Abstract
In this chapter, Ó Murchadha asks where the philosopher stands in relation to violence. Philosophical explorations typically claim a standpoint of neutrality. Is neutrality a responsible position to take with respect to violence? Ó Murchadha argues that violence by its nature disallows disengagement: the very claim to disengagement participates in violence. Drawing on The Book of Genesis, as well as the works of Agamben, Arendt, Husserl, Derrida, Leibniz, and Levinas, Ó Murchadha charts a middle way between those who aestheticise violence and those who claim to be free from all responsibility for violence. He argues that, in exploring violence philosophically, fundamental questions are raised regarding the responsibility of philosophy itself in ways which have relevance to the self-understanding of the philosopher.
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Notes
- 1.
It is always dangerous to speak of philosophy in the singular, and clearly the history of philosophy in relation to violence is varied. We need only think here of Heraclitus, Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Levinas, to see these variations. My claim, however, is that the source of violence is the same as the source of philosophy (in the difference of the ideal and the real), and that philosophical reflection cannot escape that implication and, nonetheless, remain philosophy. Implication, of course, does not necessarily mean advocating, and does not mean justification (indeed, it can mean the opposite).
- 2.
Violence is not simply a matter of perception, but is always in relation to perception on the part of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Violence disturbs the normality of a situation and is violent precisely in the context of that normality. This is not to say that norms are free of violence, but rather that violence can only be perceived in terms of norms and normality. To see certain norms as violent is implicitly to deny their normativity; to perceive the normal as an exercise in violence is implicitly to deny its normality.
- 3.
See Pascal (1999, p. 231): ‘the human being is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed’.
- 4.
Violence is ascribed to animals and, more clearly, to natural phenomena such as storms only through a metonymic shift of meaning. The lion attacking a gazelle is not violent because the gazelle makes no ethical claim and, a fortiori, cannot have its ethical claim violated.
- 5.
Commentators point out that the text in emphasizing that Abel brought the first born and the best suggests that Cain’s offering was less than the best, perhaps keeping the best for himself (see Speiser 1964, p. 30). So Cain’s distress and anger at God’s rejection of his offering may also reflect his own guilt.
- 6.
This emphasis on the heart is not simply a Biblical one; for Kant, too, only God can judge the heart of the moral agent (Kant 1996b, p. 85).
- 7.
- 8.
I coin this word, as—revealingly—the word ‘infantile’ is inescapably derogatory.
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Murchadha, F.Ó. (2016). Violence and Responsibility. In: Fives, A., Breen, K. (eds) Philosophy and Political Engagement. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44587-2_13
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