience with which these men perpetuated an economic and social regime based on the denial of humanity, on depersonalisation, and on the imprisonment of other men in a desperate non-life. Turner was hanged, his corpse was then beheaded and quartered like those of his victims, then skinned, his skin tanned like an animal and sold in pieces in the shops of the county of Southampton. In the weeks following this revolt, hundreds of completely innocent slaves were murdered and beheaded, their heads impaled and displayed on the roads, in reprisal, out of fear, out of hate. It took a military ordinance to stop the massacre. It would be wrong to summarise the reason for Turner's crimes with a slogan such as ‘liberty or death’; his violence is more complex, it has to do with determinism, it is the product of the methodical violence of a system of economic and social exploitation that denies humanity as a matter of principle. By cutting up the corpses of the Whites he had murdered, he removed all human likeness from the remains of those who had similarly stripped him of the outward signs of his belonging to humanity.
This violence was the passionate response of one individual, but it only unleashed even greater blind violence, and the abolition of slavery is not the result of such outbursts. National liberation struggles are also a poor explanation. Toussaint Louverture was black, and through his military and political talents contributed greatly to the success of the Haitian revolution, but this plantation owner - himself a slave owner - did not embrace the abolitionist movement out of conviction, but out of political realism and historical opportunism. Abolition was not the result of a religious impulse born of a scrupulous reading of the Gospels, which would have miraculously touched the humanity of the torturers and opened their eyes. It is even less the result of adherence to the theses of the Social Contract and to the dream that might be right because it is moral, that an idea such as human rights could replace the currents that profoundly determine the future of human societies. No, abolition is essentially the mechanical consequence of the evolution of the world's production relations, which has ruined the profitability of slavery, making it a brake on industrial development. If the Western slave trade has ceased, if slave ships are no longer being armed in Liverpool, Nantes or Bordeaux, if ‘wood of ebony’ in Dahomey or Gambia is no longer exchanged for Cholet handkerchiefs, if the human cargo shackled in the hold is no longer exported to America, if sugar no longer reaches our tables in exchange for black blood, it is not out of consideration for human dignity, it is above all the effect of the economic obsolescence of the slave system.
This is how the history of societies progresses. It has its own reasons, it follows its course by virtue of laws analogous to those that govern the course of the planets and the cycle of rain. Men are extras in a scenario that is written neither by them, nor even for them, and which infinitely surpasses them. It is sometimes marked out by external signs that one can learn to read. The death of Miloš Obilić, for example, on 28 June 1389, is the distant starting point of Europe's twentieth-century suicide. Gavrilo Princip drew from this heroic day the inspiration that made 28 June 1914 the casus belli of the First World War. The spirit of revenge of the Treaty of Versailles triggered the Second World War on 28 June 1919. And it was again on 28 June, in 1996, that the third great European war began with the adoption of the Ukrainian constitution that established the right of this nation to self-determination. This is how it goes with war.
For slavery, as often happens when certain balances are upset, what was not moral took on the appearance of morality through the natural play of opposites. For ‘no creation exists for anything that is perishable’, in fact nothing according to Empedocles comes from nothing, nothing is completely lost, nothing is abolished, everything is transformed. And the spirit that legitimised the right of ownership over men since Hammurabi did not disappear with the abolition of slavery; it was transfigured into a moral imperative. With that very British firmness of conviction, Rudyard Kipling's pen enshrined the Europeans in their duty to bring civilisation to the peoples of the invaded territories :
"To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child."
The White Man's Burden sponsored the plundering of Africa's wealth in good conscience, just as the Crusaders' righteous war had justified the sack of Constantinople. It was an ethical argument that served as a justification for colonisation, and prolonged the oppression of Blacks by Whites by means other than slavery. Slavery, which saw black people as a commodity, was perpetuated in the new form of the West's mission to civilise, which perceived them as noble savages, as men despite their archaism, men despite everything...
