File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9812, message 187


Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 17:09:18 -0500 (EST)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: Ontological nonviolence


On Sat, 19 Dec 1998, Michael Eldred wrote:

> Cologne, 19 December 1998

> Tom,
> 
> "The *ontological* status of violence, and of nonviolence", an
> interesting turn of phrase. This means that the phenomena of violence
> and nonviolence have to be thought themselves as phenomena of being.

Yeah, I actually looked at that after and thought I should have put it in
quotation marks, as I'm not sure these can be encapsulated in "being".
Also, violence and nonviolence (the perception and understanding of the
form is requisite for the latter) is never simply phenomenal.


> 
> If violence is "Gewalt" and "Gewalttaetigkeit" in German and _to
> deinon_ in Greek, then the negation that overcomes violence and makes
> of it nonviolence can be of either an ontic or an ontological nature.

Again, not sure this is possible. Violence is not *a being*. The
degradation of a being is not itself a being. The negation of such
degradation is, of course, some kind of affirmation. 

> 
> The ontic overcoming of violence is restraint (ethical behaviour) or 
> counter-violence (war, state monopoly of legitimate power, rule of law).

This does not at all adequatley sum up, but it does adequately sum what is
taken to be nonviolence in the main, and is based on a pressuposition of
an origional positivity that has no thematico-substantive engagement of
nonviolence. Restraint is just one mode of nonviolence. In more positive
fruition, it entials the rather "unrestrained" working to create the
conditions of possibility of nonviolence, prevention, conflict resolution,
mediation, etc., none of which can be summed up with by "restraint". Nor
may "ethical behavior" be understood simply as "restraint", though of
course it usually takes thie form currently. Wheter it is "restraint" or a
positive aifformation, there remains a "from what, for the sake of what",
etc., that has within it an irreducibly substantivy: restraing *concerning
violence*. Ever attempt is apparently made to avoid this
substantialization of nonviolence as such.


 The 
> mediating middle between these two is perhaps 'politics' (political struggle, 
> deomocratic procedures and institutions).

Not sure I'm ready for sublation on the bases you offer here, though I
guess I can see how this follows from what you say.

 
> 
> The ontological overcoming of violence is the in-sight into the abyss
> of the ontological dimension, the yawning chasm of being that shows up
> our transcendental impotence. It is the nothingness of being itself
> that can account for the "non" in nonviolence.

It may account for the *non*, but not the *violence*, the part that people
usually don't want to deal with. I don't know what is or could be the
"ontological overcoming of violence", but would venture to guess that it
could never be simply a *vision* of a *phenomenon*, but must always
entail something that exceeds every phenomenality, and hence must be a
"thoughtaction" or satyagraha.

> 
> We are unable to do anything about our ex-posure to being, which
> overcomes us all at once (_to hen_) and makes a totality of beings.

Here I think I have to hold off on embarking upon baroque fruition. It
appears to proceed on the basis of finalities that themselves entail the
hiding of nonviolence. It's "totality and infinity" all over again, but
the question concerning violence goes well "beyond" the metaphsyics of
*infinity*, which, I maintain, itself participates in the hiding or
forgetting of nonviolence in its substantivity. From where I stand, we
(assuming hypothetically one stands with me at least virtually) see Being
transported from simple forgetting, to the limit of its hubris, and then
its receeding back into a certain "middle zone", perhaps parallel to the
one you mention, more humble, more humiliated, more restricted and
limited, and in a condition that is irreducible to "ontology", in which
being and nonviolence are coconstitutive, beholden to one another, and
utterly irreducible to one another. 

Tom



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