Responses to Violence

Abstract

When we want to think about violence, talk about violence, or—crucially— think of ways to escape from cycles of violence, I think it is important to make clear the ontology on which our work draws. To think of violence is, after all, to think of a specific kind of human-enacted phenomenon, so we need to articulate our understanding of the nature of the human condition. Personally, I resonate much more to a kind of Buddhist view that the essence of being human is to be in productive relationship with other humans than to the classic Enlightenment view of “man” as a self-sufficient, self-organizing monad. I love the gentle derision that Seyla Benhabib and other feminist philosophers have directed against the various versions of the Enlightenment view expressed by Hobbes, Rousseau, and other pillars of the Enlightenment.