Knowledge of the Highest Things Through Violence

Wrestling, Resistance and the Fruits of Mastery

Less Writing, More Fighting

I took a break from this Substack recently. It wasn’t planned, but I had some personal issues to attend to which left me unable to read or write. This was something I haven’t really had to deal with before, and to fill the time where my intellectual pursuits used to be, I devoted myself to physical fitness and the study of grappling. I have been training nogi submission grappling at a good BJJ school over the past few years, as well as freestyle wrestling with some Iranians. Not only have I gotten much better at grappling, but I have expanded my mind in unexpected ways as well. I seem to have gained some philosophical insights despite reading next to no new philosophy during this time.

What I want to discuss here is how the study of any domain can lead to higher understanding and what kind of insights grappling is uniquely well-suited to produce. But before getting into that I need to clarify what I mean by “higher understanding.”

One of the newer developments in contemporary epistemology is a focus on understanding that is distinct from propositional knowledge. For a long time now the English-speaking philosophical world—and the analytical tradition in particular—has focused on propositional knowledge. In epistemology, there is a mountain of extremely boring (to me) literature on justified true belief and all the problems that arise because of it. This focus is rather strange historically, and my own view is that it has to do with the English language itself—but this is another topic, one that even the comedian John Cleese has touched on recently.

Why do we only have one word for ‘know’?

This leads to very interesting questions regarding the different kinds of knowledge that are possible. But the one that concerns us here is the nature of what I am calling higher understanding. This is an intuitive knowledge of deeper laws of the cosmos.

You can give many answers to this question, but I think part of the reason why we went through such a dry spell—and continue to go through it—is that the most interesting theories about this sort of thing basically died out after the 1940s. From about the 1910s to the 1930s, many thinkers in Germany were focused on an intuitive conception of knowledge. My favourite stuff is downstream from Husserl, whose ideas were refined by the usual suspects: Scheler, Reinach, Ingarden, Von Hildebrand, etc… Many of these people were quite influential in German intellectual spheres, so these ideas were fairly widespread. Not only that, 1920s Germany was a very exciting time in epistemology and there were all kinds of competing views.

The field was so vibrant that in 1926, two years before his death, Scheler wrote, “it should no longer be possible for a book to be published—which may in fact be quite good for its specialized use—under the title ‘general epistemology.’ Not only do we have views about the intuitive knowledge of essences (wessenchau) that I like, but at the time the notion of “cognition” (erkenntnis) was undertood in many different ways by many different people: we had the pragmatists (James, Peirce, …), Cohen, Bergson, Lotze, Rickert, Schlickt, Cassirer, Hartmann, Vailinger, Bergson, and even some old school Thomists.¹ All these people had different views and were asking very subtle questions that are seldom raised today. After the nazis came to power, a lot of these intellectuals left Germany; and after World War 2, most of these lines of thought just died out. Philosophy was now centered in France and in the anglosphere, and the main focus of epistemology shifted, which brings us to today.²

When we consider philosophy and its current relation to the world beyond academia, you pretty much either have the analytic school, which is concerned with knowledge as “justified true belief” and all the problems that such a view engenders, or the French post-modernists, who are mainly focused on anti-objectivism and writing sentences that sound cute. There are exceptions, but most of what’s done today is a continuation from those two currents, and all that cool stuff from Germany is read only by a few specialists in the history of philosophy—and much of it isn’t even available in English. Thankfully, the winds seem to be changing in academia—and perhaps they’re blowing through me as well!

Without going into too much detail, I think it’s possible to simply intuit certain features about the deeper laws of existence and that this kind of understanding can only be seen or given through insight. Philosophy is often concerned with “capturing” these insights in concepts, but the insights themselves can be gleaned from anywhere.

This process is also inextricably linked with the mastery, which we had a philosophy cafe about a few months back. It seems that mastering any domain coincides with gaining insights about the structure of existence itself. I realize these are highfalutin concepts, but I hope to show that all of this is relatively straightforward. You’ll notice that masters of any field often hold similar views but they cast them in the metaphors of what they know.

Understanding the Unity of the World

One of the main features of higher understanding is the recognition of how similar and interconnected everything is. As this essay is about grappling, I will use these metaphors to illustrate.

