Deconstructing Smallsword
Part One
Smallsword, Enlightenment, and Authenticity
Let me preface this note by saying that I am not claiming to be any kind of Fencing Master, or even close. I have been lucky enough to meet, take instruction from and fence several over the years and would not put myself in their august company. I learned a lot from them and I could surely learn a lot more. I have no doubt you could too. I am respectful of their experience and accomplishments and I would not dare to tread on their bailiwicks. That being said however, I am staking claim to a tiny bit of territory somewhere near the intersection of philosophy and fencing.
And I do mean specifically philosophy and fencing. This subject is not to be confused or conflated with any sort of "philosophy in fencing terms" . There is, I think, quite a difference. This is not about some sort of mystical Western bushido. This is not any kind of supposedly coherent meta-narrative that paints the furniture of the universe in terms of The Sharp or The Pointy. Those would be philosophies in terms of fencing. All the same I do not intend to demean these kinds of ideas. Indeed I argued for a kind of “full-contact school of philosophy” back in my university days. But here our subject is no more than philosophy and swordsmanship in a very small context. That is to say the relationship of Western intellectual culture of the late 17th century through the early 19th century to the practice of Historical European Swordsmanship. Specifically I will address the smallsword and philosophers of the Enlightenment era.
Let me take a minute to relate how I came to make these particular connections. Hasn’t every fencer speculated on what Rene Descartes wrote in his lost treatise on fencing? Ok, well maybe not. I am lucky enough to have accumulated, by choice and chance, degrees in Western academic philosophy. Some years later and well into my studies of fencing I remembered the missing Descartes manual. I began to wonder if I could apply to my sword studies what I knew of Descartes as a philosopher. Could I infer from his surviving philosophical texts the missing martial content?
At that same time I was working with living history volunteers at a national park whose focus was what we Americans call THE War of 1812. I was struck by how, compared to their black powder guns, volunteers appeared to know little about the edged weapons that they carried. And it was obvious! You could tell by looking that they had little to no idea of the piece of steel on their belt as anything more that a decoration. Picture in your mind a real military man under arms in the field or on parade. Their bearing displays a plainly visible awareness of, and familiarity with, their weapons. That is what I wanted to foster but that is not what I had achieved.
The question then was how to build that bearing – that look of awareness- into the volunteers. Costume and hardware was not enough -- we had the best. Having them go through the motions or actions of their character was not enough – it often looked faked or forced. If we were to evoke the proper period effect it had to come from the inside, not be painted on like so much makeup. Thus the idea was born to teach them period sword drill and a bit about the combat use of edged weapons. As far as it was practical to insert this into their packed schedule it was a success. Visitors commented favorably.
I then began to wonder just how far this concept could be pushed. Can one move from appearing to be a better period swordsman to actually being better via the same route? Can one make oneself a better period swordsman if one makes oneself a better period thinker? Can one credibly approach the art of swordsmanship in a way meaningfully close to that of the period swordsman? In each case the answer seemed to be, Yes. Other scholars were certainly trying. Everybody it seemed at this time was reading the newly available historic fencing manuals and related period literature. They were making some great progress in this direction. It was however progress in a predominantly practical mode. They were re-constructing the art. If I was to chart any new ground it would be necessary to look at a different, deeper, and more conceptual level. Instead I would be de-constructing the art. I maintain that philosophers get us to that level. Philosophers of an era provide us with the best evidence of the character of that period’s intellect. The goal then is no less than filtering or categorizing our perception of the world in a way as close as possible to the way a period smallswordsman did.
I can hear the objections swelling. “Philosophers were as irrelevant then as they are now.” But you are mistaken. Philosophers either consciously drove, or were perhaps unconsciously driven by, their period’s intellectual culture. Either way, the frameworks of ideas and issues discussed by those philosophers indubitably correspond to those cultures in an historically informative fashion. A denial of both paints philosophers as completely detached from their cultures, which we can see historically is not true at all, (even if they were frequently the most eccentric folks in town). How many rabid capitalists walking the streets today ever read Wealth of Nations? Have even a small number of radical socialists read the Manifesto ? I think not! Despite their limited readership one must admit that Smith and Marx are at a minimum historically informative -- if not influential--and that is all I think I need to make this thesis credible.
Besides these world views or narratives about “how the world is” --the stock in trade of metaphysicians -- and "how we understand it" -- the realm of the epistemologist--are implicitly present in swordsmanship manuals, and always have been. Consider a medieval manual where guards are called “The Ox” or “The Plow” . These terms were familiar to period students at all socio-economic levels. They lived in a predominantly agricultural world. In that time and place people could get their minds around “cows and plows”. In 1700 however the world “looks” different. In the Enlightenment, the age of science, what terms will the sword master and author use to relate to students? Numbers of course! Prime, seconde, tierce , and so on. Experimental science is the quantification of nature and mathematics is its lingua franca.
If one could guess what Descartes’ fencing manual looked like one would think that it would have been heavy on coordinate geometry. One expects that he would engage in the same sort of radical, methodical doubt and analyze every aspect of the art of the sword down to its most basic and indubitable principals because that is exactly what he does to the world as a whole in his philosophic works.
