Wittgenstein and the Nature of Violence

R. Krishnaswamy

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000075373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

How do we explain violence?

What is so significant of modern forms of violence that it has produced such large-scale destruction in its wake?

This volume builds on the political philosophy of Wittgenstein, his notions of peace and violence, to explore how violence in any form is contained in culturally or ideologically formed institutions. Drawing on Wittgenstein's work on language, it explores the link between language and violence, everydayness and culture. It examines everyday instances of micro-violence that we sometimes forget to recall. This book puts forth the claim that any theory of violence will have to touch on the myriad – both micro and macro – political, social and cultural interactions that make up the human condition. The author further comments on the unseen ways violence has been instrumentalized in modern history's many stages to create a spectacle of power to reinforce authority.

The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and conflict studies, political philosophy, linguistics and modern history.

1
MODERNITY AND THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF VIOLENCE

The nature of political violence

Hobbes was probably the first to describe violence as the politically unconstituted state of nature in modern times. For him, the state of nature was before – in either a prehistorical or a pre-contractual sense – the collective peaceful existence that is possible (under a sovereign) in a social and political setting. He said famously that our lives, if we don’t get out of our state of nature, will be “nasty, brutish and short.” Sadly, as we review our recent history, we are made aware that our lives have become brutish and short not because we live outside a social collective but because we live in state institutions. Any history of modern times, even if it is a ‘Whig’ account which catalogues the progressive institutions that we have had, cannot ignore the many violent acts that have been perpetrated in ‘advanced’ societies. That is, many of the acts of horrific violence, if one were to take the 20th century alone, have been the result of wars conducted by state governments or pogroms initiated as a result of institutional apathy and sometimes complicity.¹

This unprecedented scale of violence in the modern world raises two questions. One – the perennial question – why is there violence? Two, what is so significant of modern forms of violence that it has produced such large-scale destruction in its wake? Both questions need deep reflective thinking. Only by understanding the role of violence – which has been pervasive throughout history and especially virulent in modern times – can we hope to understand the nature of the human condition, or so I will argue in this book. It is my thesis in this book that all violence is constituted in institutions, which are either culturally or politically embodied.² This implies that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ violence. Nor is there a utopian world possible where there is no violence, as someone like Rousseau (and even Rawls) would advance.

In this book, my purpose is not to map a future where the problem of violence is solved once and for all. I aim to look at the nature of violence and probe how it is possible, by studying the everyday linguistic practices that we embody, to make a case for shifting the grounds of a critique of violence from the ontological plane to the discursive and linguistic plane. I will argue that the debate around violence, while it rightfully talks about political violence, doesn’t talk enough about the kind of violence that is perpetrated on a daily basis. In our everyday life, there are so many instances of micro-violence which sometimes we forget to even consciously recall that any ultimate theory of violence will have to touch on the many everyday interactions that form the fabric of our lives.

I set the parameters of the debate around violence, and in doing so, I will try to answer the two questions that I raised a couple of paragraphs ago. I will first start with the second question: what is it that makes modern violence unique? (By answering the second question, I hope to answer the more fundamental question of why there is violence.) Modern times, if it were merely a temporal signifier, indicating the present time, would be a floating signifier because every epoch would be modern to the people who live in it. But that is not what is implied by the phrase ‘modern times.’ When we say we live in modern times, there are some social, economic and historical references that are implicitly made which point to certain recent historically singular events like industrialization, technological advancement, the rise and fall of colonialism, etc. One mustn’t interpret modern times as merely a particular point in history in which we became modern. It is in a way also a reflexive attitude that we take regarding our own position in history and time. That is why our modern condition or the condition of modernity has come to be understood as a paradigm shift in our cultural, aesthetic, political and economic self-understanding.³ Modernity is not a doctrine as such but a way of thinking that is understood to have permeated all our cultural and collective practices.

Because modernity is socially, culturally and even cognitively reflected in all our practices, it is sometimes difficult to disengage ourselves from our own immersed lives and try to go deep into the sources of all our beliefs and pragmatic concerns. To grasp the rise of the culture of modernity, it is not enough that we merely look at philosophical or literary texts of some authors in our current era. It is important to move beyond the textual and literary expressions of cultivated people to know the essence of modernity. Modernity, since it pervades every expression of our collective existence, will have to be searched for in our daily practices as well as in the heights of secluded intellectual meditation.

