In Takehiko’s manga on the life of Miyamoto Musashi, Vagabond, one of the characters questions the purpose of practicing swordsmanship in an era when the sword was fast becoming obsolete. History’s reply is that swordsmanship is an art and thus worth preserving. As recent advancements in A.I. make us question the purpose of art itself, we’d do well to revisit the samurai’s reasons.
More context: not only had the gun emerged victorious over the blade in the hands of the new Shogun’s armies, but warriors in peacetime found they had to give up being fighters and become bureaucrats in order to remain useful. Many began wearing swords as purely symbolic gestures, while others, like Musashi, doubled down on the martial arts.
The question of why swing a sword at all if you don’t fight (especially if all future sword fights will soon be gunfights) is paralleled in our modern world. Recently, many visual artists and illustrators took to the internet to protest the rise of Chat GPT and its ability to “create new art” by stealing and amalgamating bits and pieces of existing artwork online.
Like the warriors of Musashi’s time, creative people of all stripes are now faced with the same question: If there’s no need for your professional skillset, why practice it?
On the surface, this is an easy question to answer. Either we must ban A.I. from making art, or we should stop making art and find more lucrative pursuits.
This would be a serious error.
To see why, we need to understand our work from a wider perspective. To preserve swordsmanship, the samurai maintained that it wasn’t just for killing but an art and a way of life. One through which a person might learn how to conduct themselves in the world. Because they understood, as all true warriors do, that how a person does one thing is reflected in how they do everything.
For warriors, cowardice, dishonesty, and unpreparedness meant death. The martial arts were a way to train this out of them. Moreover, hard sparring taught them to think strategically about the unexpected. These were attributes that couldn’t be acquired purely through marksmanship. Thus, even though the battlefield became increasingly mechanized, the practice of archaic forms of combat continues to this day.
What true practitioners understand is that swordsmanship, like art, is a means of developing one’s soul.
The best generals are the ones who know intimately what it means to be a soldier. The best warriors are the ones who know the pain and hard work of mastering a deadly skill. And the best visual artists will always be the ones who can draw, because what gets honed over the years of practice isn’t merely the muscle memory of making, but an almost mystical way of seeing.
This, combined with human depth of experience, is how art is made. It’s what distinguishes soulless pornography from spiritual fruition.