The fact that we can thus consider beings ’ human despite the abjection, horror or contempt they inspire', as Ajari writes, is what triggers his painful relationship to indignity, because such an idea is the avatar of the very idea that allowed slavery, and we find it today disguised to the point of a certain condemnation of racism itself. Modesty, for example, which consists of circumventing the words race or Black through various techniques of language - or even thought - transpires precisely the opposite of an anti-racist sentiment, that is to say an unconscious negrophobia. ‘The bad conscience that guides these avoidance strategies denotes an unavowable belief in Negro abjection, which manifests itself even where one intends to criticise racism’. If Ajari thus denounces the recurrent tragic nature of the Black destiny, it is in the hope of raising this destiny to the level of a political commitment. And since historical anamnesis is indispensable to any political awareness, he cannot help but summon up the pathos linked to the slave trade, but without claiming to embody it in some way by heredity. He therefore does not fall into the trap of pseudo-empathy mentioned at the beginning of this reflection. He places the emotional relationship he has with suffering in the context of negritude - and therefore of his own negritude - with a constant disposition of the Western soul throughout history: a state of mind that was initially insensitive to the inhumanity of slavery, which then legitimised a softened version of the same subjection through the colonial enterprise, and which today finds expression in the unconscious racist disgust of modern white society. His work, far from espousing the theories of modern anti-racist thought, the conventionality of which he rightly criticises, on the contrary proposes the liberation from all oppression through the proud affirmation of the primordial character of the black race, and through the establishment of a policy of negritude which would draw its legitimacy and its vitality from the forgotten fertility of African culture and its diaspora. This ‘ethical and political ambition of race’, which is affirmed even in the subtitle of ‘Dignity or Death’, if it dismisses current anthropological arguments with a wave of the hand, is nevertheless for Ajari the only serious path to progress towards a recognition of black dignity.
Here, I believe, we must reflect on the idea of progress and the meaning that should be given to this expression in terms of the relationships that unite or oppose people. Let us reason for a moment by analogy on the concrete example provided to us by the technical progress generated by the movement of human reason. The fact that this progress is born of scientific discoveries does not guarantee that an automatic progress of consciousness will be achieved in parallel. Science and conscience do not naturally go hand in hand, because conscience depends on human resources that are not limited to intellectual faculties. Rabelais warned us that ‘science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul’, but his colourful language concealed the prophetic nature of the warning. Failing to develop his conscience at the same pace as technology, man has, over the centuries, settled into the illusion that his evolution was possible independently of the nature that surrounds him. This dream led him to the absurd belief of the industrial age that it was in his power to conquer nature. Elon Musk is today the caricature of this spirit that believes it can ‘save civilisation’ through ever more technology. What was forgotten with such a chimera is that everything is linked, that all things are connected, that efforts directed towards one goal necessarily bring about the appearance of another, and that events consequently follow the only path they can take. Not only is there no conquest, but no one controls anything. Things just happen, through the interplay of complex forces that interact in a world where humanity is just one element among others. At the dawn of the 21st century, the planet reminds us of this reality. There is turmoil everywhere, but no one is doing anything, because to truly act one must understand, and understanding depends on the relationship between knowledge and being. However, the progress that we call civilisation only sees in being that which is opposed to non-existence, and is therefore not interested in it. This imbalance between knowledge and being generates a shaky knowledge, distorted by anorexia of being and bulimia of knowledge, a sickening state of affairs. People educate themselves as they go about their shopping, feeding on abstractions that interfere with their lives instead of serving them. It is precisely this deficit of being that is damaging to relations between Whites and Blacks. Human consciousness has not progressed because its progress cannot be expected from reason any more than from nature, and it only comes about through a conscious evolution of being.
