Aikido and Rhetoric: Love

Loyalty and devotion lead to true bravery. Bravery leads to the spirit of self-sacrifice. The spirit of self-sacrifices creates trust in the power of love.

Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace

This, Phaedrus and you others, is what Diotima told me, and I am persuaded of it; in which persuasion I pursue my neighbors, to persuade them in turn that towards this acquisition the best helper that our human nature can hope to find is Love. Wherefore I tell you now that every man should honor Love, as I myself do honor all love-matters with especial devotion, and exhort all other men to do the same….

Plato, Symposium 212b

It’s interesting to see foundational figures in aikido and rhetoric claim the same ultimate aim for their disciplines: love. Plato is actually talking about dialectic here, a special form of dialogic argumentation that he maintained was separate from rhetoric; however, it still involved persuasion, and dialectic is just as good a counterpart to aikido as rhetoric, if not better, because it was practiced in pairs, and its goal was the attainment of ultimate Truth. A

bit earlier in this same speech, which Socrates quotes from a (likely fictional) teacher, Diotima claims that the journey to Love is a ladder, achieved rung by run, step by step, as we learn to love individuals, then groups of individuals, then the principles and ideals that bind them together, then ultimately the divine. O-sensei presents the warrior’s achievement of a state of love in a similarly ladder-like fashion, climbing from acts of loyalty to bravery to self-sacrifice and finally to love. I think the key insight from both aikido and rhetoric here into love is that it’s a practice, not an idea. We don’t just decide to love someone or something. We arrive at love through daily actions, small and large.

Yesterday at practice, my sensei showed us a video of O-sensei observing a class led by his chief disciple, Morihiro Saito (my sensei’s teacher). As he watched the practice, it was clear from the expression on his face that he wasn’t monitoring the individual pupils, scrutinizing their performance for mistakes to correct; he was contemplating something greater and higher arising from the movements of those bodies in the room. He looked happy, proud, at peace. It struck me that he may in fact have been feeling love, for his students, for everyone in the world he wished to bring peace to.