Martial Spirituality and The Ethics of Attention

Practices of meditation and spiritual combat in martial arts enhance the capacity to control attention, which is morally significant because deliberate behavior—action performed with careful attention—is what makes ethical evaluation possible. Paying attention is itself a kind of doing that can be done well or poorly. Drawing on Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, William James, and Charles Peirce, this essay explores the relationship between martial spirituality and an ethics of attention, arguing that training attention is a foundation for ethical life and resistance to forces that capture it.

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Abstract

While many martial arts include meditation as a part of their practice, some are regarded as being essentially spiritual exercises. Moreover, in a variety of religious traditions, certain forms of prayer and meditation are conceived as preparation for engagement in “spiritual combat.” Most immediately, these practices are designed to enhance one’s capacity to control attention, to defend it from forces that attempt to capture it. I argue in this essay that such a capacity is morally significant. Our behavior is most readily subject to ethical evaluation when it is deliberate behavior, that is, in instances when we are paying careful attention to what we are doing. Moreover, paying attention is itself a kind of doing, something that we can do poorly or well, or fail to do altogether. Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch made this last claim the centerpiece of their philosophy, the foundational insight that grounds an “ethics of attention.” My goal in this essay is to explore the relationship between martial spirituality and an ethics of attention. Toward that end, philosophical pragmatists like William James and Charles Peirce will also prove to be important sources of insight.