For the beginner, everything appears extremely complicated. There are thousands of techniques, positions and details—each of which has its own nuances. One is overwhelmed, and the sheer complexity of grips, positions and movements is so great that it can even produce the feeling of something like the sublime.

Gradually, however, all these elements begin to blend together. Certain common objectives reveal themselves—to beat the elbows or get an angle, for example—and one comes see how various techniques are merely ways to achieve specific goals. Further training leads to the recognition of how different moves are actually different versions of similar ideas. In BJJ what is done on the ground is mirrored by certain wrestling takedowns, and even two ostensibly very different wrestling moves can be seen to have similar movements underlying them, as with the fireman’s carry and the arm throw.

What began as a series of techniques becomes a set of methods to achieve certain goals, and the unique moves reveal themselves to be variations on deeper themes.

This new understanding of the techniques themselves coincides with a greater awareness of one’s opponent or training partner. It isn’t merely about executing a technique effectively but about acting in accordance with the reactions that present themselves. There is a sense in which a perfectly employed technique requires perfect harmony with the opponent’s movements.

One of the guys at my gym was a judoka training on the junior Olympic team a decade ago, and his awareness is so staggering as to border on the supernatural. It’s as though he has telepathy and knows exactly what I am going to do. I merely think about a move and he reacts (and this only applies to the standing position, where he is a master). Often, after a sparring session, I will ask him if he knew I was thinking about a certain technique that I decided not to attempt, and he always answers in the affirmative. His focus is entirely divorced from what he is doing; there is no self-centeredness, no thought about himself. He is aware of the unity of action that both our bodies represent.

The process of becoming proficient, then, does not merely require learning certain concepts or even training the body to perform them efficiently; it has to do with the growth of the mind and an increase in one’s awareness. What was complicated becomes simple. What was highly individualized becomes merely the variation of deeper themes.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this process is that the understanding of this fundamental unity of existence is not restricted to any one domain. The same thing is true of music, writing, chess—of anything, really. The mastery of one domain provides a lens through which to grasp those laws that regulate all aspects of human existence. I’m not suggesting that everyone reading this go and start training martial arts, but I am suggesting that a careful attention to one’s passions can yield much more than proficiency in that given field.

The further one advances, the simpler everything becomes. One learns more and more, becomes increasingly individual through the development of a personal style—and yet this increase in individuality coincides with a deeper sense of integration and harmony. My friends 𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐓 and Noesis recently recommended that I read Soloviev, and he has some wonderful stuff on unity and multiplicity:

since every relation and every combination necessarily implies distinction, the more elements an organism contains, the more distinctions are present in its unity, and the more distinct it is from all other organisms; in other words, the greater the multiplicity of elements reduced to unity, the more the principle of unity asserts itself and consequently the more individual the organism is. So from this point of view, we again come to the conclusion that an entity’s universality is in direct ratio to its individuality: the more universal it is, the more individual, and therefore an absolutely universal being is absolutely individual.³

Mastery provides the intuitive insights for truly understanding this fundamental unity that binds everything together. It ceases to be something that is merely known in an abstract, heady way and becomes an insight that is simply part of one’s lived experience. Philosophical speculation can help to clarify these insights, but it seems to me that they must first be won through action.

Reality as Resistance

Alongside unity, which is something that can be seen everywhere, some fields tend to produce specific insights as well, or they tend to be better at producing them. Grappling, for example, is extremely well-suited to showing us what reality is.

There is a long-standing problem in philosophy about the existence of the external world. How do we know we aren’t the only thing that exists? Is it all a dream? There are a variety of answers to this question, but the one that I find most fascinating is the idea that reality discloses itself through the feeling of resistance. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Dilthey, Scheler and Heidegger were especially interested in this. The following quote is from Peter Poellner’s book on Nietzsche’s metaphysics:

The world which we ordinarily consider to exist `objectively’ and externally to us is thus a system of resistances which we either experience as actual or which we would expect to encounter in various roughly specifiable circumstances (these experiences of resistance must of course not be simply identified with sensations of various kinds, e.g. tactile ones—a point also made by Scheler and William James). The above-mentioned phenomenological characteristics of what we consider to he real objects had of course been noted by philosophers prior to Nietzsche—for instance, by Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley—but, with the partial exception of the latter, they did not draw his radical conclusion that `objective reality’ can only be explicated with recourse to them.⁴

There is an important question here: is it really the case that we can know these deepest metaphysical aspects of the world through immediate intuition of something like resistance? To paraphrase Scheler, yes, and I think it’s pretty obvious (but I will touch on this in more detail another time). But regardless of whether you think resistance is how the objective world reveals itself, the experience of resistance is extremely interesting.