I am not so naïve as to think that geometry was never used in sword instruction before this era. I have seen the prints and have read texts. They do use geometry to show what the student is to do. What however, is different from why. Descartes is different because the Enlightenment mind is different. Descartes is not asking us to believe what someone else says is right but asking us to analyze, to question, to search after the truth ourselves. In the same way that his contemporary Galileo strained against the doctrinal oppression of science by the church, Descartes struggled with dogmatic Aristotelians who dominated academic philosophy. Descartes asks us to question the ideas our academic, religious, and by extension fencing masters present to us and to accept them only if we find them indubitably and demonstrably true. The Enlightenment mind the mind of the smallswordsman admits to no “Simon Says . . .” methodology. Compare “Do this—Do that”, the appeal to authority, of the Renaissance and before with Hope’s extensive arguments, demonstrations and justifications in his New Method.
That personal search for truth through intense analysis and radical reduction is the first step toward recreating the ideal Enlightenment swordsman, but is only the first. One could also consider the skepticism of Hume, Kant’s pure intuitions of time and space, Hegel’s “science with a point of view”, the dialectic, Kierkegaard’s "Knights of Faith” and ‘Infinite Resignation” and much more in order to grasp this mode of thinking. None of these philosophic texts are explicitly about swordsmanship, but they do give us valuable concepts to apply to our study because they are "true" about a world in which swords, swordplay and science were, and are still for us, a part. The truths one discovers from analysis of the world are no less true of the sword. The laws of nature are visible and demonstrable in the salle. Therefore it is fitting and productive for one to pursue truth, to pursue enlightenment, in Kant’s words to “dare to be wise” as swordsmen in exactly this same frame of mind.
If this line of reasoning may seem hostile to the "official" sword authority hierarchy, it is not meant to be. Indeed there is such a thing or at least it acts as if it were and when it speaks it sounds like a bad Kung Fu movie. You have surely seen the part where at leas one person says. “I am the only real Kung Fu teacher. I learned from the only real master. All other Kung Fu is not as good and has been made up or copied from me. ” The argument from authority knows no geographical or temporal bounds. In contrast I think that you will find that every respectable, credentialed master of any weapon of any period will admit that they would not have achieved their status without employing the analytic method. The "authorities" do have a place and always will. They provide role models and start novices on their road to enlightened swordsmanship. For many students that is enough, if not more than enough. Good instructors help the sincere overcome developmental plateaus and avoid error. But the best inspire their students think for themselves. Ultimately to walk the final miles down "that lonesome valley" to enlightenment "you got to walk it by yourself."
Let me close for now by suggesting a bit of optional homework. Method is key to the Enlightenment approach and I would recommend the Second Chapter of Descartes' Discourse on the Method if one wants a short and enjoyable bit of background.
Part Two
The Cultural Connection
In our first section we addressed the justification for a connection between smallsword and Enlightenment Era philosophy. It seems a little odd that such a justification was necessary. If instead I was to argue that there was a connection on a fundamental level between Kendo and Zen no one would have batted an eye. Somehow there is a lingering impression that western martial arts lack the same sort of philosophical grounding because we, to a greater degree, separate philosophy from religion and spirituality. Rather than being a shallow and corrupt practice I would assert that it is really an advantage because it allows us to deal with the physical, and scientific, aspects without being hampered by the spiritual and ethical. Which is not to say that we are not spiritual and ethical, but that we run that line of thinking on a linked parallel track.
Back to the subject at hand.
The rise of the smallsword in the Enlightenment Era was no accident. Nor was it the result solely of technological innovation. Instead it reflected the cultural and intellectual values of the age. Chief among these was a belief that the world was knowable through science and that such knowledge gave humanity the ability and the right to change themselves, their station and the world. “Reason” Hume tells us “is and ought to be only the slave of the passions.”
The application of science to martial arts was nothing new; however each era looks at the world and science a little bit differently. Each temporal and geographic location filters its view of the world through its own particular values. Therefore the application of that science in pursuit of those values, -- which we call technology -- reflects that world view, or to use a modern term “meta-narrative”. It is the philosophers that tell us how a culture thinks the world works.
I do not see the smallsword’s evolution as being in anyway inevitable. I am surprised those who insist that it could not have been different. Sure there were metallurgical advances in the mid 1600s in Europe but they do not seem that decisive. If technology alone dictated a weapon design why did the Japanese who certainly had highly sophisticated sword making skills go to the katana? Why did the Spanish not adopt the smallsword along with most of the rest of Europe? ( Ok, there is the Spanish Smallsword but that is really a mini-rapier.)
Please let’s not trot out the "thrusting is faster than cutting" argument for it -pardon the pun -- misses the point. Yes it is true and a well placed thrust is decisive but by 1820 even the French began to see that cutting was way easier to execute and left one less vulnerable. Just read some of the Napoleonic era discussions on the 1796 Light Cavalry Saber Likewise you make no headway with a convenience argument. Such as “since people were wearing their swords everywhere, and all of the time, a shorter and lighter sword would be “better” “ Of course anyone who has worn a sword , even a smallsword knows that it is a blasted inconvenience. It is nearly always in the way dragging or bumping along. Safer, cheaper, easier to learn and more transportable weapons were available, so why not carry one of them?