Therefore, it is important if we want to understand the origin of our modern way of thinking, that we pay heed “to the rise of the novel, to the changing understanding of marriage and the family, and to the new importance of sentiment” (Taylor, 1989, p. 285). By following all concurrent changes in our different practices, we can hope to see the influence of modernity. The methodological conduit to understanding modernity is in a way itself a modern phenomenon. This will become apparent as we discuss the different methods that people have used to come to terms with the condition of modernity.

All the social or political changes that modernity is said to have brought about can be traced genealogically towards a new self-reflexive attitude. This quest to find out who we are in the cosmos and what role we are to play in history, even though has been a perpetual philosopher’s quest, has had peculiar twists in modern history. Philosophically, the project of modernity is supposed to have started when we started thinking of our self and identity in a way that was fundamentally different from earlier times. The rest of the social and political changes are supposed to follow from this change in our attitude towards ourselves.

The project of modernity is considered to have given birth to a new sense of self. Implicit in the theory of modernity⁴ is a ‘diremption,’ as Habermas calls it (Jürgen Habermas, 1987, p. 21) in the social world of the dichotomy of reason and understanding (Kant), understanding and sentiment, ends and means, the personal and the social. As the old political and social order was undermined by Western history from the time of the Reformation and the era of the Enlightenment, an exhaustive bifurcation was eventuated in which the realm of the personal and the realm of the social were rent asunder.

This also meant that the normative criteria of judging moral action, in modern times, was not something that was transcendental in either but something that had to be immanent to the social processes in which each person found themselves. As Alas-dair MacIntyre, a philosopher who has critiqued the many facets of modernity, puts it,

The bifurcation of the contemporary social world into a realm of the organizational in which ends are taken to be given and are not available for rational scrutiny and a realm of the personal in which judgment and debate about values are central factors, but in which no rational social resolution of issues is available, finds its internalization, its inner representation in the relation of the individual self to the roles and characters of social life.

(MacIntyre, 2007, p. 34)

As much as modernity opened us to the sense of the future, through unshackling its cosmological vision from the Ptolemaic and tying it to the Copernican,⁵ this sense of freedom also brought with it an incongruity in the moral sphere as the disengagement of normative principles from its cosmic and transcendent roots. According to Charles Taylor, “the essential difference can perhaps be put in this way: the modern subject is self-defining, where on previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order” (Taylor, 1975, p. 6). This new form of subjectivity implied that our self-understanding was now confined not in the cosmic order but in contradistinction to the world outside. The new modern subject becomes the epistemological observer whose self is the atomic subject of psychology and whose inward operations can be observed as objectively as nature around them can be.

The technique of drawing morals from nature because nature and the humans were part of the same macrocosm became suddenly illegitimate upon the arrival of modernity. The new historical consciousness that projects the present as the progressive culmination of past moments forces the moral self at the present to be at the precipice of a future to which they alone are given the responsibility to shape. Until the advent of modern times, as long as the human self was tied to teleological (and deistic) notions of the normative order, the sense of temporal completion and personal fulfilment coincided. But the undermining of any notion of telos – what a human could be if they realized themselves – meant that the moral code had a content and directives for action but without a context for those morals. The ‘modern self,’ becomes, to use the term that Sandel brought into currency, ‘unencumbered’ from its telos and its context, which includes possibly its religion, culture and immediate surroundings.

In modern times, not only is the responsibility to act morally imposed on the self, but the criterion of judging whether an action was right or wrong is also to be decided by the same person. The sense of agency that was generated for such a self was bounded not by the will of God or the duty to the Church but the Cartesian ego. That is, the boundaries between humans who were capable of moral agency was what later came to be crudely called consciousness. Consciousness was the seat of not only our thinking but also the seat of moral criterion. As morality was more and more equated with the possibility of it being grounded in a form of human reason, people came to believe that only humans endowed with reason could be moral. The modern epistemologically grounded person was seen as having the power to frame the conditions of representations for themselves. In other words,

what makes it possible to attribute a point of view to persons is that they have a representation of things. They have the wherewithal to reply when addressed, because they respond out of their own representation of the world and their situation. What this view takes as relatively unproblematic is the nature of agency. The important boundary is that between persons and other agents, the one marked by consciousness.

