The Definition of Violence — Part II

Abstract

Violence can be defined empirically in numerous ways. What happens then is that certain empirical events are said to constitute ‘violence’. Each of those definitions will probably uncover aspects of violence, but none of them wholly captures what violence amounts to in social process. In searching for a definition of violence, the first move is to get out of the paradox of simultaneously seeing and not seeing, of highlighting aspects and at the same time blotting others out. I therefore define violence ontologically, and I define it as reduction of being. I now need to explain what it means to define violence ontologically, and precisely what it is that makes the definition of violence as reduction of being preferable over against alternative, perhaps almost always more commonsensical conceptualizations of violence. In order to explain this definition, I draw on a number of sources in philosophical and sociological thought.