Nonviolence

There are probably few people who would be 100% happy to be called ‘good’. Because we often call someone a good person because there is little else to say about him. And strangely enough, this goodness, the absence of all evil, doesn’t have a very favourable meaning. It is pretty much regarded as simpleness. The word ‘simple’ also used to mean: good and innocent and now only means: stupid and unworldly. The world to which the simpleton is alien does not seem to take pure goodness seriously and therefore prefers to give its names an unfavourable meaning. What is not good and bad at the same time, or rather: what, in addition to being good, is not at the same time useful, pleasant, fascinating or admirable, is pushed into a corner by the bad world. Only the ambiguous mixture of good and evil or good and whatever can endure. The pure is not welcome. In the game of the world everything must also contain its own opposite, because each player must take into account all the movements of his opponent. Otherwise he won’t play along and becomes unworldly or silly. 

This now also seems to be happening to nonviolence. In everyday language, this name seems to suggest an attitude that ignores the existence of violence. And there is violence, so that attitude is simple, albeit noble and good. Nonviolence is then the noble but unreal attempt to create, in the midst of a world full of violence, an island that is characterized by the absence of the most worldly and is therefore very unworldly.

Now one can of course say that it is not so bad to be unworldly; one can continue to preach noble nonviolence in the face of ridicule. There is something beautiful in that.

But besides the fact that it is difficult to prove that unworldliness is not a bad thing, there is the danger that one will make a virtue out of enduring that ridicule and thus harm the ‘world’ in a stupid way. That does not benefit the world and the purpose of a virtue is precisely that it does benefit the world.

Those who advocate nonviolence should take a different path. They must begin to remove its ‘image’ from the sphere of sterile simplicity. Nonviolence is not at all the same as pure nobility. It is not a denial of violence, but only a refusal to cultivate violence by adopting the rules of the game. It does not coincide with pure goodness.

Nor is violence the only evil in the world. And nonviolence should not be seen as a lack of resources. This is often done based on the belief that violence is a super means. But violence as a means is actually very dubious and nonviolence can be very superior from the point of view of the use of means. There are forms of nonviolence that are far smarter, infinitely more evil, and even incomparably more worldly than the primitive and brutal violence they are opposed to. Nonviolence is the human tool par excellence.

And it is not at all true that violence can only be met with violence. Whoever can answer it more effectively is not simpler than the other who uses violence, but on the contrary much smarter. Nonviolence is always superior to violence. Violence is powerlessness; nonviolence can be power. But nonviolence is not superior – this must be especially emphasized – because it contains a heavier element of ethical nobility, patience and gentleness. I emphasize this not to belittle these virtues and push them away into the corner of simpleness, but to highlight the inherent character of nonviolence by removing from it what a hostile and simple world has wrongly placed on it. Nonviolence is characterized not so much by a noble aversion to violence as by the presence of other and more superior means or, failing that, the refusal to do anything, no matter what. The principle of nonviolence means that we do nothing when we have no means; the principle of violence is that the absence of means is never recognized.

The negative name therefore does not indicate a perhaps noble and very difficult attitude towards violence, but an attitude towards a difficult matter. Seen in this way, nonviolence is a ‘technical’ rather than an ethical matter and in any case it does not owe its ethical superiority to its simpleness, but to the fact that it knows how to use means in a situation where others, in the absence of all means, see reason to engage in violence. Nonviolence is the possession of means or, in their absence, expertly practiced passivity, while violence is the simultaneity of an urge to act and a lack of means. Nonviolence can only come from the ability to analyse a situation, while violence is the unwillingness itself to analyse. It will be clear that the first attitude is far superior. Ultimately, this consideration is not enough to make the better attitude prevail on all fronts, but my intention was only to show that nonviolence has nothing to do with stupidity, and on the other hand, violence has everything.

