Essay on Violence.
We must answer the questions to make sense of the world. We seek after sense as we seek after sustenance. Without it we remain empty. Amongst the questions, we identify the questions of violence, inquiring into both its meaning and its purpose. Yet after tireless attempts at the analysis of violence, we remain perplexed in its face. At this moment alone can we come to the realization that violence can only be found in senselessness itself. It is now our self-given task to capture this concept, although its use as a conceptual tool is to describe that which we do not understand and shudder in the face of.
In the Socratic tradition, it is often taught that wrong action is the result of ignorance. One who acts wrongly does so because of a lack of the ability to perceive the truth about their own nature, the nature of reality, or the nature of others. It is here that we find our first insight into the nature of violence. One necessarily finds oneself incapable of doing violence to that which one fully understands, for one will understand both the purpose of the entity as well as its virtue , and therefore cannot corrupt the object willfully in full knowledge. To perceive an entity as incomplete, that is to say, to perceive it as less than what it really is, is already to do it violence. The expression of this violence in physical or psychic space is merely an after effect of this initial act of ignorance. It is commonly pointed out that the most horrible of military crimes are committed only after the perpetrators are made to believe that their human victims are less than human. The subjectivity of the persons in question is denied them, thereby making their mistreatment appear morally justifiable as well as psychologically tolerable. This dehumanization of the other renders them less than what they are by means of treating them not as a valuable autonomous subjectivity but merely as a means to some end. This is often accomplished through the reduction of the person to some category, replacing the concrete nature of their humanity with the abstract nature of some concept. The Marxist cannot bring himself to kill a man, although he can easily bring himself to “eliminate the Bourgeois” just as the Klansmen can bring themselves to “uphold white supremacy” by getting rid of all the “Niggers”. This reduction considers the other only as an object, never as a subjectivity, and therefore considers the other as less than sufficiently valuable. Yet denial of a persons being an object does them violence as well. It is for this reason that many find the Existentialists offensive when they declare that each person is perfectly free and responsible for every aspect of their own existence. This is somewhat analogous to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” . It is ridiculous to think that there are no material conditions for human flourishing, and in the neglect of the material aspects of humanity we find a great deal of the world’s violence. This too originates in incomplete knowledge and thus incomplete perception, although of the opposite sort. It is in this way that the dualisms of philosophy have for so long justified the use of interpersonal violence. From the metaphysical separation of mind and body to the moral separation of good and evil, and perhaps even on lesser issues such as the separation of the attainment of knowledge through observation and the attainment of knowledge through reasoning, the vast majority of philosophers have attempted to preference some aspects of reality and not others. In doing so, they have rendered the understanding incomplete, setting the preconditions for violence.
In business culture, the notion of contract defines the morality of interaction by making knowledge of the future the precondition for action. In this way, one is always fully capable of choice, for one has always been given the necessary knowledge and the appropriate opportunity for consent. A contract is considered viodable in cases where this has not occurred. Violence, always non-contractual, must be considered “voidable” and intolerable for the same reasons. Violence never occurs by contract in full knowledge, as it is only possible to make a decision believed to produce a net loss when one is in ignorance. We never claim that violence has been done to a person in accordance with their will. Violence is always understood as a form of imposition, its victim always as encroached upon or without understanding.
…
Understanding not only impairs our ability to do violence, it also removes our perception that reality is itself violent. Never does one perceive violence in matters which one completely understands. Momentarily consider the martial artist, master of combat, what many of us consider violence, and the calm with which they face their activity. It is as if they are unable to suffer in the presence of combat. This we must attribute to the understanding of combat as a system with its own rules, positions, and decisions. If one is to become injured in this way, the martial artist is able to clearly perceive why the injury has occurred, and is hence confronted with information rather than nonsense. With this understanding, the martial artist is able to accept the reality of combat, and is thus capable of making the decision to participate in it willfully in tournament, as a pure aesthetic action/playful activity, a social device, or as a personal goal-oriented activity. If the activity were intrinsically senseless, it would be impossible to do so, as one would have no reason to have confidence in one’s own ability to endure a situation as potentially harmful as a hand to hand encounter of this sort. It is a mistake to believe that the martial artist perceives combat as violent . It is only those without an understanding of combat that encounter it as violent.