(Taylor, 1985, p. 98)

This meant that to be a human, a person had to be a moral respondent.

As the worldview of modernity spread politically and socially to different societies and the strata within them, it was only a matter of time, before a strong self-realization of what modernity meant came to take a hold of people. If the project of the Enlightenment started in the 15th century, by the 18th century, the Western world can be said to have been completely modernized in all its pursuits. This is exemplified in the 18th-century pursuit of freedom as the political foundation of justice. Freedom in the 18th century came to be understood as the pursuit of self-hood. The determination of the political order was justified only to the extent that it legitimized the realization of humankind’s freedom.⁶ The French Revolution itself came to be realized by many of the philosophers of that time as the most significant event in world history. It was for many philosophers, the primary ones being Kant and Hegel, a world-event. This meant that “the Revolution itself must positively qualify as an epoch of European world history and its freedom of being human insofar it makes freedom the foundation upon which all legality is based” (Ritter, 1984, p. 51).

Because with the French Revolution, freedom came to be understood as some form of a foundational ethics, it was only natural that universalism became a moral corollary to freedom as a value. But these ethical debates around the value of freedom also meant, given the constellations of political movements at the end of the 18th century in France, that it was believed that only political institutions would be able to execute the distribution of the value of freedom. That is, with the French Revolution, we started to think of human freedom as a universal right that it is the inherent duty of political institutions to realize. If we are born free but are everywhere in chains, then the duty of any human collective is to realize this freedom that is inherent in each person, it was believed. More importantly, this sense of freedom cannot be gained through any kind of spiritual or religious exercise but only through engagement with the body politic.

What the 18th century brought to political and social reality through the instantiation of moral duty as the realization of human freedom was a new historical sense. The negation of the past and its traditions opened the way to think of the present as unbounded by the past. Time became discontinuous with the past, and this problem of the rupture between the past and the present is in a way the ultimate problem of modernity. If the hermeneutic continuity provided by traditional customs and beliefs through history was not valid anymore, meaning came to be that which can only be self-generated. Interpreting traditions and their moral force produced a difficulty as the bridge between the present and the past was burnt. If meaning is not all pregiven as either the sacred text or the word of God, then the absoluteness of meaning and its constant nature are dissolved. The advent of modernity meant that the foundation for any interpretative exercise that is fundamental to intersubjective existence was made relative to the human subject or subjects. This in turn brought about a large-scale reorientation in the human being’s relation to their nature and to other human beings. No change was more pervasive than the changes in our political self-representation.

The philosophical node around which our social, cultural and political representational thinking expressed itself was a new self, a new sense of history and a new normative code. But out of all of these changes, the political changes that modernity brought about will be my focus. It is in the new politics of our times that we will have to place the history of the growth of national identity politics, the rise and fall of colonialism, modern-day revolutions and more importantly the nature of large-scale violence.

Modernity and political reality

If we see ourselves as a globalized world where the traffic of values and capital is made easy because ultimately there are certain economic and moral interdependencies that we share with the rest of the world, this kind of thinking owes its provenance to the heritage of modernity. As much as we use the dubious currency of ‘progress’ and ‘technical advancement’ to engage in descriptions of our modern world, it is equally important to see that there have been large-scale political ‘tectonic’ shifts that have occurred in modern times that need to be understood. Much has happened in the past 250 years in the political realm across the world. But colonialism and nationalism remain the two crucial large-scale events whose repercussions still haunt us globally. Even if Herder is sometimes considered the spiritual father of the concept of nationalism, the consequences of the spread of nationalistic movements in the 19th and 20th centuries could not have been something that Herder would have foreseen in its historical details. The unfurling, so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Modernity and the instrumentality of violence
• 2 Violence and the body
• 3 The silent stories we tell
• 4 Wittgensteinian interventions
• 5 The rules of the everyday world
• 6 Conclusion: tying the knots
• References
• Index