The convenience argument does hint at the more likely reason. So let’s look deeper. More men from the upper and middle class were wearing swords more often. Yes. Smaller is more practical. Voila! The smallsword is born. Not so fast. This begs the question of why swords were being worn more or even at all! Strong, independent, able to defend themselves, their loved ones and their honor at all times was the way that men wanted to see themselves. Upper class men had had this capacity for a long time and now the rising middle and merchant class man wanted it as well. The great advance in metallurgy was that steel could be made on a scale that began to reduce the price to a level affordable to more men.
The point here is that weapons development is at least as much a subjective choice as an objective one. The smallsword owes at least as much to changing cultural values as it does to technological development. Suppose instead of "refinement" social values took a more brutal turn in which raw brute strength was a dominant shared cultural value. I would think that duels would have been either weaponless tests of strength or would have used the latest and most technologically advanced weapon of brute strength. But the smallsword begins for the 18th century man what Colonel Colt finishes a hundred years later, i.e., making all men equal.. Is it a coincidence that in the same era we see representative democracy blossom in America and then Europe?
Those values, desires or “passions” to use Hume’s term were achieved through the reason, the science, and the technology of the day. The rational framework of this science was largely reductive and analytical. There is ample evidence that period people thought in these terms. In a military context we have for example “Ships of the Line”. Infantry fought in lines using “linear tactics.” In industry we see the rise of machinery. A cotton mill looks like a large and complicated machine but it really a collection of many little single purpose machines. Even the workers are “reduced” to single cogs of the great machine. It is difficult to talk of this era without using implicitly scientific terminology. With little effort we could fill pages with period phrases, and practices reflective of a scientific world view.
Philosophers of the period are obsessed with analyzing the “system” of the world almost as if it were a giant mill whose parts we have not yet explored. Spinoza, Leibnitz, Galileo, Newton, and of course Descartes are all looking for the same things. We know Descartes’ other writings revolved around math and method. His method was to reduce complex ideas to their simplest components in order to understand them. He probably would have done the same with actions and practices of sword play.
Smallsword is about a much a reduction of conflict resolution to its essence as is possible. Make a hole in one of your opponent’s vital areas. Simple, efficient and elegant. Efficiency, elegance, and beauty in this world view were hallmarks of natural truth. In ballet the ideal was to present at any moment the most beautiful picture to the audience. As those who have studied know the way that beauty is achieved is a science of efficiency and elegance based on natural truths. Smallsword has much the same conceptual grounding but the goal is different.
The weapon itself is a reduction to little more than a line, or a point really, where all the force of our passion is concentrated. But to use it efficiently one must think of the geometry involved. Above all the smallsword is thinking man’s weapon. Other weapons may suffer brutes and fools but not the smallsword. To survive the fight the smallsword user must be constantly doing the geometric calculus which keeps his blade between himself and death. Descartes gave us a method to systematically graph and quantify the motion on the blades through space.
So for example if we were to graph the ideal path of a sword tip through space in a thrust we would see that it is a straight line. Ideal because it is the shortest, fastest and most efficient. The geometry of the overall motion necessary to accomplish that path over the distance required necessitates moving more than just the hand or arm. In order to move the approximately three feet in a straight line to the target the entire body must coordinate. That motion also can be graphed and analyzed. From that analysis we can judge the security of our defense. The tip of the opponent’s sword moves thirty-six inches straight toward our heart. Our parry must move only six to deflect his blade. If we react promptly we should have no trouble. For our opponent to strike us must move his point six times further than we must move to deflect it. It is no accident that this efficient action is also elegant and beautiful. And it is no accident that the security of our defense decreases in proportion to the proximity of the opponent’s tip to our heart.
I could go on about swordplay and the intuitive understanding of time and space as the structures of experience in Kant, Newton’s laws of motion, or his disputes over relativity and identity with Leibnitz, Hume’s "bundle" theory and more but I think that you get the idea. One can use the ideas of almost any philosopher of the era as a viewpoint from which to look at the "Technical, Tactical and Practical" aspects of the art of the smallsword.
To understand smallsword as people of the period did we have to share, for at least a while, their conceptual framework, their paradigm. That mindset helps us to understand the context of the weapon and leads to deeper understanding of the technique. That is to say that just getting down “the moves “ may be sufficient to master the sport of fencing but to understand the Art of the Smallsword requires more. Smallsword is a state of mind not the object in your hand.
Having gotten into this distinctly Western mode of analytical thinking the next step is to devise ways to bring this understanding into the practice of swordsmanship through drills and exercises. Those present in the period manuals (and new ones too) become more instructive of the technique and lead to more insightful practice and execution when practiced analytically. So rather than the typical lesson of “do this and that” or “if opponent does x you do y” we look for intensely self critical and analytical practice leading to insight. The Enlightenment era swordsman enlightens himself. In part three we will look at how we can internalize these concepts through drill and practice.
Part Three
Think Analytically, Move Mindfully
I am reminded of a story one of my professors, John Rose told me many years ago at Goucher College. As a young philosophy student and much like all philosophy students at one time or another he was having some doubts that he would ever be able to get his mind around some of the big concepts. So he asked his favorite professor “When will I be a philosopher?” The professor had no doubt heard this question before, so he answered right back “When you start to ask philosophic questions” John not getting the sort of answer he expected said “Just what -- IS -- a philosophic question?” And his professor replied “Congratulations you are now a philosopher!”
