The False Soul of Budō: Ilyenkov, Jacobs, and the Myth of Moral Transformation

The False Soul of Budō: Ilyenkov, Jacobs, and the Myth of Moral Transformation
Dedicated to all who journey toward—and help to form—the soul of budō
“One is not born a person but becomes one.” — Evald Ilyenkov (in Jacobs, 2024, p. 4)
Across the global martial arts community—from the dōjō of the Japan Karate Association to the worldwide branches of Aikikai—one promise unites otherwise divided organisations: training will make you a better person. Promotional brochures speak of “character,” “discipline,” and “respect” as natural consequences of practice. Yet such rhetoric, however well-intentioned, has long since ossified into ideology. The ethical claim of budō has been reduced to a consumer guarantee, a marketing slogan assuring parents that violence will ennoble their children. What remains is a mask of morality, not its substance.
Masks and Faces
Isabel Jacobs’ essay On the Soul: Ilyenkov’s Theory of Personality (2024) offers a remarkable lens through which to re-examine this moral mythology. Drawing on the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, she reminds us that “a person is not born with inherent qualities; their body and mind are formed through experience and social activity” (p. 1). In Ilyenkov’s dialectical anthropology, personality (lichnost’) is not a private moral kernel but a social creation--“a knot of relations that arise between individuals in collective activity” (p. 4). An ethical being is therefore never an inner possession; it is a mode of participation. By that measure, the idea that budō can individually bestow Virtue is an illusion. A karateka does not “become good” through repetition of kata any more than a bureaucrat becomes just by memorising a code of conduct.

Ilyenkov’s image of the mask (persona) and face (litso) is particularly apt. “And it also happens that the mask becomes so firmly affixed,” he wrote, “that [one’s] former personality slowly atrophies from disuse” (p. 1). The modern martial arts world is filled with such masks—ritual bows, moral slogans, the façade of humility—beneath which lie ordinary rivalries and commercial ambition. The tragedy is not hypocrisy per se but alienation: when gestures meant to express ethical life harden into empty performance, the face of practice disappears. What survives is the moral costume of budō.

The Soul of the Dōjō
Contrast this with the ethical seriousness of the ancients whom modern budō so readily invokes. Confucius warned, “To see what is right and not do it is want of courage” (Analects 2:24). Virtue (ren) was never politeness or docility; it was courageous moral discernment enacted through right relationship. Likewise, Takuan Sōhō, in The Unfettered Mind, cautioned the swordsman that “the mind must not be fixed anywhere”—ethical freedom being inseparable from mental clarity. Both thinkers understood self-cultivation as ceaseless labour, the ongoing negotiation between impulse and reason, self and other. By comparison, the modern dōjō’s moral instruction—“be respectful,” “show spirit”—appears thin, procedural, and essentially detached from reflection on what goodness entails.

Jacobs’ discussion of Ilyenkov’s concept of the soul illuminates why this hollowness matters. “The soul,” she notes, “is located not inside an individual body, but precisely outside it—in the system of real relationships … binding them as if into one body” (p. 6). The true “soul” of budō, then, is not hidden in the heart of the lone practitioner but emerges in the relational field of training: senpai and kōhai, teacher and student, attacker and receiver, all joined in the dialectic of embodied trust. Yet under capitalist conditions, that collective soul is commodified. The dōjō becomes a service provider; the practitioner, a consumer of Virtue. In Ilyenkov’s terms, this is pseudomaterialism—a mechanical imitation of ethical practice divorced from the labour of mutual recognition.

Hands, Labour, and Phronesis
For Ilyenkov, thinking and becoming are hand-work. “It is not the brain that thinks,” he writes, “but an individual entwined in a net of social relations, always mediated by material objects” (p. 13). In this light, kata and kumite—understood here not as competitive sparring but as any moment of training with another, any time two hands meet—are not moral rituals in themselves; they are opportunities for phronesis—the practical wisdom Aristotle described as the capacity “to decide what to do in light of what there is most reason to do” (Nicomachean Ethics VI.5). The bow, the strike, the parry, the shared rhythm of breath and timing—all are ethical materials through which reason can take form, but only if the practitioner engages them consciously and collectively. Without that dialogue, movement decays into etiquette, and etiquette into spectacle.

