Practice and What Gets Lost
Ikkyo as an internal good.
I’ve been thinking about Alasdair MacIntyre and his book After Virtue, and how his views on virtue both align with and differ from my own thoughts about Aikido.
Reading and reflecting on his work has helped clarify my thinking about practice. It feels similar to training with a senior Aikidoist—where understanding grows through both agreement and disagreement.
MacIntyre suggests that a real practice is grounded in what he calls internal goods—qualities that only arise through participation in the practice itself, for its own sake.
For me, this feels like practicing Aikido as a way of understanding the relationship between my partner and myself. That relationship might take the form of a technique such as ikkyo. But once I start trying to do ikkyo better—as opposed to understanding the relationship—I don’t deepen
the practice.
I lose it.
When I focus on doing better technique, the practice shifts outward. What begins as inquiry becomes repetition, and it’s easy to organize around what can be seen and judged.
Aikido makes this visible. Technique is easy to see. Relationship is not.
So we train what we can see—and miss what matters.
When this happens, the practice changes. We move away from what Alasdair MacIntyre calls internal goods and toward getting it right, making it work, being effective.
MacIntyre helps name that shift. But I think something else is happening too.
It’s not just that we lose sight of internal goods. We lose contact with the relationship that makes them possible.
We begin with technique. Or with an idea of what should happen. And then try to act correctly from there.
When I was younger, I spent time in Paris. I remember writing that most people traveling seem to learn more from their Michelin Guide than from their experience of being there.
We come to know the map better than the place—the technique better than the relationship.
I should start by admitting that
I haven’t actually read The Book:
“After Virtue”, yet.
Your post made me curious enough to go and research
Alasdair MacIntyre and his ideas a bit — and I found what I discovered fascinating.
And I’m genuinely looking forward to reading the book soon.
One idea especially stood out to me:
-Some forms of Power — or perhaps “Empowerment”— arise only through becoming a *different*
kind of person.
For example:
Relaxing when suddenly grabbed instead of tensing up.
(AiKiDo)
Nothing external changes first.
The change happens in the person.
Modern society largely operates through transactional value:
pay → receive
perform → reward
credential → authority
visibility → legitimacy
External goods fit perfectly into this structure. They can be counted, displayed, compared, and exchanged — almost like a
martial arts movie, -where effectiveness is visible and immediately legible.
But internal goods do not work this way.
You cannot buy wisdom.
You cannot outsource understanding.
You cannot accelerate maturity through payment.
You cannot subscribe to insight.
And this creates a type of “friction”.
It makes me think that nearly every religion seems to contain both an external and
an internal path.
The external-path expresses itself through ritual performance and visible structure.
(There’s a child like guiding present in the fallowing of the instructions.)
But
The internal-path feels more like the cultivation of attention — an acquired sensitivity or skill of awareness.
(Attentional-skill that only the practitioner knows how good he or she is.)
Real practices — as MacIntyre describes them — generate goods that arise only through participation itself.
They cannot be separated from the activity or possessed apart from the transformation of the practitioner.
This feels very close to what your reflection describes.
When practice begins as inquiry into relationship, something alive is happening.
Technique is present, but it is not the center. The internal good becomes the changing quality of attention between partners — the gradual refinement of perception, timing, and mutual awareness.
But the moment the focus shifts toward “doing ikkyo better,” the gravitational pull of external goods appears.
Technique becomes visible, measurable, and judgeable. Practice reorganizes itself around performance rather than understanding.
Nothing looks wrong from the outside.
Yet something essential quietly disappears.
MacIntyre helps name this shift:
Practices begin to decay when external goods dominate internal ones.
(Reminds me of how bodybuilding has taken over fitness.)
Institutions naturally reward what can be seen, ranked, and certified.
When attention stays only on the external, that shared reality can start to feel strangely constructed — almost made up — and we risk losing contact with the relationship that made the practice meaningful in the first place.
Your Paris analogy captures this beautifully:
Learning the Michelin Guide instead of learning the city — as if Paris itself starts getting in the way of the eating.
What resonates most for me is that the internal goods of practice are fundamentally relational. They do not belong to an individual alone because they must be practiced with another person. They arise in the space between people — in the shared inquiry that technique merely expresses.
What it is, it is not it.
This may be why real practice often feels subjective, or even invisible to outsiders. Its results cannot be transacted. They appear indirectly — in the quality of presence someone brings into interaction. Even something subtle, like how our Aikido practice seems to expand peripheral awareness, becomes noticeable only through lived experience.
Genuine practice therefore feels slightly resistant to modern culture.
It is not primarily about seeking a good workout, looking impressive, or producing obvious outcomes. It asks for participation rather than performance.
Perhaps that is the deeper point:
The goal is not to perfect technique, but to become the kind of person capable of meeting another human being without abandoning a certain quality of relationship.
Technique then stops being a destination — of some imagined perfection — and becomes communication.
There is also a mysterious element of “context”
that seems to exist only through narrative.
Storytelling becomes the medium through which we can approach experiences that resist direct explanation.
Many of the paradoxical qualities of internal martial arts
AiKiDo,
cannot be transmitted as instructions;
They emerge through shared stories, metaphors, and examples. The story creates a space in which understanding can appear.
(I’ve gained a lot through our mutual storytelling in your instruction.)
Something that has both fascinated and frustrated me in some “consciousness communities”,
-is how quickly teachers sometimes try to declare that *everything — reality itself — is “made up.”*
And This is Presented too early,
this can feel like a kind of
proselytizing of nihilism.
Discovery seems different from declaration.
(I need plenty of stories to make sense of it all at first.)
Story may be
“made up”, but it is also the vehicle that allows meaning to unfold.
Rejecting story too quickly risks dismissing the lived reality through which understanding actually develops. Paradoxically, it is through narrative — through shared human context — that mystery becomes approachable rather than negated.
And maybe practice, whether philosophical or martial, lives precisely in that space between structure and mystery, where understanding cannot be purchased, only practiced.
Though I had not read Alasdair MacIntyre's book, After Virtue, your referring to it, Scott, and particularly, to his use of the term "internal good" resonated with me because of its apparent similarity, though not necessarily identity, in meaning with the Hebrew term, Lishmah (לשמה), "doing something for its own sake." This term was often applied when referring to Torah Lishmah (studying Torah for its own sake) or Avodah Lishmah (divine service for its own sake). It signifies performing an act for its intrinsic value, passion or love of God, rather than for reward, fame, external gain or simply to show off one's erudition.
One might draw an analogy between Aikido and Torah Study in that both share some common features. For instance, both are highly disciplined practices in which the practitioner in each case derives a tireless satisfaction engaging in such a discipline. Also, in both cases, the practice of each has a profound impact on the manner in which one is oriented towards life in general and the wider world.
This beneficial result, it should be emphasized, is not sought after, which would deny the very concept of "intrinsic meaning" or "internal good," but is a natural outcome or consequence of the practicing of each of these disciplines. In effect, I am distinguishing between purpose and consequence.
Finally, within the Jewish tradition, Lishmah (לשמה) is a key concept in spiritual and ethical life, emphasizing that the action itself is its own reward