On this point, I therefore agree with Ajari, who ‘opposes the notion of a black essence to that of a black nature’, but on the condition that he does not reduce this essence to an identity such as negritude, because that would be to reduce man to a secondary aspect of his essence. It is indeed the human being that we must find in the quest for dignity, not the Black, not the White. The first step on the path to that man is self-knowledge. How can you know anything if you don't even know what you are? It is through yourself that you access the order of the world, but for that you must have self-awareness, an awareness that the accidents of a man's journey do not make up his essence. Accidents shape one's personality, while destiny is one's very own essence, which it is up to us to discover first and then develop. We must dip our toes in the fountain of Delphi. Without effort, to achieve ‘know thyself’, our freedom is like driftwood carried along by the currents, our enthusiasms and our commitments have the innocence of children's games, and their cruelty too. A man's ignorance of what he is is the root cause of his inner slavery. And the liberation that must come about first and foremost is that of this particular form of servitude, without which all attempts to respond to the violence of societies will have no other result than to perpetuate the implacable chain of causes and effects that produce transformations of the world beyond any human control.
This is why it is not possible to undo the chain of indignities that led to externalised slavery, to bloody slavery and its avatars, by calling, as Ajari does, for the awakening of a political consciousness of a black world whose social mix will make it increasingly difficult to define the limits. The political awareness that is the subject of ‘Dignity or Death’ cannot fundamentally diverge from the political awareness of Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, and to varying degrees the Black Power movement, because legitimacy is not enough to leave the field of conflict. A conscience of this nature can only endlessly revolve around the problem of antagonism, because it remains in the realm of division and divorce; it is Manichean by nature. ‘Afro-decolonialism’ is by definition a reaction to ontological imperialism, it depends on it, it is not an affirmation in itself of negritude, and Black people cannot help but remain Black in the face of Whiteness. By writing that ‘liberation cannot come from switching to the enemy’, Ajari anchors his work in such opposition. I would say that any conceptualisation of an enemy is an obstacle to liberation. Because everything that opposes necessarily brings out the powerlessness in the face of force, and powerlessness breeds despair, which gives rise to resentment, which gives rise to hate, which in turn finds the strength to oppose. This unchanging sequence of world events prevents us from breaking out of the cycle of conflicts, even if one day the relationships are reversed. The Holocaust gave birth to Zionism, yesterday's victims are today's executioners, the forms change with the circumstances, and so too possibly does the degree of horror, but the violence remains, and with it the right and the good conscience claimed by the torturers of each camp.
However, it so happens that a fundamental principle of this world forbids force and violence from obtaining results other than those contrary to the very purposes for which they are employed. The Third Reich wanted Greater Germany and the crushing of Soviet Russia, it achieved the division of Germany and the strengthening of the USSR. But there is no moral concept in this process of reversal, so it is only from the point of view of conscience that it must be considered, that is to say, essentially from a practical point of view. For force and violence are part of the laws of this world. If they could be eradicated, the whole would collapse. The rules of a game govern and impose themselves once the system is given; they are the essence of the game, and God himself cannot make it so that the bishop moves in chess other than diagonally. Similarly, the general laws that make this world function as it does are what they must be; they are necessary for its equilibrium. If the lion does not kill the gazelle, the entire ecosystem collapses, and nothing can prevent force and violence from expressing themselves, good feelings least of all.
In this kind of impasse, man can do no more than find his place. And in this respect, Aikido teaches that ‘making an enemy of anything, wanting to fight it, is no longer the divine Heart’. This divine Heart of which the Founder Morihei Ueshiba speaks, is a balance of opposites, where opposites are only opposed from a certain point of view, and are revealed to be complementary when the perspective changes. When two forces are in direct opposition, the greater one prevails, as a consequence of Newton's laws, but Aikido demonstrates that two opposing forces can only produce a phenomenon when they are balanced out by a third force that is neutral, that is invisible, but that is not inactive. It is the gallows of the scales, the hub of the wheel, and for the Aikido practitioner the motionless motor, the heart of the axis of rotation on which the relationship of active and passive forces in movement depends. By using neutral force properly, man can change the relationship he has with opposing forces, and thereby escape Newton's laws in a way. He can then go with the flow of the tumultuous current of the world's constant transformations, free from the certainty of drowning in it. Master Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, used an image to describe this attitude, saying that he was ‘standing on the floating bridge of Heaven’.