…
In terms of human intellectual/moral development, analysis alone is inadequate, as it is not possible to understand the world only in terms of difference and category. We must also possess the ability to identify sameness, unity, and completeness. We must therefore, if we wish to avoid violence, possess a wisdom which is simultaneously analytic and synthetic, both empirical and rational. This begins with the understanding that no finite entity , in order that it be finite, will ever have a complete picture of reality. This is not to say that any of the things that a finite entity understands are unreal, but rather is to say the contrary. The things we understand are perfectly real. The cause of our error, of both our perception of violence and our perpetration of violence, is not the falsity of our beliefs but rather their partiality, that is to say, there incompleteness. It is here that we must make the greatest leap of faith in our quest toward understanding and the elimination of both violence and suffering, for we must believe in truth without believing in falsity. The conception of falsity is used as a weapon against others and as a diversion for the self. Rather than respect the ideas of others, rather than listen to their lessons and change our own ways, we often reject the truth of what we perceive as other, invalidating any conception of reality not in tune with our own. Hegel’s Dialectical reasoning attempted to eliminate this problem, and was certainly an advancement from previous ways of thinking in metaphysics, which held that one aspect of reality must be master of all. This dissatisfaction with falsity was perhaps at the root of the Enlightenments reaction against monotheism. The Rationalist conception of God as absolutely infinite rather than infinite in some limited set of attributes demonstrates this attitude clearly. It is as if we finally came to perceive that there was truth to all of reality . Knowledge of this truth should be our goal, rather than the crude moralism which separates us against one another in constant disagreement about who is right or wrong, or who holds the true position and who the false. If we desire understanding, it is harmful to us to declare that the perceptions of others are false, as we can thus disregard them as meaningless and inconsequential. We must realize that there is some reason that others would see things in the way that they do, and hence that there is some truth, if not the whole truth, to their perspective. To take a perspective from Berkeley’s Idealism, it is as if we are all sharing in the mind of God, and are all striving to become identical with the mind of God, the perspective from which we could neither do violence nor perceive violence, for all would be sense. We must not ask whether one person is right and another wrong but rather what the world must be like such that all persons could have formed their beliefs independently. Beyond the set of analytic and a priori truths, there is an infinite set of truths only attainable through paying attention, both to the world and to one another. Violence finds its roots in the denial of one’s own incompleteness as much as it finds its roots in incompleteness itself. One must not allow oneself to become convinced of one’s own superiority, as it is at precisely this moment that one’s ignorance becomes most apparent. The fatal flaw in every plan is the assumption that nothing could possibly surprise us, yet we are oft surprised, utterly unprepared.
In the Socratic tradition, it is often taught that wrong action is the result of ignorance. One who acts wrongly does so because of a lack of the ability to perceive the truth about their own nature, the nature of reality, or the nature of others. It is here that we find our first insight into the nature of violence. One necessarily finds oneself incapable of doing violence to that which one fully understands, for one will understand both the purpose of the entity as well as its virtue , and therefore cannot corrupt the object willfully in full knowledge. To perceive an entity as incomplete, that is to say, to perceive it as less than what it really is, is already to do it violence. The expression of this violence in physical or psychic space is merely an after effect of this initial act of ignorance. It is commonly pointed out that the most horrible of military crimes are committed only after the perpetrators are made to believe that their human victims are less than human. The subjectivity of the persons in question is denied them, thereby making their mistreatment appear morally justifiable as well as psychologically tolerable. This dehumanization of the other renders them less than what they are by means of treating them not as a valuable autonomous subjectivity but merely as a means to some end. This is often accomplished through the reduction of the person to some category, replacing the concrete nature of their humanity with the abstract nature of some concept. The Marxist cannot bring himself to kill a man, although he can easily bring himself to “eliminate the Bourgeois” just as the Klansmen can bring themselves to “uphold white supremacy” by getting rid of all the “Niggers”. This reduction considers the other only as an object, never as a subjectivity, and therefore considers the other as less than sufficiently valuable. Yet denial of a persons being an object does them violence as well. It is for this reason that many find the Existentialists offensive when they declare that each person is perfectly free and responsible for every aspect of their own existence. This is somewhat analogous to Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” . It is ridiculous to think that there are no material conditions for human flourishing, and in the neglect of the material aspects of humanity we find a great deal of the world’s violence. This too originates in incomplete knowledge and thus incomplete perception, although of the opposite sort. It is in this way that the dualisms of philosophy have for so long justified the use of interpersonal violence. From the metaphysical separation of mind and body to the moral separation of good and evil, and perhaps even on lesser issues such as the separation of the attainment of knowledge through observation and the attainment of knowledge through reasoning, the vast majority of philosophers have attempted to preference some aspects of reality and not others. In doing so, they have rendered the understanding incomplete, setting the preconditions for violence.
