Lineages and history

It is a result of the complex pathways of thought which led to the enlightenment, according to the German Continental philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002), that our modern society has come to believe that history has and continues to move in a linear path of progression. Furthermore, these 'ascending' lines of history are constructed and perceived as simple lines, that is to say, as lines with discrete points of progression marked by what are considered to be significant historical figures. This oversimplification of the concept of what history is, is easily seen in the way history is often taught in schools, exemplified in textbooks, and in our conversations about many topics, for example, lineages in the martial arts.
The false idea of a simple, sustained, and unfaltering line of historical progress is often expressed in the arguments, often heated, among martial artists over whose line is more 'pure' or the 'true' line of an art. Although few arts can show a lineage of headmasters which is unbroken from the first record of the art, as Kim Taylor sensei has concisely stressed (http://swordforum.com/swords/nihonto/js-training.html) the living nature of the arts make them arts which exist within the times and places of the headmasters and thus, as is necessarily the case in all human understanding, undergo interpretation.
This is Gadamer's key point: that human understanding is an act of interpretation. Interpretation is not a method, nor a science. It is contingent, complex, multiple and changing. It is also not relativistic: the headmasters do not show up one day at the training hall and teach entirely new techniques, made up over night, within a vacuum of knowledge. Their teaching comes from somewhere, from the traditions they have been immersed in and which have become part of what Gadamer calls their historically effected consciousness. We are all historically effected. Earlier German thinkers brought this idea to us in different terms, though the idea is essentially the same: we are not able to get behind our own history, our immersion in the world, in order to say something completely objective and final, and distanced from it. It is necessarily the case that our understanding of the world is influenced by our place and time in the world, by our own history.
So it is that the arts come to us as traditions which are organic, and like all organisms, somethings die off while others grow forth. And in each presentation of the art, which we might describe as each new generation of headmaster, the art is brought forth both anew, as if for the first time, and yet embraces its heritage as well. It turns out that the martial arts are exemplary forms of what Gadamer spends almost 500 pages arguing for in his tome, his magnus opus, Truth and Method. He argues that the move towards history as progress, as seated in the power of humanity's reason (Immanuel Kant), has shifted our traditional understanding of truth, especially in the human sciences, away from the inheritances we receive in things like works of art, myths, and powerful stories, towards the sterility of method within the empirical sciences. Along the way, the arts became places of taste, merely subjective, as acts of sudden genius, or acts of imagination by those we see as 'different' and not as works which tell us something true about the world, about how we understand in the world and how we understand through a sense of community. For those of us immersed in the martial arts for a few years and more, we know that the arts do have truths to tell us about the arts as lived in the here and know, and about living in the world with one another.
The online forum wars over lineages are often simply sympomatic of the modern idea that a lineage means simple, pure, true knowledge of an art as it was originally, and that the pure line is the 'true' line and all other lines have no legitimacy. Although it may be the case that lines are not given permission from a headmaster to be as they may, this does not exclude them from the truths their studies in the arts offer, and it does not also give them license to claim the only truth, as well as give us reason to not be wary of the lines which have been created overnight, products of the imaginations of those who watch too many movies and wish to be more than what they are.
One should do their homework before signing up with a martial arts teacher, if doing the homework is important to them. One should not expect however, that the instructor is instructing the original art as it was when it first started. An original art is being offered however, as it lives in the time and space of the instructor and the interpretation that instructor necessarily makes during instruction as understanding. As Yamomoto sensei has told me all along, one must also consider that time and space continously changes for a headmaster so that if one watches video of Nakayama Hakudo sensei over the years, one sees different Muso Shinden iai. Each time and space of the performance is true of the art,and thus it changes as it lives in the instructor.