The first condition for such liberation for an individual is the control of their motor activities, in other words learning how to use the body in a way that takes universal constraints into account. In this context, Aikido is a method of enabling the body to adopt the appropriate movement in a situation of opposition. It is not a way of stopping violence, since violence is a constituent and inescapable fact of our world. But it is a way of changing the relationship to violence for oneself, in accordance with the general laws of movement, the study of which is the training of Aikido through rhythm and breathing. Moving the body in accordance with the natural rhythms of the universe is thus the first step on the path to a change in consciousness. Mutatis mutandis, sacred dances have the same objective, certain laws are made intelligible to those who are able to see them. This is the case, for example, with the whirling dervish dance of Sufism, and it is no coincidence that the movement is identical to that of Aikido. All things are connected, according to the teaching of the Emerald Table, ‘that which is above is like that which is below’, and there is solidarity in particular between the lower faculties of a person, which include the motor faculties, and his higher, emotional and intellectual faculties. This means that a motor activity that respects harmony and eurythmy will serve as a paradigm for the higher activities of man, while avoiding interference between the various faculties. However, it is precisely by collaborating within the limits of their respective fields of action that these faculties can lead to the establishment of the centre of gravity that is necessary for the work on oneself to begin. The things of this world are of little importance in themselves; it is their balance that counts, and human consciousness does not escape this law. The same is true of Aikido, which, on a physical level, consists of occupying the centre of a situation of dynamic equilibrium with an opponent. To this end, the motor faculties are put in a position to be acquired according to the modality of imitation, which is their own, at an equal distance from innate instinctive faculties and rational intellectual faculties. For it is only in this way, by following their own nature, that they can access the archetypes of the universe. And this is a profound reason why the teaching of oriental physical disciplines does not initially call on reflection, but first requires the ritualistic reproduction of a model.
Thought alone is therefore not enough to access the special awareness that is necessary for a generalised conception of good and evil in human relationships. As Ajari has no means of investigation other than thought, he cannot draw the obvious conclusion from the very enlightening vision of James Baldwin that he quotes, namely that the worst crimes - whether they are those of a man or of an entire nation - are not committed out of love of evil. Every crime is perpetrated in the interests of good as understood by the person or persons committing it. ‘All extermination is always thought of as innocent, because it is a pure affirmation of the self of the one who massacres’. The cruellest psychopaths, Theodor Eicke himself, never had any concern other than for the good, and it is always in the final analysis in the service of the good that men tear each other apart. The lesson to be learnt from such an observation is that the executioner cannot understand evil, since evil only ever exists from the point of view of the victims. It is therefore pointless to appeal to a moral or political conscience to oppose it to the good conscience of an innocent torturer. On the other hand, it is advisable to concentrate the forces of transformation on that which, in its ignorance, is unaware that it is ignorant. In the film ‘The Sixth Sense’, Cole, an eight-year-old boy, says to the psychologist who is helping him to understand his terrifying visions of deceased people: ‘They don't know they're dead’. With these words, the psychologist suddenly realises that he is dead himself. The consciousness of many men going about their daily business is in such a state of lethargy that their essence, their hereditary character, has ended up dying out for lack of stimulation, and their existence now depends only on the experiences that have shaped their personality after birth. Through this imbalance in their being-in-the-world they are in reality already dead, but just like the psychologist they do not know it. Ignorance is a form of sleep, racism is a consequence of it, and no generalised concept of good and evil will be attained without an awakening of self-awareness - of the oppressor who sees good only in his own measure, and of the oppressed who sees evil only in what he suffers. But a conscience of this nature is not political or ethical as Ajari envisages it, nor is it economic or social as Marxism supposes. Qualities of this kind indeed proceed from the simple spontaneous, self-aware knowledge that an existence can have of itself. Yet consciousness is not ‘the most shared thing in the world’, the Cartesian common sense that everyone is naturally endowed with, consciousness is not compulsory, and its evolution cannot be unconscious. Nor is it introspection, a reflection that thought can have on itself in the manner of Saint Augustine or the ‘Reveries of a Solitary Walker’. It is the result of a work on oneself of the will to, for which intellectual faculties are not enough, and which involves the use of the body in parity. It is an attempt to achieve a knowledge of the order of the world that is neither scientific, nor religious, nor economic, nor social, nor ethical, nor political, but which is objective, art allowing under certain conditions to reach this objectivity. This is how to find a lasting solution to the problem posed in ‘Dignity or Death’, as to so many others for that matter, this is the point we are trying to make, for those who can hear it.