I think swordsmanship is very much like that. You become a swordsman by doing the kinds things that swordsmen do. Despite talking about the Enlightenment in parts one and two of this essay it is quite clearly an existential theory of swordsmanship I am advancing. When you make the choices that swordsmen make you are becoming one. When you make these choices from the mental perspective of a practitioner of the art, who lived in the Enlightenment era, the possible choices that derive from that viewpoint determine the kind of swordsman you become. I believe that to be the best that you can be -- the most authentic, in a Heideggerian sense -- you need to be conscious of both your choices and the context in which you operate. The first step to becoming authentic is to develop a sense of context. To know your situation into which you are “thrown” and what the realistic possibilities and outcomes are leads to making swordsman-like choices.
Let me propose an artificial concept I call martial space. It is a graphically interesting concept and a very Cartesian metaphor. Think of your typical x,y,and z axes defining three dimensions. The individual axes represent the Technical, the Tactical, and the Practical aspects respectively of any given moment of our martial practice. Our position within the martial space continuum is defined by the relative values of what we are doing at that moment.
Thus a solo drill, like “pushing at a target on the wall”, which we see in virtually every fencing manual, is much more of a Technical exercise than a Tactical or Practical one. So if we were to plot its location it would be something like x=10, y=2, z=2. The exact values themselves are not important. What is important is to get a sense of where within martial space we are. Exactly what are we practicing, why we are practicing it and so how is it best to practice it. So often we see people practice without that kind of focus. Pushing at the wall is usually thought as almost exclusively a point control exercise or the fencing equivalent of shadow boxing. We see folks merely going through the motions. They fail to take advantage of a great opportunity to really concentrate on technique. If done slowly and repeatedly one is freed from thinking about sequence, reaction or an opponent. The wall is an excellent place to turn the thoughts analytically inward to subtleties of weight distribution, hand and foot position, and so on. Awareness of these elements is easier to sense going slow and nearly impossible to sense at least initially at speed. Practice like this is the core of “Think analytically, move mindfully.”
This concept of martial space is also important because as we become more aware of our location in any environment we make better choices and have better outcomes. We all know “one-dimensional” fencers. Frequently in smallsword we encounter them by way of sport fencing. They are tremendous athletes and have impressive speed but their tactical and practical sense is skewed. Not bad, just skewed. They may be well positioned for the foil, or epee but not for the smallsword. The sport fencer mistakenly believes that he has achieved proper balance for the smallsword context. He believes he is in the proper location in martial space for smallsword but he is not. Older and slower small-sworders frequently beat him because they are more balanced, more aware and make better choices.
We have all been in the position of fencing someone who was not in the same plane of martial space. We have fenced people who could not think about anything but the touch and would do anything to get it. They are addicted to the practical and cannot break free of its seductive grip. This attitude and mindset is invaluable and serves them well in the street but holds back their progress in the salle because they have abandoned technique at the very time that they should be practicing it.
Eventually one realizes it is easier to have technique and chose to “get practical” in a moment of crisis than it is to try to perform a technique for which you see the need but have not practiced. To paraphrase Macarthur “Short swords make for bad habits.” and he is right. Infighting is surely easier to practice -- and satisfying too -- since you usually can get at least a double-hit . . . if you just keep on poking. Is it an important skill? Yes it is, but to rely upon it or any single technique or style exclusively is limiting. To in-fight you have to get in and if you cannot manage your engagements at distance you will most likely not get in against someone who can. In one class I asked one of the short-sword crowd to switch to my longer weapon. I could adjust to their 30 much faster than they could adjust to my 35. “I don’t like this” they said “I have to think further ahead.” We agreed that it was a good thing to think further ahead.
When we engage in free play for the purpose of practicing our feints and strategy we are very much being tactical. But we are still partly technical because we chose and use the techniques we know. When we step outside of the canonical techniques and their situational use we enter the realm of the practical. For example kicking out the knee of an opponent that lingered too long in a lunge in a street fight.
In any encounter we move about within martial space, at one moment be more concerned with one or the other aspects. Sometimes moving toward the technical and sometimes toward the tactical as the situation demands. Different and unknown opponents force us to be able to determine quickly where in martial space the opponent is coming from so that we can match or counter him effectively. Fencing like a gentleman against the raving lunatic who wants to kill you is a short and sure route to unpleasant outcomes.
Well that is a lot to think about and I promised to give some clues as to what to expect in the class so here goes. (Constant reference to Enlightenment Philosophy is a given.)