25 propositions on conflicts

1. Conflicts are an attempt that is being made or continued after its failure.
2. The conflict, as a collision of two worlds that aren’t aware of their incompleteness, is an endless detour to an enforced peace.
3. Conflicts exist in the perspective of a possible peace. There is no conflict possible between two parties where there is no peace possible. 
4. Conflicts arise and persist on the grounds of their superfluidity; they serve no purpose whatsoever.
5. The distinction between “cause” and “reason” in explaining the emergence of a conflict only emphasizes its inexplicability; it builds into the explanation a delay that is tantamount to a postponement of the explanation.
6. Conflicts arise from ignorance of their cause; they not only are there before the warring parties know about it; they also come because the parties don’t know about it.
7. The moment when a conflict arises cannot be predicted any more than the moment when an accident happens. Predictable conflicts do not arise.
8. Conflicts are prolonged indefinitely by the illusion that they will be short-lived.
9. The duration of a conflict is determined by the extent to which the motivation is unclear and can be shifted to other conflict material.
10. Conflicts are only motivated once they get going; they do not arise from that motivation.
11. The motivation of a conflict is subordinate to its continuation.
12. A conflict is a clash between two logical systems; it is about being right; reasoning is an essential component of a conflict.
13. At each subsequent stage of a conflict, the illusion arises that the conflict only took on realistic forms at a previous stage.
14. Conflicts are self-perpetuating and find motives in their own history to continue.
15. The relationship between the severity of a conflict and the size of the conflict material is only established during the conflict.
16. The motivation for continuing a conflict can also be used to end it.
17. Each conflict itself provides the material for a later resumption; new material is not necessary.
18. The escalation of a conflict does not arise from the conflict material, but from the conflict itself, which creates the illusion that the severity is proportional to its shortness.
19. When a conflict is at its most intense, the cause is forgotten, it no longer is about anything and peace is the most logical solution.
20. Conflict as a continuation of dialogue, but with other and inferior means, affects the effect and credibility of the better means.
21. Conflicts don’t solve problems, but force to pose them.
22. A relationship is more primitive and precarious, the more conflict it takes to become aware of the problems within it.
23. What the conflict is about, being right, is never made clear by its outcome.
24. Achieving victory in a conflict means: to force your own being right and to create your own truth.
25. Peace is the postponement of one’s own being right; peacefulness means being willing to engage in a dialogue without end.

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Helen in Egypt

(editorial written during the 6 day war in 1967)

According to the well known Greek saga, Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus and famed around the world for her beauty, was kidnapped by Paris, who had gained the permission and courage for this by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The elopement then became the cause for the Trojan war. For Menelaus and his brother Agememnon gathered a large number of Greek heroes and sailed across the sea to Troy to avenge the injustice. Only after a ten years siege did they manage to take the city by means of a ruse, the well known wooden horse that, filled with soldiers, was brought into the city.

That is a saga, something that’s being told and something to talk about. A large chunk of Greek literature finds it starting point in this saga. But it can also be discussed differently than from a literary point of view, for example critically. Herodotus, a Greek historian from the fifth century before Christ, does this. In his work we find a different reading of the Trojan saga, recorded from the mouths of Egyptian priests. When Paris had kidnapped Helen and wanted to sail away from Greece, an unfavourable wind was blowing which made him end up in Egypt. And the Egyptian king took Helen under his guard, along with the possessions Paris had robbed, so that Aphrodite’s favoured had to sail back to Troy alone. When the Greeks landed there and demanded Helen, the Trojans could rightfully say that she wasn’t there. Of course nobody put any faith in their words and only after the city was conquered did it turn out they had spoken the truth, and that the whole ten year war had been a senseless undertaking. Herodotus, who takes this saga rather seriously, says that this reading strikes him as the most believable. For, as his reasoning goes, if the Troyans really had Helen in their midst, they wouldn’t have been so insane to endure a long and bloody war just to give frivolous Paris the chance to have an adulterous love life. They would have handed over Helen.

This argument does sound convincing. It’s just that, if you are busy anyway looking at this saga critically and trying to learn from it, then you also have to say this: if Helen truly was in Egypt and not in Troy, then the fight was even more senseless. For then, there wouldn’t have been any stakes, not even the protection of the adulterer Paris. We then reach the conclusion that the Trojan war, the most sang about war in history, the first conflict between East and West, either had as its stakes something as frivolous as the love life of cowardly Paris, or nothing at all; with the footnote that, the longer we look at the affair critically, the probability increases that it was about nothing at all, at most that nothing that we can call a ‘miscommunication’. 

Ernst Bloch wrote extensively about this allegorical meaning of Helen in Egypt in his colossal work “Das Prinzip Hoffnung”. “There were you are not is where happiness is” says Bloch. Dreams invite to distant journeys and long detours. In every conception there’s an element of hope, that in its own way and despite reality stubbornly remains. Even though Helen is in Egypt she has to be in Troy, for there is where the battle rages. And vice versa: if there’s fighting in Troy, Helen is in Egypt. The dreamt version of Helen beats the real version. I believe that our surprise about this situation gives us all kinds of connections to current events. Helen is once again in Egypt. The stakes of a heroic and what’s even called idealistic battle withdraw themselves again from the possibilities that can be realised by war. In war it always turns out to be about ‘something else’ and in that, war isn’t different from a domestic fight. The effect is in no way related to what the war was meant to achieve. Helen is in Egypt, while they’re fighting about her in Troy.

Only after the war does it turn out to be the same Helen. But when we deduct from the dream vision what the intoxication has added to it, than that same remaining reality has only become more problematic. The problem of why the war started, has become twice as big, and lays the foundation for yet another more violent war which in turns increases the problems. For example: one of the causes of the war in the near East was the large number of Palestinian refugees. That number hasn’t decreased; on the contrary it has increased with thousands of Jordanian refugees. The animosity which brought forth this war has also not gotten smaller: it has, historically speaking, been prolonged by at least one generation. The chance of a new war has only gotten bigger. 