I have played a lot of contact sports, but I know of no other activity that brings this aspect of the world to the fore like grappling does. To wrestle with someone, to pick them up and slam them, hold them down as they attempt to get up, and then proceed to joint lock or strangle them is such a rare thing these days. In such moments, the will of the other person is so palpably present. If you’re on the receiving end of the beating, it’s even clearer. There is something beyond yourself, something alien and apart from you, your drives and intentions.

Nature resists us, but there is something special about feeling the intention of another person. I also believe it has salutary effects. Life seems to need resistance to flourish. Reality shapes the form of what a thing becomes, and in the absence of resistance, all kinds of aberrant growths occur—and this is even worse in human beings, who can reason themselves into all kinds of insanity.

Most “degenerate losers” are often said not to live in reality. The anime kid who thinks he’s possessed by an ancestral spirit and will be able to fight like those he watches in his cartoons is suffering from a psychic infection of some kind—“unrealococus.” It’s actually impossible to hold these beliefs if you ever really feel the resistance of the world. Engaging with external reality shapes a person according to those same laws that can be grasped intuitively by the master. Living in reality, feeling how external forces resist your will—this is a healthy, necessary thing.

One of the big problems with the internet is that it filters out this feeling of resistance, and a society without robust social consequences—physical consequences?—seems to have deleterious effects as well. It’s common to say of certain people that they would benefit from being mugged or punched in the face; this is just another way of saying that they would benefit from feeling the resistance of the world.

It very well might be the case that violence has beneficial effects for people, that feeling the power of another person’s will or of nature’s caprices shapes the individual in superior ways. This isn’t to say that we should regress to a state of barbarism, but I, for one, believe that there are healthy and even relatively safe ways of doing these things.

Knowledge Through Violence

There are many other benefits that I have reaped through training and reflecting deeply upon these issues, like a better understanding of my own body and mind. I still believe philosophy has its place and think it offers its own unique insights, but the world is rich and varied. It seems to me that some of the most profound things are best known—or perhaps can only be known—through violence.

What is violent is intense and powerful; even the etymology shows this. Often the term is given a negative evaluation these days, as though it were something bad by definition, but that need not be the case. Perhaps certain kinds of knowledge, certain forms of higher understanding, even require a great degree of violence to be grasped with any clarity.⁵ I’m not suggesting that everyone become an MMA fighter (I won’t), but if you’re interested in higher things, it is probably worth exploring all the means of coming to know them.

Of course, this also presupposes a certain kind of attitude as well. The pure pragmatist loses himself in the contingent world of reality, whereas the pure idealist is enraptured by his cloud of ideas. The one is focused on a specific goal and never sees the essence of things, the other never feels the resistance of the world. But the wise sees and senses both, uniting them within himself. Grappling has given me both a more intense experience of resistance and a deeper understanding of what it is in its purity.

1. I have not read all these guys, but I see these names pretty often.

2. One result of our intellectual inheritance is that the average person today doesn’t even really possess the terms or language to be able to think about the kind of knowledge. Readers may possess a hazy feeling that what they’re doing is valuable, but as soon as a term like “knowledge” is invoked it steers them down another path. Either they begin thinking about beliefs (as the analytic philosophers do) or they think about relativism and politics (as the post-modernists do). The idea of knowledge as intuitive non-linguistic insight is completely foreign to most people, even though many of them hold it in their hearts. Even extremely brilliant individuals have trouble understanding these things simply because the ideas are so foreign to our current ways of thinking. As I said earlier, some analytic guys are now rediscovering this stuff using the term ‘understanding.’

3. Solovyov, Vladimir. A Solovyov Anthology (p. 37). Barakaldo Books. Kindle Edition.

4. Poellner, Peter. Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford Philosophical Monographs) . Kindle Edition.

5. I have written about this a bit in the sexual realm as well. See this essay for example.