Originally Posted by
Miqi
‘Dialectic method’ does not mean ‘balance’ or a combination of opposites; it means an active relationship in which the halves of the dialectic have an ongoing ‘conditioning’ or ‘grooming’ effect on one another, leading to a synthesis.
The idea is complex, hence the scramble-in-the-dirt arguments about ‘what is yiquan?’ which consistently flare up on various forums, usually from people without the slightest understanding of yiquan. There are two common mistakes about ‘what yiquan is’ which I see. It is, unfortunately, difficult to challenge these mistakes because one of yiquan’s key dialectics – that between science and tradition – has been smothered, so that no criticism is allowed, and Wang’s vision of a scientific community in which people engage in honest critique has been overwhelmed by sclerotic and egotistical defence of position. Fortunately, I don’t need the money from teaching, nor any connection with any sclerotic lineage, so I am free to follow Wang’s original advice.
However, one mistake is signally represented by Andrzej Kalisz, who argues that he only wants to pass on, as precisely as possible, what he has been taught. This is itself a corruption of the principles of yiquan – a corruption which is then passed on in a ‘the medium is the message’ kind of mistake, as his students adopt his mistaken approach. (This is, of course, the sclerotic position of most Chinese martial arts – the false belief that keeping an art as identical as possible to previous generations is somehow a positive. Usually, this only seems correct because most arts actually degenerate as hoaxers parasitise them for egotistical gain.)
The problem is that yiquan is a dialectic interaction between current state of yiquan and you, as an individual. Yiquan cannot be taught or passed on – the idea is to unfold via intuition your own native ability, multiplied by your own desire to practice, guided via a training framework. No one, in that case, can pass on what they have learned. Each expression of yiquan is individual. It should also be noted that the dialectic of theory and practice means that no one really understands further than their own highest point of practical level – despite the very common practice of martial arts teachers pointing to their abilities to coach beyond their level. Those arguments don’t apply to yiquan in the way that they do to basketball and weightlifting, because they are not dialectic methods; no one can supply the yiquan dialectic of another with a theoretical level which is not in itself originally conditioned by their own level of theoretical understanding, which in turn is conditioned by their own practical ability.
The second mistake is the argument over whether yiquan is a set of techniques or a general method. This mistake comes from failure to understand the dialectic method. JKD provides a useful contrast here - and I should also say, even though I believe that yiquan's method is ultimately far superipr to JKD's, I've seen scores of JKD practioners with really high level, and only one or two skilled yiquan practioners. Nevertheless... JKD is a set of techniques, taught in a non-dialectical manner. JKD’s theory does not have a dialectic relationship with the techniques; the core ‘theory’ is to establish and learn the simplest set of techniques with the broadest self-defence application. This is often covered by an ideology of ‘liberation’ – as if ‘liberation’ means simply freeing up the rest of your time to do something else, or freeing your ‘ego’ from its insertion into ‘styles’ – as if JKD wasn’t just another style. Yiquan’s dialectical method, by contrast, has no core techniques, and yet, it requires a structured curriculum to encourage the development of intuitive skill. There is, in yiquan, ultimately no technique which ‘is’ yiquan – yiquan is a product; the product of a human being who has gone through a dialectic interaction with a method in order to draw out intuitive skill. Multiple factors will affect that final outcome. However, the ability to issue force with whole body power is the key aim – although, the phrase ‘whole body power’ generally causes people to ‘appoint’ an expectation of something that is much more than it really is. And that is how parasites manage to con the gullible and lazy, by pretending to be able to issue magical levels of force.
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