Toward the Soul of Budō
The ethical promise of budō has never been about moral elevation but about encounter—an unending practice through which one meets both the world and the self without illusion. Read through Jacobs’ Ilyenkov, this practice becomes a kind of phronesis: the lived, practical wisdom that arises only in relation, through the collective shaping of body, mind, and circumstance. Moral growth in martial arts is neither automatic nor inward—it is dialectical, a social and material creation born of struggle, reflection, and care. To practise budō ethically is to work, hand and mind together, within a community of others striving toward what Confucius called yi—rightness of action, not righteousness of appearance.

Budō will not make us better people on its own. But practised as the collective labour of recognition—as an art of relation rather than a commodity of Virtue—it may still teach us to see, in Ilyenkov’s words, “through the eyes of another person, through the eyes of all other people” (Jacobs, 2024, p. 14). Only there, in that mutual gaze, does the true face of budō appear.

Postscript
This idea has been germinating in my mind since my budō teacher, Miyase-sensei, first planted it there over fifteen years ago. Sensei is gone, yet I continue to learn from the kindness he embodied and from his unwavering commitment to excellence. What he taught through presence, patience, and precision remains a living reminder that the soul of budō is formed not in words, but in the quiet discipline of care.

References

• Aristotle (2011), Nicomachean Ethics. London: University of Chicago Press.
• Confucius (2017). The Analects, trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Jacobs, I. (2024). On the Soul: Ilyenkov’s Theory of Personality. Berlin: Brill.
• Takuan Sōhō (1986) The Unfettered Mind, trans. William Scott Wilson. Tokyo: Kodansha.

日本語要約（要旨）本稿は、イリェンコフ（Evald Ilyenkov）の人格論をイザベル・ジェイコブズ（Isabel Jacobs, 2024）の解釈を通して再読し、「武道を学べば人間的に成長できる」という現代武道の道徳的神話を批判的に検討するものである。
多くの武道団体や道場は、稽古によって「良い人間」になれると主張する。しかし、著者はそれを理念的・商業的なスローガンに過ぎないとみなし、倫理的実践の空洞化を指摘する。イリェンコフによれば、人間の人格（личность）は生まれつき備わるものではなく、社会的活動のなかで形成される「関係の結び目（knot）」である。したがって、徳や人格は個人の内面にあるのではなく、他者との共同的な行為を通して生まれるものである。
この観点からすれば、武道の本質的な修行とは、孤立した自己鍛錬ではなく、関係的・社会的な実践である。型（kata）や組手（kumite）は、競技的な技術ではなく、二人の身体と心が交わる瞬間、つまり「二つの手が出会う」場として理解されるべきである。そこにおいて初めて、アリストテレスが説いた実践的知（phronesis）——状況に応じて最も妥当な行為を判断する知恵——が生まれる。
また、孔子の「義（yi）」や沢庵宗彭の「心はどこにも止まってはならぬ」という教えを引用しつつ、著者は古代思想における道徳的修養の深さを現代武道の表層的な「礼節」教育と対比する。真の「武道の魂」は、個人の内面に宿るのではなく、師弟・先輩後輩・稽古相手など、他者との関係性のなかで形づくられる「共同的思考の身体」であると結論づける。
本稿は、武道を「より良い人間になる手段」としてではなく、人間と人間が共に人格を形成し合う社会的・倫理的な営みとして再評価するよう呼びかける。著者は、武道が「他者の眼を通して世界を見る」力を与えるときにこそ、その真の顔—--the true face of budō——が現れると説く。

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