Ajari's ambition ‘to heal the wound of African dehumanisation’ by making this very therapy the object of his philosophical investigation, allows him to rightly reject what in ethnophilosophy still appears too dependent on a European epistemology ignorant or unconcerned with the existential consequences of racist violence. But this therapy stops at the diagnostic of racial hostility; as a remedy, it lacks a concrete project.
It is utopian to base the hope that the recognition of black dignity will arise from the in situ rebirth of vernacular talents and knowledge eradicated by colonisation. Not because these talents have disappeared, but because the frontier on which this dignity will be decided tomorrow is not in Africa, but in the black diaspora where these talents and knowledge have mutated. It is as such that they have played and will play a role in the evolution of Western and world culture, and therefore African culture, particularly through music, dance, poetry, and a philosophical reflection that owes to the experience of slavery a sensitivity unknown to white Western metaphysics, and of which Ajari himself is the bearer. However, the strength of this influence is not intended to serve the advent of a cultural nationalism in the form of a break with Eurocentricism, of which ‘Dignity or Death’ is a philosophy. Because unity is not achieved through division, but rather through the reconciliation and fusion of antinomies. The feeling of brotherhood is approached through paths as diverse as the pen of Alexandre Dumas, the quest for the universal by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the voice of Marian Anderson or Nina Simone, not by taking up the arms of self-defence with the Black Panther Party.
Confident in the faith that unites the black community in the Church, Ajari also makes the teleological gamble of an ‘emergence of the unheard of’, but the latter will not present itself either - unless special intervention of grace - as long as the prophetic Christianity of the black Church is opposed to the secularism of white political theology. Once again, the way out of adversity does not come from a focus on the adversary; the opposite is true. And in this respect, Aimé Césaire certainly sees further than all those who have used to divide the concept of negritude, which he created in the 1930s. Césaire invented negritude but rejected division, and scored many points on colonialism by refusing to oppose it head-on.
It goes without saying that it is to Ajari's credit that he did not follow Jean-Paul Sartre's call for murder in his preface to ‘The Wretched of the Earth’. Frantz Fanon, ill and at the end of his short life, perhaps not realising how much the opportunistic use that was thus made of his reflection served an ambition that was less scrupulous and more cynically subversive than his own, even though it did not have the legitimacy. However, we would like the limits that are placed on violent action in ‘Dignity or Death’ to be less vague. We would like to be sure that there is no ambiguity, and to understand, for example, what a sentence like ‘love is not the opposite of struggle, it is one of its ingredients’ can mean in practical terms. What form can love actually take in a man engaged in a struggle against oppression, if non-violence is to be considered a ‘treacherous’ means seeking to ‘deprive activists of their own capacity for revolutionary love’? Putting a name to an abstraction does not enable it to be understood, and explaining it by tautology only increases the misunderstanding. This is why, instead of stating that love is ‘the ethical effort to take into account the dignity of others’, it would be preferable for Ajari to give us his concrete definition of ‘revolutionary love’, in which he suggests that non-violence is a suspect attribute.
