Abstract:
This is not an essay on the acts of violence, but on violence per se. The purpose is to expose violence for what it is <em>in its essence</em>, so as to renounce it, and thus make room for genuine peace. It is widely acknowledged that violence is the very opposite of peace, and thus obviously threatens it, but most discussions of violence remain at the level of acts of violence and rarely attempt to probe the essence lying beneath its outward manifestations. The same could be said of peace. This is understandable, as both concepts entail highly enigmatic subtleties that are difficult to pin down, and therefore require the work of arduous metaphysical analysis. Nonetheless, such work must be carried out, for if discussions of violence do not attempt to probe the inner depths of what it is in itself, we are apt to end up defining certain activities as non-violent, when in fact they are simply different forms of violence, masquerading as non-violence. This may lead to the further identification of peace with these deceptive definitions of non-violence, which ultimately amounts to calling violence peace, as, for instance, when so-called non-violent demonstrators, short of inflicting bodily harm upon the other, are nonetheless filled with passionate hatred, with no intention of transforming the other. To adequately understand that non-violence is not automatically to be equated with peace, it is first necessary to get at the core of what violence really is. René Girard and Mahatma Gandhi are two exemplary contemporary thinkers, coming from dissimilar academic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, who do explore the metaphysics of violence profoundly, and whose conclusions are stunningly commensurate. Though their approaches are quite different, they both conclude that violence is an invisible, ambiguously transcendent, disordered force that feeds upon itself by parasitically taking advantage of the whole range of immoral human <em>desire.</em> To renounce it is nothing short of renouncing all evil and immorality through a hyper-conscious decision to strive daily to know the truth and to do the good, precisely by loving the beautiful—the very place where the good and true meet—and that one sacred space where violence dares not show its hideous face.
Machine summary:
Metaphysics of violence, Peace, René Girard, Mahatma Gandhi, Mythological and religious traditions I.
Finally, the essay leads to the conclusion derived from the philosophical judgments of Girard and spiritual reasoning of Gandhi that the Buddhism and Islam contain resources for repudiating violence and for cultivating life-structures that are free from the contagious violence of mimetic rivalry as for both Gandhi and Girard, violence is an invisible, ambiguously transcendent, disordered force that feeds upon itself by parasitically taking advantage of the whole range of immoral human desire.
3 My reading of Gandhi‟s answer to the General about groping in the dark, and of his plea in his autobiography (quoted above) wherein he asks the reader to join him in petitioning the God of Truth to give him the blessing of Ahimsa, is that Gandhi was on the verge of receiving the same kind of grand and mystical vision that Krishna finally bestowed upon the irresolute Arjuna—a vision which immediately dispelled all doubt and fear and hesitation—enabling him to pick up his weapon and face the impending battle.
This had led many to conclude that Girard considers mimetic desire to be an intrinsically evil power that inevitably leads to violence, but a careful reading of his work shows this not to be the case.