In business culture, the notion of contract defines the morality of interaction by making knowledge of the future the precondition for action. In this way, one is always fully capable of choice, for one has always been given the necessary knowledge and the appropriate opportunity for consent. A contract is considered viodable in cases where this has not occurred. Violence, always non-contractual, must be considered “voidable” and intolerable for the same reasons. Violence never occurs by contract in full knowledge, as it is only possible to make a decision believed to produce a net loss when one is in ignorance. We never claim that violence has been done to a person in accordance with their will. Violence is always understood as a form of imposition, its victim always as encroached upon or without understanding.
…
Understanding not only impairs our ability to do violence, it also removes our perception that reality is itself violent. Never does one perceive violence in matters which one completely understands. Momentarily consider the martial artist, master of combat, what many of us consider violence, and the calm with which they face their activity. It is as if they are unable to suffer in the presence of combat. This we must attribute to the understanding of combat as a system with its own rules, positions, and decisions. If one is to become injured in this way, the martial artist is able to clearly perceive why the injury has occurred, and is hence confronted with information rather than nonsense. With this understanding, the martial artist is able to accept the reality of combat, and is thus capable of making the decision to participate in it willfully in tournament, as a pure aesthetic action/playful activity, a social device, or as a personal goal-oriented activity. If the activity were intrinsically senseless, it would be impossible to do so, as one would have no reason to have confidence in one’s own ability to endure a situation as potentially harmful as a hand to hand encounter of this sort. It is a mistake to believe that the martial artist perceives combat as violent . It is only those without an understanding of combat that encounter it as violent.
…
In terms of human intellectual/moral development, analysis alone is inadequate, as it is not possible to understand the world only in terms of difference and category. We must also possess the ability to identify sameness, unity, and completeness. We must therefore, if we wish to avoid violence, possess a wisdom which is simultaneously analytic and synthetic, both empirical and rational. This begins with the understanding that no finite entity , in order that it be finite, will ever have a complete picture of reality. This is not to say that any of the things that a finite entity understands are unreal, but rather is to say the contrary. The things we understand are perfectly real. The cause of our error, of both our perception of violence and our perpetration of violence, is not the falsity of our beliefs but rather their partiality, that is to say, there incompleteness. It is here that we must make the greatest leap of faith in our quest toward understanding and the elimination of both violence and suffering, for we must believe in truth without believing in falsity. The conception of falsity is used as a weapon against others and as a diversion for the self. Rather than respect the ideas of others, rather than listen to their lessons and change our own ways, we often reject the truth of what we perceive as other, invalidating any conception of reality not in tune with our own. Hegel’s Dialectical reasoning attempted to eliminate this problem, and was certainly an advancement from previous ways of thinking in metaphysics, which held that one aspect of reality must be master of all. This dissatisfaction with falsity was perhaps at the root of the Enlightenments reaction against monotheism. The Rationalist conception of God as absolutely infinite rather than infinite in some limited set of attributes demonstrates this attitude clearly. It is as if we finally came to perceive that there was truth to all of reality . Knowledge of this truth should be our goal, rather than the crude moralism which separates us against one another in constant disagreement about who is right or wrong, or who holds the true position and who the false. If we desire understanding, it is harmful to us to declare that the perceptions of others are false, as we can thus disregard them as meaningless and inconsequential. We must realize that there is some reason that others would see things in the way that they do, and hence that there is some truth, if not the whole truth, to their perspective. To take a perspective from Berkeley’s Idealism, it is as if we are all sharing in the mind of God, and are all striving to become identical with the mind of God, the perspective from which we could neither do violence nor perceive violence, for all would be sense. We must not ask whether one person is right and another wrong but rather what the world must be like such that all persons could have formed their beliefs independently. Beyond the set of analytic and a priori truths, there is an infinite set of truths only attainable through paying attention, both to the world and to one another. Violence finds its roots in the denial of one’s own incompleteness as much as it finds its roots in incompleteness itself. One must not allow oneself to become convinced of one’s own superiority, as it is at precisely this moment that one’s ignorance becomes most apparent. The fatal flaw in every plan is the assumption that nothing could possibly surprise us, yet we are oft surprised, utterly unprepared.