“Kill him!” How many times has this injunction slammed into my ears as I've engaged in a movement ? It was Pierre Chassang who watched over my motivation from a corner of the tatami. Determination was not something he lacked.
Let's be clear, Pierre never called anyone to murder, of course. What he wanted to express with this apostrophe was that no Aikido movement is possible if the spirit is not martial.
The art of war is based on determination, and Aikido is based on the art of war. If you can't kill the other in spirit, then you can't destroy the fighting spirit in yourself either. To win in Aikido is not to win over the other, it's to win over the fighting spirit in oneself, it's masakatsu, “to cut off the attachment to life and death”. But do we seriously believe that an objective so ambitiously defined by O Sensei can be achieved by the kind of personal development gymnastics to which Aikido has been reduced by the pathological feeling of delicacy towards uke and self-indulgence ?
Aikido is something else, because you can't harmonize cheaply with the movement of the Universe. To touch being, you need a change of consciousness, you need to kill the old man within you, the man who opposes himself, who always wants to measure himself, the subjective man. It is at this price that Aikido can give birth to the new man, the objective man, Ecce Homo in Nietzsche's sense.
The video gives an example of the determination required to perform kaiten nage :
Confusion is the sign of our times : confusion of terms, confusion of ideas, confusion of feelings, confusion of genders... In this case, we must be careful not to confuse determination with violence. Force is not violence, and a clear distinction must be made between two such opposites. Force is harmonious and measured, it produces and builds. Violence, on the contrary, is the irrational and impulsive destruction of the harmony of the Universe. O Sensei's “Victory through Peace” is not achieved through violence, but through force... coincidentia oppositorum. And one of the characteristics of strength is determination. The Aikido gesture must have this martial strength and determination.