1. We will begin with a bit of systematic movement exercises used in the Classical period to facilitate body awareness, correct posture and deportment which becomes ingrained in classical smallsword technique. (Yes this is the Ballet part)
2. Analysis and reconstruction of core elements of technique. The guard and the thrust for example. Constructing your best guard and deconstructing the thrust
3. Exploring the geometry of engagement. Seeing it in your mind, feeling it through the blade, managing it in real-time.
4. Exploring a plastic notion of time and space as the ground for effective offence and defense.
Smallsword, Enlightenment, and Authenticity
Let me preface this note by saying that I am not claiming to be any kind of Fencing Master, or even close. I have been lucky enough to meet, take instruction from and fence several over the years and would not put myself in their august company. I learned a lot from them and I could surely learn a lot more. I have no doubt you could too. I am respectful of their experience and accomplishments and I would not dare to tread on their bailiwicks. That being said however, I am staking claim to a tiny bit of territory somewhere near the intersection of philosophy and fencing.
And I do mean specifically philosophy and fencing. This subject is not to be confused or conflated with any sort of "philosophy in fencing terms" . There is, I think, quite a difference. This is not about some sort of mystical Western bushido. This is not any kind of supposedly coherent meta-narrative that paints the furniture of the universe in terms of The Sharp or The Pointy. Those would be philosophies in terms of fencing. All the same I do not intend to demean these kinds of ideas. Indeed I argued for a kind of “full-contact school of philosophy” back in my university days. But here our subject is no more than philosophy and swordsmanship in a very small context. That is to say the relationship of Western intellectual culture of the late 17th century through the early 19th century to the practice of Historical European Swordsmanship. Specifically I will address the smallsword and philosophers of the Enlightenment era.
Let me take a minute to relate how I came to make these particular connections. Hasn’t every fencer speculated on what Rene Descartes wrote in his lost treatise on fencing? Ok, well maybe not. I am lucky enough to have accumulated, by choice and chance, degrees in Western academic philosophy. Some years later and well into my studies of fencing I remembered the missing Descartes manual. I began to wonder if I could apply to my sword studies what I knew of Descartes as a philosopher. Could I infer from his surviving philosophical texts the missing martial content?
At that same time I was working with living history volunteers at a national park whose focus was what we Americans call THE War of 1812. I was struck by how, compared to their black powder guns, volunteers appeared to know little about the edged weapons that they carried. And it was obvious! You could tell by looking that they had little to no idea of the piece of steel on their belt as anything more that a decoration. Picture in your mind a real military man under arms in the field or on parade. Their bearing displays a plainly visible awareness of, and familiarity with, their weapons. That is what I wanted to foster but that is not what I had achieved.
The question then was how to build that bearing – that look of awareness- into the volunteers. Costume and hardware was not enough -- we had the best. Having them go through the motions or actions of their character was not enough – it often looked faked or forced. If we were to evoke the proper period effect it had to come from the inside, not be painted on like so much makeup. Thus the idea was born to teach them period sword drill and a bit about the combat use of edged weapons. As far as it was practical to insert this into their packed schedule it was a success. Visitors commented favorably.
I then began to wonder just how far this concept could be pushed. Can one move from appearing to be a better period swordsman to actually being better via the same route? Can one make oneself a better period swordsman if one makes oneself a better period thinker? Can one credibly approach the art of swordsmanship in a way meaningfully close to that of the period swordsman? In each case the answer seemed to be, Yes. Other scholars were certainly trying. Everybody it seemed at this time was reading the newly available historic fencing manuals and related period literature. They were making some great progress in this direction. It was however progress in a predominantly practical mode. They were re-constructing the art. If I was to chart any new ground it would be necessary to look at a different, deeper, and more conceptual level. Instead I would be de-constructing the art. I maintain that philosophers get us to that level. Philosophers of an era provide us with the best evidence of the character of that period’s intellect. The goal then is no less than filtering or categorizing our perception of the world in a way as close as possible to the way a period smallswordsman did.
I can hear the objections swelling. “Philosophers were as irrelevant then as they are now.” But you are mistaken. Philosophers either consciously drove, or were perhaps unconsciously driven by, their period’s intellectual culture. Either way, the frameworks of ideas and issues discussed by those philosophers indubitably correspond to those cultures in an historically informative fashion. A denial of both paints philosophers as completely detached from their cultures, which we can see historically is not true at all, (even if they were frequently the most eccentric folks in town). How many rabid capitalists walking the streets today ever read Wealth of Nations? Have even a small number of radical socialists read the Manifesto ? I think not! Despite their limited readership one must admit that Smith and Marx are at a minimum historically informative -- if not influential--and that is all I think I need to make this thesis credible.
Besides these world views or narratives about “how the world is” --the stock in trade of metaphysicians -- and "how we understand it" -- the realm of the epistemologist--are implicitly present in swordsmanship manuals, and always have been. Consider a medieval manual where guards are called “The Ox” or “The Plow” . These terms were familiar to period students at all socio-economic levels. They lived in a predominantly agricultural world. In that time and place people could get their minds around “cows and plows”. In 1700 however the world “looks” different. In the Enlightenment, the age of science, what terms will the sword master and author use to relate to students? Numbers of course! Prime, seconde, tierce , and so on. Experimental science is the quantification of nature and mathematics is its lingua franca.
If one could guess what Descartes’ fencing manual looked like one would think that it would have been heavy on coordinate geometry. One expects that he would engage in the same sort of radical, methodical doubt and analyze every aspect of the art of the sword down to its most basic and indubitable principals because that is exactly what he does to the world as a whole in his philosophic works.
