Coralie Camilli, substitute philosophy professor at the University of Corsica and French boxing champion, published L’art du combat (Puf) in 2020, Jours de grâce et de violence (Vérone éditions), and Insulaires (Vérone éditions) in 2023.

In ancient Japan, there did not exist a word to designate the Way, and yet, despite this absence of the word “Way,” the reality of a Way to pursue very much existed. Thus, the notion of Way “took on artisanal, aesthetic, mystical or moral forms, to grasp the highest spiritual truth within the most concrete daily activities, with sincerity and self-denial.”

The term activity here takes on a particular philosophical importance, for if Aikido, as a martial art, has become a Way, it is therefore both as a set of techniques, but also as a manner of acting, of acting, of holding a practice, of conducting an activity: of developing what the philosophical tradition has finally called a praxis (“practice” or “activity”).

What is meant by this? First of all, that it is indeed through the body that this activity, understood as energy and as act, is found and manifested. And it is precisely to Leibniz prudently cited that it falls to have played a decisive and founding role in positing that, in corporeal substance, there must be found a first entelechy, a certain first capacity of activity, namely the motive force, primitive which is added to extension and mass and which always acts. The “active power” or “active force” (vis activa) that Leibniz attributes to bodies, particularly in the form of “primitive active power,” must be carefully distinguished from what is commonly called “bare power”: the latter expresses a “receptivity of action,” that is to say a capacity to act, a faculty to act or again, as Leibniz says elsewhere, “the proximate possibility of action, but which nevertheless needs, in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)