To draw from this the conclusion that nothing can be achieved with war, seems to me especially weak and untrue. Some things can indeed be achieved by it. It is an iron law, that war achieves the opposite of what it intended to do. War is an extraordinarily efficient, even an infallible means to, at the costs of unimaginable sacrifices, achieve what we would like to avoid at all costs; it is the only truly efficient way to turn difficult problems into unsolvable problems.

Rebirth

The thought of the possibility to be born again, expressed in the simple word ‘rebirth’ , is so far-reaching, that it must have arisen in a play on words in which the rebirth can’t be taken too literally or physically. The Dutch word has been used since the middle ages in a religious context, in which there is not mention of a new conception of the same living being and a second stay in the mother’s womb, but only of the transition of the same existence to another form of life and another insight into its nature. That’s why it was primarily used to indicate that by baptism or conversion people as it were transcended to a life that was regarded more as as the true life. They were therefore reborn in the water or in the spirit. That is far-reaching enough, but this rebirth cannot undo the past; it lets the ‘old person’ continue to exist and it’s sooner a new phase in the old life or at best a new beginning of what there was already, than the beginning of a totally different life from a completely different origin. The origin as an occurrence in the past can absolutely not be undone. 

Also the thought of reincarnation and of a cycle of ever-repeating births seems to ultimately draw its inspiration and meaning from a form of realisation that human existence is a one-off and irrevocable matter. It has such an elementary and absolute meaning, that the chance of failure is almost unbearable. I’m inclined to think that that is why, in reincarnation and the cycle of rebirths, a sort of resit was built in into existence. A certain way of literal and mythical thought then gives that resit the form of a series of new births in which an earlier life can be be retaken over and over again until it is finally appraised by its true value. For as unbearable as the thought that life is a definitive failure, must be the thought that we depart without a moment in which the absolute meaning of a one-off existence has imbued us. Once that has happened and existence has been purified of its sloppiness, then perhaps that can be the end of it. For from that moment onwards every hereafter and every sequel is redundant fiction. 

So what am I occupied with, when i’m thinking of the far too easily used word ‘rebirth’? In any case not with reincarnation from a new physical origin, also not with a regurgitation of an ‘eternal return of the same’ about which Nietzsche orated, and especially not with a revival after a conversion or a successful cure or operation. I sooner think of what Nietzsche’s admirer Heidegger said about the ‘forgetfulness of being’, interpreted as the inescapable given that the absoluteness of the fact that we exist eludes us, and almost can not be the subject of attention. It continuously and forcefully intrudes on us, but it might be too simple to completely get it at once, or satisfy us with its slight scope and content. When that happens and we are confronted with the coincidence of our birth and the fact that we exist, a feeling of rebirth is appropriate. With every rebirth existence becomes more sober, loses some weight and necessity and at the same time gains that weight in absoluteness. The almost nothing that we are is almost everything that we have. 

Excerpts from ‘Against violence’

“Violence by definition is what is stronger than I am myself and therefore what I have to endure. It can never be drawn into the circle of political manageability without residue. Whoever allocates to his thoughts and words a power they don’t have, especially from the not having that inspired them, places himself outside of the matter and underestimates violence. He acts as somebody who went to the beach and started blowing, believing that this would give wind to the sails of a ship in the distance that he did not see, whose course he doesn’t know and who has switched to steam a long time ago.”

“Only reality is the point of existence, not something that is outside it or is added to it with lyrical violence. The closer we are to reality, the more our existence has a point. The meaning of thinking is that it brings man closer to reality. That indeed is a product of thinking, not just of deed.”

“Violence and emphasis are the denial of the power of the impotence, of the defenseless, but conscious undergoing. As long as this power is denied and the possibility of a technique of passivity is neglected, an ideology of activity can only lead to violence or choke on its own excitement.”

“As a radicalization of annoyed impotence thought can make a step here against the domination of violence. That is the discovery that precisely the most important things are given and received, not conquered. Thinking can cultivate receptivity against violence and with that disarm part of violence. As insight into impotence it liquidates part of the emphasis of the will, which is the cornerstone of every ideology of activity. That is not as much an ethical as a technical mission. It is not about an incitement to immediate and noble non-violence, but about the liquidation of violence as a doctrine.”

“The deed rushes past wisdom, and rouses by its infectiousness the squaring of its effects. Violence finds more ears willing to listen than patience will, especially in a culture that has always glorified big, spectacular acts of heroism. It is almost a physical law, that in such a culture no real possibility remains unrealized. The weapon calls forward the violence, the iron pulls the man, says Homer. A threat, once expressed, almost by law solidifies into a reality. Collectivity is the place where possibilities as such cannot be contemplated and taken into consideration, but where realization is the only attitude towards realizable possibilities. Without hesitation, skepticism or distance a rumor becomes a message, an impulse an activity, a threat violence.”

