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 order to pass to the act, a foreign excitation, like a spur.”

Such is not the case of primitive power of action or primitive active force: this one needs nothing other than itself in order to pass to the act, it requires no exterior “spur” nor any help to become effectively active. Primitive active force is by itself active, provided at least that nothing, that is to say no “obstacle” (impedimentum) or limit, prevents the deployment of its activity.

Thus, returning to the conditions of possibility of activity, if one indeed begins these from the body, requires examining the conceptual differences that may exist between the act, acting, and action; but also questioning the notions of gesture and power, which, from Greek metaphysics to German idealism (and applying literally to the martial arts) are intrinsically linked to it.

In this sense, what then is an activity?

The question proves crucial, especially for us who have lived several of them.

The bodily foundation, vital energy, setting in motion, decision-making, action – as always situated at the frontier between intuition and matter, and the power that results from it – will indeed be so many notions which, starting from the concept of activity, raise the question of “what the body can do,” to take up the famous expression of Spinoza.

“No one, it is true,” he writes in the Ethics, “has until now determined what the body can do (…) which (…) can do many things of which its mind remains astonished.”

The distinction between force and power, to begin with, which is fully found in the practice of Aikido. If that were not the case, it would not be a discipline allowing, in the same class, beginners and advanced ranks to practice together, as well as practitioners of all sizes and all weights; and one would find oneself in a situation that exists in other Budos where different classes are necessary, all separated according to levels and builds, sometimes according to sexes, since muscular force is solicited.

The principal remark that one can philosophically propose about the difference between force and power is therefore the following: to have force is to know how to do something, and to do it; to have power is to know how to do something, and to refrain from doing it. True power is restrained.

In Aikido in a very practical way, one will stop at the sensation, limit to pain, but one will not go as far as injury. Whereas one could!

Principle of restraint moreover that Sun Zi extends to the martial art in military terms, but which one also finds in the Jewish tradition, in the texts of Ecclesiastes, Kohelet, which we will barely evoke, for lack of time, but which express the same idea: there is a time for everything, to know when to attack and when to defend, when to speak and when to be silent, when to act and when to abstain, when to heal and when to refrain from it.

One is indeed at the most intimate of philosophy: not to do what one can do, is at the highest point, the expression of the highest freedom.

That which escapes all necessity, necessity consisting precisely in doing what one cannot not do. The excess of actuality over potentiality, of a doing always vaster, possibly, than its strict limitation to the dimensions of a power without beyond, constitutes a reserve of event, the deployment to come of freedom, and the most intimate form of its experience.

The law of parsimony, which one can divert from its use in Kant, but barely, which he evokes drawing inspiration from the Principle of Perfection (and therefore of economy, let us recall) and which indeed means that nature always takes the shortest path, the one that mobilizes the least possible means (the complete opposite of “paths that lead nowhere”), to arrive straight at the goal. That is indeed “parsimony.”

One must at the outset place at the foundation of this proposition thus understood the empirical concept of a body (as movable object in space), in such a way that one can then understand entirely a priori that this latter predicate (that of movement by the sole fact of an external cause) suits the body. In this sense, the principle of the purposiveness of nature joins the principle of practical purposiveness, purposiveness which must be thought in the Idea of the determination of a free Will. Just like sentences of metaphysical wisdom, these maxims intervene relatively often in the course of this science, but only in a scattered way, and this on the occasion of many rules whose necessity one cannot show starting from concepts: “Nature takes the shortest path (lex parsimoniae)”; “It nevertheless makes no leap, neither in the sequence of its transformations, nor in the assemblage of specifically different forms (lex continui in natura)”; “Its great diversity in empirical laws nevertheless constitutes a unity under a small number of principles (principia praeter necessitatem non sunt multiplicanda).”

It would then remain to examine whether there exist “degrees” within perfection itself.

Precedently: *Penser la « messianicité sans messianisme » *L’art de combattre un ennemi invisible *Pandémie et production *Après la contingence *Hegel, Bensussan et la sortie de la philosophie *Philosopher à Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy et Gérard Bensussan, rencontres et désaccords *De l’excès à l’excellence *Coralie Camilli and the ‘Islander philosophy’ *L’Aliénation, du Sujet vide au Signe creux *Coralie Camilli Interview | Alex Gilbert #254 *Coralie Camilli Interview | Alex Gilbert #264.1 *Coralie Camilli Interview | Alex Gilbert #264.2 *Coralie Camilli Interview | Alex Gilbert #264.3

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