I am not so naïve as to think that geometry was never used in sword instruction before this era. I have seen the prints and have read texts. They do use geometry to show what the student is to do. What however, is different from why. Descartes is different because the Enlightenment mind is different. Descartes is not asking us to believe what someone else says is right but asking us to analyze, to question, to search after the truth ourselves. In the same way that his contemporary Galileo strained against the doctrinal oppression of science by the church, Descartes struggled with dogmatic Aristotelians who dominated academic philosophy. Descartes asks us to question the ideas our academic, religious, and by extension fencing masters present to us and to accept them only if we find them indubitably and demonstrably true. The Enlightenment mind the mind of the smallswordsman admits to no “Simon Says . . .” methodology. Compare “Do this—Do that”, the appeal to authority, of the Renaissance and before with Hope’s extensive arguments, demonstrations and justifications in his New Method.
That personal search for truth through intense analysis and radical reduction is the first step toward recreating the ideal Enlightenment swordsman, but is only the first. One could also consider the skepticism of Hume, Kant’s pure intuitions of time and space, Hegel’s “science with a point of view”, the dialectic, Kierkegaard’s "Knights of Faith” and ‘Infinite Resignation” and much more in order to grasp this mode of thinking. None of these philosophic texts are explicitly about swordsmanship, but they do give us valuable concepts to apply to our study because they are "true" about a world in which swords, swordplay and science were, and are still for us, a part. The truths one discovers from analysis of the world are no less true of the sword. The laws of nature are visible and demonstrable in the salle. Therefore it is fitting and productive for one to pursue truth, to pursue enlightenment, in Kant’s words to “dare to be wise” as swordsmen in exactly this same frame of mind.
If this line of reasoning may seem hostile to the "official" sword authority hierarchy, it is not meant to be. Indeed there is such a thing or at least it acts as if it were and when it speaks it sounds like a bad Kung Fu movie. You have surely seen the part where at leas one person says. “I am the only real Kung Fu teacher. I learned from the only real master. All other Kung Fu is not as good and has been made up or copied from me. ” The argument from authority knows no geographical or temporal bounds. In contrast I think that you will find that every respectable, credentialed master of any weapon of any period will admit that they would not have achieved their status without employing the analytic method. The "authorities" do have a place and always will. They provide role models and start novices on their road to enlightened swordsmanship. For many students that is enough, if not more than enough. Good instructors help the sincere overcome developmental plateaus and avoid error. But the best inspire their students think for themselves. Ultimately to walk the final miles down "that lonesome valley" to enlightenment "you got to walk it by yourself."
Let me close for now by suggesting a bit of optional homework. Method is key to the Enlightenment approach and I would recommend the Second Chapter of Descartes' Discourse on the Method if one wants a short and enjoyable bit of background.
Part Two
The Cultural Connection
In our first section we addressed the justification for a connection between smallsword and Enlightenment Era philosophy. It seems a little odd that such a justification was necessary. If instead I was to argue that there was a connection on a fundamental level between Kendo and Zen no one would have batted an eye. Somehow there is a lingering impression that western martial arts lack the same sort of philosophical grounding because we, to a greater degree, separate philosophy from religion and spirituality. Rather than being a shallow and corrupt practice I would assert that it is really an advantage because it allows us to deal with the physical, and scientific, aspects without being hampered by the spiritual and ethical. Which is not to say that we are not spiritual and ethical, but that we run that line of thinking on a linked parallel track.
Back to the subject at hand.
The rise of the smallsword in the Enlightenment Era was no accident. Nor was it the result solely of technological innovation. Instead it reflected the cultural and intellectual values of the age. Chief among these was a belief that the world was knowable through science and that such knowledge gave humanity the ability and the right to change themselves, their station and the world. “Reason” Hume tells us “is and ought to be only the slave of the passions.”
The application of science to martial arts was nothing new; however each era looks at the world and science a little bit differently. Each temporal and geographic location filters its view of the world through its own particular values. Therefore the application of that science in pursuit of those values, -- which we call technology -- reflects that world view, or to use a modern term “meta-narrative”. It is the philosophers that tell us how a culture thinks the world works.
I do not see the smallsword’s evolution as being in anyway inevitable. I am surprised those who insist that it could not have been different. Sure there were metallurgical advances in the mid 1600s in Europe but they do not seem that decisive. If technology alone dictated a weapon design why did the Japanese who certainly had highly sophisticated sword making skills go to the katana? Why did the Spanish not adopt the smallsword along with most of the rest of Europe? ( Ok, there is the Spanish Smallsword but that is really a mini-rapier.)
Please let’s not trot out the "thrusting is faster than cutting" argument for it -pardon the pun -- misses the point. Yes it is true and a well placed thrust is decisive but by 1820 even the French began to see that cutting was way easier to execute and left one less vulnerable. Just read some of the Napoleonic era discussions on the 1796 Light Cavalry Saber Likewise you make no headway with a convenience argument. Such as “since people were wearing their swords everywhere, and all of the time, a shorter and lighter sword would be “better” “ Of course anyone who has worn a sword , even a smallsword knows that it is a blasted inconvenience. It is nearly always in the way dragging or bumping along. Safer, cheaper, easier to learn and more transportable weapons were available, so why not carry one of them?