To speak of love without taking the precaution of first defining the parameters of a common language is to address the other in a language that is unknown to them, it is to seek an audience on the Tower of Babel, where men confront their subjectivities without hope of understanding one another. Because we understand each other on the basis of objective knowledge, not on the belief that the world is made up of billions of unrelated events, each of which every person could have a different opinion on. Objective knowledge is based on the idea of the primordial existence of a Whole, from which what we know of the world has emerged by division, and on the assurance that the sign of the profound unity that structures the diversity of the phenomena resulting from this diversification is not impenetrable; it is the reason for art as well as for mathematics. Aikido is rigorously constructed on this model, the techniques are linked together by an intelligible common principle that connects them to the Whole and makes them members of the same family, despite their multiplicity, and beyond their apparent diversity. It is by virtue of this identity of its structure with that of the universal archetype that this martial art is a means of access to objective knowledge. And love is not the inconsistency of a concept; it manifests itself physically through the art of receiving the most violent forms of opposition inherent in the nature of phenomena, recognising in them our own essence, and uniting with them in respect of the laws derived from the common principle. No Aikido movement includes the notion of opposition; all demonstrate the complementarity of forces that are only apparently contrary, provided that the principle of single action is respected. One acts in accordance with the non-human laws that direct the universal current of the permanent transformations of the being - in this case the techniques - taking care not to interpret anything, not to add anything of one's own to the unfolding of the process. This type of action is called wu wei in the Eastern tradition, and non-action in the Western tradition, but this non-opposition should not be confused with passive non-resistance. On the contrary, it is a total, perfect action, an action that is not guided by any subjective vision of the world, and in truth the only possible action, the only action capable of giving man a hold on the impermanence of the world.
In this sense, Aikido techniques have a non-human power; they can be used to destroy when there is no other way out of an extreme situation, but this is neither a victory nor their main purpose. Their primary function is to act as symbols. Cathedrals are stone symbols raised to the heavens by the master masons of the past; they bear witness to sacred geometry for those capable of reading their equations. Aikido techniques are flesh symbols, experienced by the human body that draws them in space, respecting the same laws. They are lived out symbols, and this quality of symbols makes the techniques intangible in the same way as Plato's solids, in that they express, like them, the immutable laws of Unity in the formidable diversity of phenomena. This is why they must be transmitted with a rigour that forbids them to be distorted - this concern and this work were those of Morihiro Saito - because they are fundamental keys to the awakening of what I call consciousness, which has nothing in common with the spontaneous consciousness that each person grants themselves by saying ‘I am well conscious of…’, as has been explained.
‘If the body is through the mind, it is a wonder, but if the mind is through the body, it is the wonder of wonders’, this teaching from the Qumran manuscripts could be inscribed on the pediment of every cathedral. The metaphysical speculations of the medieval masons have indeed influenced the centuries because they were born of stone, because the cathedrals were built. This saying would also have its place at the door of every Aikido dojo, warning against the risk of missing out on objective knowledge through metaphysical or philosophical speculation lacking an operative dimension. Only a vision marked by an imbalance of this nature allows one to write a sentence like ‘dignity can only be thought of rigorously from the perspective of the most vulnerable humans in a given society: the oppressed’. In asserting this, Ajari departs from objectivity in three directions:
Firstly, the anthropological monopoly. The vagaries of life have led me to become a breeder. I am only an amateur, and it is a cow, to tell the truth, that taught me what little I know about farming. She died recently, having led with courage and in all weathers a tough herd whose only roof, winter and summer, is the immensity of the Irish sky. One day, at the top of a cliff, her legs gave out. Quietly, sitting in front of the ocean as far as the eye could see, she watched her last moon rise, immense, then the sun one last time on a peaceful day. She knew she was dying, and she waited for it without fear, calmly, even gently. This simple cow died with a dignity that could serve as an example to many men. We must not forget that dignity is not the sole reserve of humans.
