Recently my good friend and talented artist
Aurelio Madrid asked if he could interview me about my experiences and background in both Mixed Martial-Arts (MMA) and academics. At first I was hesitant – enjoying my near total anonymity with regards to online affairs – but upon reflection I started thinking it might be a nice opportunity for me to think biographically for a change, as I am near pathologically anti-nostalgic, especially about my own life. The here and now is where all the action is. So Aurelio and I set to work, exchanged a few emails and the result of that conversation can be found on Aurelio’s blog
HERE for anyone interested.
In retrospect I think I could have answered his questions a little more succinctly, but what comes through is perhaps a slice of who I am and where I am coming from. As I come to the end of my fighting career I am realizing just how much I have learned from martial-arts. Wisdom is the achievement of engaged bodies - beings fully of this world; and philosophy is more than reading books and measuring words: it is lived.
Below is an excerpt of me talking about embodied realism from the interview:
I think the most important philosophical insight I have had from combat sports came to me directly after my first loss in the cage. I competed against a much more experienced and dedicated fighter and was beaten pretty soundly despite going the full three rounds. A few days afterwards, I was reading some article on radical skepticism and Kant, and it struck me as so completely and brutally absurd that anyone could ever claim that humans do not have the capacity for direct experiential access to objects as such. Basically, here I was unintentionally beaten, bruised and deeply and emotionally affected while some professor sitting in some library was dreaming and writing about how humans do not directly experience things-in-themselves. Well, my experience and the state of my body demonstrated quite the opposite. What fighting has proved to me – beyond any sort of linguistic demonstration or logical construction – is that entities external to my perception and control have direct access to my substantial being. The plane of action is immanent. Not only did I experience my opponent’s powers cognitively but a felt them structurally, in the way he was able to intervene on my existence and disable (temporarily) certain aspects of my characteristic functionality. Never had I felt so affected. So I know that objects and entities can and do have direct and highly consequential contacts with each other. Realism is THE default position for anyone who experiences the world as a whole/embodied being. Ontologically speaking, we are open and vulnerable systems. After five minutes in a locked cage with a trained opponent, I believe anyone would become a realist…
Read the Full Interview: HERE
Please note that the picture above is from Seattle based photographer
Adam Smith. Check out his amazing body of work:
here and on Tumblr:
here. Comments, questions and/or trolling are more than welcome.
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