The convenience argument does hint at the more likely reason. So let’s look deeper. More men from the upper and middle class were wearing swords more often. Yes. Smaller is more practical. Voila! The smallsword is born. Not so fast. This begs the question of why swords were being worn more or even at all! Strong, independent, able to defend themselves, their loved ones and their honor at all times was the way that men wanted to see themselves. Upper class men had had this capacity for a long time and now the rising middle and merchant class man wanted it as well. The great advance in metallurgy was that steel could be made on a scale that began to reduce the price to a level affordable to more men.
The point here is that weapons development is at least as much a subjective choice as an objective one. The smallsword owes at least as much to changing cultural values as it does to technological development. Suppose instead of "refinement" social values took a more brutal turn in which raw brute strength was a dominant shared cultural value. I would think that duels would have been either weaponless tests of strength or would have used the latest and most technologically advanced weapon of brute strength. But the smallsword begins for the 18th century man what Colonel Colt finishes a hundred years later, i.e., making all men equal.. Is it a coincidence that in the same era we see representative democracy blossom in America and then Europe?
Those values, desires or “passions” to use Hume’s term were achieved through the reason, the science, and the technology of the day. The rational framework of this science was largely reductive and analytical. There is ample evidence that period people thought in these terms. In a military context we have for example “Ships of the Line”. Infantry fought in lines using “linear tactics.” In industry we see the rise of machinery. A cotton mill looks like a large and complicated machine but it really a collection of many little single purpose machines. Even the workers are “reduced” to single cogs of the great machine. It is difficult to talk of this era without using implicitly scientific terminology. With little effort we could fill pages with period phrases, and practices reflective of a scientific world view.
Philosophers of the period are obsessed with analyzing the “system” of the world almost as if it were a giant mill whose parts we have not yet explored. Spinoza, Leibnitz, Galileo, Newton, and of course Descartes are all looking for the same things. We know Descartes’ other writings revolved around math and method. His method was to reduce complex ideas to their simplest components in order to understand them. He probably would have done the same with actions and practices of sword play.
Smallsword is about a much a reduction of conflict resolution to its essence as is possible. Make a hole in one of your opponent’s vital areas. Simple, efficient and elegant. Efficiency, elegance, and beauty in this world view were hallmarks of natural truth. In ballet the ideal was to present at any moment the most beautiful picture to the audience. As those who have studied know the way that beauty is achieved is a science of efficiency and elegance based on natural truths. Smallsword has much the same conceptual grounding but the goal is different.
The weapon itself is a reduction to little more than a line, or a point really, where all the force of our passion is concentrated. But to use it efficiently one must think of the geometry involved. Above all the smallsword is thinking man’s weapon. Other weapons may suffer brutes and fools but not the smallsword. To survive the fight the smallsword user must be constantly doing the geometric calculus which keeps his blade between himself and death. Descartes gave us a method to systematically graph and quantify the motion on the blades through space.
So for example if we were to graph the ideal path of a sword tip through space in a thrust we would see that it is a straight line. Ideal because it is the shortest, fastest and most efficient. The geometry of the overall motion necessary to accomplish that path over the distance required necessitates moving more than just the hand or arm. In order to move the approximately three feet in a straight line to the target the entire body must coordinate. That motion also can be graphed and analyzed. From that analysis we can judge the security of our defense. The tip of the opponent’s sword moves thirty-six inches straight toward our heart. Our parry must move only six to deflect his blade. If we react promptly we should have no trouble. For our opponent to strike us must move his point six times further than we must move to deflect it. It is no accident that this efficient action is also elegant and beautiful. And it is no accident that the security of our defense decreases in proportion to the proximity of the opponent’s tip to our heart.
I could go on about swordplay and the intuitive understanding of time and space as the structures of experience in Kant, Newton’s laws of motion, or his disputes over relativity and identity with Leibnitz, Hume’s "bundle" theory and more but I think that you get the idea. One can use the ideas of almost any philosopher of the era as a viewpoint from which to look at the "Technical, Tactical and Practical" aspects of the art of the smallsword.
To understand smallsword as people of the period did we have to share, for at least a while, their conceptual framework, their paradigm. That mindset helps us to understand the context of the weapon and leads to deeper understanding of the technique. That is to say that just getting down “the moves “ may be sufficient to master the sport of fencing but to understand the Art of the Smallsword requires more. Smallsword is a state of mind not the object in your hand.
Having gotten into this distinctly Western mode of analytical thinking the next step is to devise ways to bring this understanding into the practice of swordsmanship through drills and exercises. Those present in the period manuals (and new ones too) become more instructive of the technique and lead to more insightful practice and execution when practiced analytically. So rather than the typical lesson of “do this and that” or “if opponent does x you do y” we look for intensely self critical and analytical practice leading to insight. The Enlightenment era swordsman enlightens himself. In part three we will look at how we can internalize these concepts through drill and practice.
Part Three
Think Analytically, Move Mindfully
I am reminded of a story one of my professors, John Rose told me many years ago at Goucher College. As a young philosophy student and much like all philosophy students at one time or another he was having some doubts that he would ever be able to get his mind around some of the big concepts. So he asked his favorite professor “When will I be a philosopher?” The professor had no doubt heard this question before, so he answered right back “When you start to ask philosophic questions” John not getting the sort of answer he expected said “Just what -- IS -- a philosophic question?” And his professor replied “Congratulations you are now a philosopher!”