Then there is the privilege of the victim. Led by King Leonidas, three hundred men bid farewell to their wives and children and leave Sparta for the Thermopylae pass, with death in their hearts, in the sense that they all know they are going to die. For three days, these three hundred men hold off three hundred thousand Persian soldiers. At the end of the fighting, exhausted, overwhelmed by waves of enemies, all their weapons broken, they still fought with their hands. These men were slaughtered until the last one, but they were not victims, they were not oppressed, they were warriors. The conscious choice they made to die and the nobility with which they left this world are a symbol of dignity that still serves as a reference point twenty-five centuries later. Dignity is therefore not reserved for the oppressed. It is all the less so, moreover, given that there have also been in history unworthy oppressed people; it was at the cost of brotherly cowardice that certain kapos in the Nazi concentration camps saved their lives.
A shift in values, finally. Arria takes the knife from the hands of her husband, who does not have the courage to commit suicide, stabs herself, and before dying hands it to him, saying ‘Non dolet, Paete!’, it doesn't hurt… Dignity is not linked to the particularities of an individual's existence, nor to the vagaries of his condition - Spartacus's status as a slave did not make him a ‘vulnerable’ man - dignity is a value that emanates from the profound essence of a being. But the essence does not think, it acts, dignity is entirely in the action, and in its highest form in the action confronted with the alternative of life and death. Dignity cannot therefore ‘allow itself to be thought’, contrary to what Ajari says, to think dignity is already to lack it.
From the very first page of his introduction, Ajari had warned of the possibility of an ‘understanding, perhaps impossible, of the ethical dimension of death and black life in the modern era’. The politicisation of indignity as a prelude to the maieutics of a modern black political ontology, which is the subject of ‘Dignity or Death’, certainly goes beyond the attitude that would simply consist of taking note of iniquity, but it does not allow progress towards the cancellation of the indignity that is thus denounced. Criticism of the political ontology of racism does not amount to a solution. In the name of the uses to which race is put, it invariably leads back to the struggle: ‘only with the demolition of white supremacy and the eradication of the negrophobia that sustains it through blood, rape and humiliation will the black name finally lose its implacable relevance’. This struggle is particularly directed against the partisan anti-racism of the French state which, accused of ideological negrophobia, has chosen to erase the specific problem linked to negritude by adopting a dogmatic approach to racism conceived as a global phenomenon, with anti-Semitism occupying a special place in this holistic vision. But Ajari tells us nothing about the modalities of the manifestation of this struggle to which he ultimately arrives, and in a way with his back to the wall, except that its revolutionary character cannot be the object of a Marxist-Leninist recuperation that would erase - just as much as the ‘toxic’ statist antiracism - the black identity that constitutes the historical foundation of indignity. Since nature abhors a vacuum, this no show, this failure to present the very means of action, is not unrelated - if not to complacency - at least to a half-hearted understanding of violent action, against the backdrop of the stated ethical and political objectives.
An indication of this ambiguous approach to violence is also implicit in the impatience that dictates the condemnation of Tania de Montaigne's essay entitled ‘L'assignation’ (The Assignment), subtitled ‘Les Noirs n'existent pas’ (Black People Do Not Exist). A large part of Ajari's effort in the advent of a black political ontology, in fact, involves the creation of an esprit de corps of negritude based on the recognition of black suffering borne precisely by this historical assignation. However, no one is concerned with gathering and unifying troops without an agonistic conception of the world. Tania de Montaigne rejects such a vision and what it implies in terms of confinement to a communitarian ideology. This is the obvious implication of the subtitle of her essay: Blacks do not exist... as Blacks in front of Whites. By countering that ‘when you are attacked as a Black person, you have to respond as a Black person’, Ajari confirms what we suspected earlier, namely that negritude and Black essence are synonymous for him. I would like to reiterate my disagreement here: what makes a man black is only a secondary aspect of his essence. And failing to arrive at a more nuanced vision of the relationship between essence and personality, the only path that emerges is that of a Manichean opposition leading to conflict, between Blacks and Whites of course, but also between Blacks themselves. Through her ideas, Tania de Montaigne effectively becomes the enemy of the political ontology of the black race that Ajari is trying to bring to life, an enemy within the very cause since the latter recognises in this woman's suffering a ‘twin of’ his own. He therefore urges her, with an ideological violence presented as political realism, to think and act on the basis of her blackness, that is to say, even before being a woman, a citizen, or a cultured being, to be black.
