Plato, Aristotle, and Two Schools of Sword Thought

 I have recently acquired Tom Leoni's translation of Capoferro's Gran Simulacro and a historical survey of Chinese martial arts manuals.  I'll be reviewing these soon enough, but Capoferro specifically helped to crystallize a thought that's been brewing for a while.

The thought is this: there are two schools of thought on how to train for combat in general.  One of these starts from first principles then works down to specific examples, the other trains specific examples and the student is expected, via practice, to derive first principles.  Perhaps the greatest historical example of this divide is the argument between Carranza and Pacheco on one side, and Godinho on the other - Carranza being of the opinion that fencing can be distilled to principles and the exacting application of these principles through practice being the key to victory, while Godinho believes that knowledge of the principles is revealed by the practice itself.  I am, of course, using Godinho to stand in for all of the other teachers of esgrima vulgar here, because unlike them, he wrote it down.

This is a much older argument than simply Spaniards in the sixteenth century (how's that for alliteration?) and goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle.  For Plato, the representation in the physical world of a thing was not the thing, but an imperfect version of a perfect ideal, or "form."  By study of things in the world, the abstract version of a "thing" could be derived, coming closer and closer to that perfect form.  Thus, a navy blue coat is an imperfect expression of navy blue; navy blue is an imperfect expression of blue, and there is a metaphysical (literally "beyond the physical") expression of Blue which each of these removed steps represents.  At the highest possible level is the form of The Good, from which everything else is a less perfect expression.  This is why Plato's Socrates is such a jerk - he keeps trying to get people to abstract their definitions of things such that the Form is revealed, and keeps pointing out exceptions to their definitions.

What this has to do with swords is that each individual movement or play is an imperfect representation of the underlying principles of fighting; by practice, one learns to abstract the rules and principles, and figures out how to go from posta di donna to the momentary feeling of blade pressure in a crossing, and knows that converting to punta falsa is the solution - or whatever the appropriate series of responses in that moment is.  There is no way that one can understand all of the appropriate responses, and one can certainly not express all of them, but with practice, one can derive the response that the moment demands, taking the perfect Forms, and turning them into the imperfect expression.

Aristotle, of course, would say that this is not a good explanation of forms at all, and that to understand a fight, you must first understand what a fight is.  By this view, a fight is an expression of definable rules of motion and geometry and the expression of those rules is dictated by material, circumstance, space, and intent.  To understand the individual fight, you must understand the underlying structures of the fight - what Aristotle called the "causes."  Aristotle's four causes were material, formal, efficient, and final.  Material is the natural state of the thing, going to the classical elements (bet you didn't expect to see them in a fighting post!) such that each thing is an expression of its elemental essence.  Formal is the thing that defines it as belonging to a certain category - my definition of "definable rules etc." works just as well for traffic collision and fight, so what makes it a fight? Efficient is the actual underlying cause as we understand it in English - what set the fighters moving? Finally, appropriately enough, final cause is the telos, which can be translated to mission or purpose.  This is where Aristotle gets complicated, so I will use the simple mission statement of the Army to demonstrate telos: the mission of the Army is to fight and win the Nation's wars.

Now, the Spaniards would say, understand the four causes and you understand fighting! There is a great deal of obvious truth to this - understanding the brute-force rules of fighting, what "lay on" and "hold" mean, what counts as a legal target and why you can't shoot a mosque, will make the fight easier to understand.  However, the Spanish argument goes further: all fighting can be reduced to abstractions, and then the abstractions made more concrete, until you are describing a specific fight.  Understand the abstractions and understanding the concrete will naturally follow.  The goal of the Carranzist training approach was to remove everything from training that did not actually contribute to understanding the fight, and to attempt to distill fighting to principles - to define first a perfect Fight, and then to train such that every fight used the principles that made it.  While he was obviously not a Spaniard, this is precisely why Capoferro titled his work the Gran Simulacro - the Great Representation.

Having spent all this time talking about anything but Italian rapier, I am going to change gears here; Capoferro, Fabris, and a handful of others, including the Spaniards, represented a transition in how rapier was thought, rather than how it was fought.  Prior authors such as Marozzo and Manciolino, or for that matter Fiore, make clear in their writings that they teach a series of drills, and that if it's not covered by the drills, then it's either an advanced, off-book lesson, or it's a thing you're supposed to learn by practicing the drills until you understand how the drills work and can do on the fly.  Or, to quote Figueyredo:
 

With the admonition that no swordsman necessarily should do this or that rule, but rather he should take from them all what he best understands and that serves him to defeat his adversaries.

 After about 1600, authors in Italy, Spain, and even Japan started to write at least as much about the underlying principles of the fight as they did about the specific plays.  Capoferro is one of the first in the Italian tradition to give extensive thought in writing to the underlying structures of fighting; I actually prefer him to Fabris in this regard, as because Fabris was writing to one of his senior students to help him continue his practice (much like Musashi or Munenori - their writings were intended for senior students, who knew their masters' minds), while Capoferro wrote for a wider audience, which is why there was a revised edition of his work published in his lifetime.

What does this mean in actual practice? It means that, prior to about 1600, you could expect a teacher to say "here is a sword, here is how you use it, and here are the drills of the lesson, now go and practice those drills."  After 1600, you are likely to see at least as much why does it work that way as the rules and forms.  There is a place for all of this - you can take the second half of Capoferro, or Fabris, and teach it the exact same way as Marozzo's assaults.  You can also take Fiore and teach it from first principles of leverage and advantage.  What you can't do is understand the forms perfectly without practice; some application in actual meat space is required.

I'm sure there will be more to this; this all feels like something vaguely glimpsed and half-understood right now, but I felt it mature enough to share the first inklings.