I think swordsmanship is very much like that. You become a swordsman by doing the kinds things that swordsmen do. Despite talking about the Enlightenment in parts one and two of this essay it is quite clearly an existential theory of swordsmanship I am advancing. When you make the choices that swordsmen make you are becoming one. When you make these choices from the mental perspective of a practitioner of the art, who lived in the Enlightenment era, the possible choices that derive from that viewpoint determine the kind of swordsman you become. I believe that to be the best that you can be -- the most authentic, in a Heideggerian sense -- you need to be conscious of both your choices and the context in which you operate. The first step to becoming authentic is to develop a sense of context. To know your situation into which you are “thrown” and what the realistic possibilities and outcomes are leads to making swordsman-like choices.
Let me propose an artificial concept I call martial space. It is a graphically interesting concept and a very Cartesian metaphor. Think of your typical x,y,and z axes defining three dimensions. The individual axes represent the Technical, the Tactical, and the Practical aspects respectively of any given moment of our martial practice. Our position within the martial space continuum is defined by the relative values of what we are doing at that moment.
Thus a solo drill, like “pushing at a target on the wall”, which we see in virtually every fencing manual, is much more of a Technical exercise than a Tactical or Practical one. So if we were to plot its location it would be something like x=10, y=2, z=2. The exact values themselves are not important. What is important is to get a sense of where within martial space we are. Exactly what are we practicing, why we are practicing it and so how is it best to practice it. So often we see people practice without that kind of focus. Pushing at the wall is usually thought as almost exclusively a point control exercise or the fencing equivalent of shadow boxing. We see folks merely going through the motions. They fail to take advantage of a great opportunity to really concentrate on technique. If done slowly and repeatedly one is freed from thinking about sequence, reaction or an opponent. The wall is an excellent place to turn the thoughts analytically inward to subtleties of weight distribution, hand and foot position, and so on. Awareness of these elements is easier to sense going slow and nearly impossible to sense at least initially at speed. Practice like this is the core of “Think analytically, move mindfully.”
This concept of martial space is also important because as we become more aware of our location in any environment we make better choices and have better outcomes. We all know “one-dimensional” fencers. Frequently in smallsword we encounter them by way of sport fencing. They are tremendous athletes and have impressive speed but their tactical and practical sense is skewed. Not bad, just skewed. They may be well positioned for the foil, or epee but not for the smallsword. The sport fencer mistakenly believes that he has achieved proper balance for the smallsword context. He believes he is in the proper location in martial space for smallsword but he is not. Older and slower small-sworders frequently beat him because they are more balanced, more aware and make better choices.
We have all been in the position of fencing someone who was not in the same plane of martial space. We have fenced people who could not think about anything but the touch and would do anything to get it. They are addicted to the practical and cannot break free of its seductive grip. This attitude and mindset is invaluable and serves them well in the street but holds back their progress in the salle because they have abandoned technique at the very time that they should be practicing it.
Eventually one realizes it is easier to have technique and chose to “get practical” in a moment of crisis than it is to try to perform a technique for which you see the need but have not practiced. To paraphrase Macarthur “Short swords make for bad habits.” and he is right. Infighting is surely easier to practice -- and satisfying too -- since you usually can get at least a double-hit . . . if you just keep on poking. Is it an important skill? Yes it is, but to rely upon it or any single technique or style exclusively is limiting. To in-fight you have to get in and if you cannot manage your engagements at distance you will most likely not get in against someone who can. In one class I asked one of the short-sword crowd to switch to my longer weapon. I could adjust to their 30 much faster than they could adjust to my 35. “I don’t like this” they said “I have to think further ahead.” We agreed that it was a good thing to think further ahead.
When we engage in free play for the purpose of practicing our feints and strategy we are very much being tactical. But we are still partly technical because we chose and use the techniques we know. When we step outside of the canonical techniques and their situational use we enter the realm of the practical. For example kicking out the knee of an opponent that lingered too long in a lunge in a street fight.
In any encounter we move about within martial space, at one moment be more concerned with one or the other aspects. Sometimes moving toward the technical and sometimes toward the tactical as the situation demands. Different and unknown opponents force us to be able to determine quickly where in martial space the opponent is coming from so that we can match or counter him effectively. Fencing like a gentleman against the raving lunatic who wants to kill you is a short and sure route to unpleasant outcomes.
Well that is a lot to think about and I promised to give some clues as to what to expect in the class so here goes. (Constant reference to Enlightenment Philosophy is a given.)
1. We will begin with a bit of systematic movement exercises used in the Classical period to facilitate body awareness, correct posture and deportment which becomes ingrained in classical smallsword technique. (Yes this is the Ballet part)
2. Analysis and reconstruction of core elements of technique. The guard and the thrust for example. Constructing your best guard and deconstructing the thrust
3. Exploring the geometry of engagement. Seeing it in your mind, feeling it through the blade, managing it in real-time.
4. Exploring a plastic notion of time and space as the ground for effective offence and defense.