If I had to summarise ‘Dignity or Death’ in a single word, I would choose anger. Ajari is an angry man, an anger certainly tempered by erudition and a mastery of philosophical discourse, but a deep anger, born of a vision of history and personal experience that denounce the amorality of human relationships based on the use of force and violence, to which black people have paid a considerable price throughout the ages and up to the present day. This anger is not negative, as it has provided him with the energy he needs to write a thought-provoking book. But he lacks a lever of action on the drama he is witnessing, the dialectical method reaching its level of incompetence here, as I have tried to show.
I took advantage of my reading of ‘Dignity or Death’ to try to highlight the resources of Aikido in terms of the perception and accompaniment of existential problems that seem to be the antithesis of what we generally imagine to be the concerns of this martial art. I hope that I have provided a better understanding of how Aikido is something other than an aesthetic way of destroying one's fellow man, and how it can contribute to an evolution of consciousness that allows man to escape the hazards of a being-in-the-world dependent solely on power struggles. I have shown the importance, from this perspective, of the use of bodily symbolic actions such as Aikido techniques, because they establish the essential relationship between motor skills and intellectual abilities, with a view to the evolution of consciousness.
I wouldn't want to finish without quickly mentioning the equal role played by myths and legends in stimulating emotional faculties this time, and recalling that the emotions aroused in Morihei Ueshiba by the Kojiki, a major work of Japanese cosmogony, were of great importance in the creation of Aikido. Izanagi and Izanami ordered the primordial chaos and created the world according to laws which affirm that the history of these two original energies is one of opposition finding its resolution in the constantly challenged equilibrium of contradictory forces. In the brief moment when the complementarity of opposites is realised, be it for a second or a thousand years, duality returns to unity. This is the story of life, and it is also the work of Aikido techniques, which is why the Founder said that they are a manifestation of Takemusu... of the Divine, to give a poor translation of this Japanese expression.
In the dark cave where the world separated from the One lives, ‘there was the goddess of the Underworld and that of the Sun whose gaze extends far, bloody Discord and grave-looking Harmony, Beauty and Ugliness, Haste and Slowness, gentle Truth and black-haired Uncertainty.’ It is not impossible for man, in the time and space of his life, to find his way in the cave of Empedocles by uniting opposites to the best of his ability. But he cannot do this without learning to be genuinely sincere when necessary, in other words without realising the insignificance of everything he has always regarded as his own, his ideas, his convictions and his mistakes. This is a condition for him to finally begin to learn something true about himself, and about his relationship with others and with the world. However, the ‘gentle Truth’, like everything else in the cave, is only revealed through its opposite; it needs lies and concealment to express itself, just as light needs darkness. That is why, on this path of sincerity, I pray at the same time to ‘black-haired Uncertainty’ not to abandon me to a task that can only exist through her.
Having mentioned the dark side that 28 June has repeatedly had to bear throughout the twentieth century, it is with some perplexity that I put an end to this reflection on another 28 June. But I have learnt to accept as necessary that everything that is implicit in any event is also fully realised by other reasons, without human action having any connection with this necessity. All I can do, therefore, is wish this summer solstice piece of writing fair winds, so that it may touch whom it must and in the way it must. I send it logically from the heart of the austral winter.
Philippe Voarino
Lorne Beach, 28 June 2023