“In a reasonable and technical society the individual aggression should not be able to pass on its impulses to technical collective provisions, so that from those provisions a perpetual lesson in tolerance would egress, like the face of reason, an anonymous authority that can not fall back on feudal relations. It has distanced itself from those in a technical way, that is to say in a realistic and not emotionally manipulable way. That this reasonability is not in the least a vague illusion or an unrealizable dream, can be seen in the way modern traffic is controlled. If you adhere to the laws of traffic, you don’t obey anyone, you are not a hero and you don’t have to demonstrate courage; your aggression only meets itself, and does not get the chance to realize an ideology. It becomes a completely powerless impulse, for which there is no room in the system. The sheer technical regulation prevents chaos and violence; the reasonability is calculated without taking into account the abundance of aggressive impulses. Within the system there can not be a decision for violence: it is rejected plainly as primitive.”

“The phraseology that defends the handiwork of bravery prevents technique from doing its sober and businesslike but clarifying work. It is a feudal ethical obstruction in a matter that is not suitable for the lyrical violence of personal merits and awards. For nonviolence is not a favor and peace is not an exceptional state that should be maintained at the cost of great offers. Sooner violence is an ‘offer’; and an ethics of courage that demands offers, implicitly demands violence and catastrophe. So whoever suggests that nonviolence is an enormous ethical exertion, introduces a military and martial concept on to the terrain of peace, and by glorifying courage, they continue the war.”

“Courage is the lyrical density of misjudged impotence. Only the acknowledgement of impotence can liquidate courage without making it into cowardice.”

“Sentiment is the flip side of violence. Therefore it cannot and will never be disconnected from it. If you cultivate one, you’ll also increase the other, even if you think you can turn against violence this way. War criminals were sentimental at Christmas, to serve violence the rest of the year without shock. Peace becomes a Christmas matter to justify and ensure the existence of wars. Guilt is ritually cranked up to sentiment and localized in a season, in which it can change very little of the normal way of things. It is no coincidence that the cosy winter fest gets celebrated during a time in which it was less opportune for the old Germanics to go to war. The ritual celebration channels the sentiment and puts it as it were in a remote place to make more room for bravery. This is how the equilibrium gets restored every time.”

Defenselessness as an assignment

If thought has a job in the liquidation of violence, then that job is undoubtedly connected to this powerlessness. That job is the liquidation of all forms in which this powerlessness remains masked and wants to, also in the violence of thought itself, pretend that it is might. More than this beginning thought can not make, because it finds its own end in this beginning. But if violence is a resistance to the powerlessness of thought, then seeing through that resistance and that powerlessness is already more than a first step towards the liquidation of violence and its voluntary constructions, it is already in itself that liquidation and becomes so more as it succeeds better in being radical without becoming violent. Thought itself gets an ethical meaning here by preparing a clarification in practice. It will not stop asking questions that it can’t answer, like the fanatics of clarity and the critics of ethical pointlessness would so very much like it to, but it stops expecting an answer to those questions solely from itself.

To radically combat violence as a ‘mistake’ and through that liberate rational forces, it would be necessary to accurately describe the borders between power and powerlessness. . That is now impossible, like everything which is most necessary within thought is the most impossible. In the mean time, the terrain of activity is unlimited and power can increase unlimited. Its border cannot be determined by thought in advance. The only real border is the border it turned out to be, just like the only real truth is the truth as it turned out. In the area of unambiguously efficient action any powerlessness is essential but temporary. A direct development is possible there, with unlimited progress, in which violence is averted by the exactness of the means. 

Even in the area of passivity, activity can indirectly expand itself as a technique. A sleeping aid, for example, can as active intervention temporarily overcome the paradoxical effect of emphasis on this area. Technique penetrates areas of passivity and reduces it. Even death is deprived of its absolute power. It’s brought into a zone of manipulability. Therefore there is a direct and indirect activity, and powerlessness only starts there where both end, and then still it’s only temporary. 

Power and powerlessness of technique are the most clearly distinguishable, much more clearly that the power of the will and of ethos. That is why its criterium is more reliable and should be assigned a more decisive meaning. Whole areas where ethos thought it was alone and where the dilettante handiwork of thought, that wants to get further that wonder or annoyance, might have founded more confusion than it created clarity, now fall to the power and influence of technique, which takes over their administration without the mists of courage and sentiment. The liquidation of courage liberates energies for an ethical evolution, which coincidentally also gets enforced by technique.

Because the powerlessness of technique clearly has a temporary character, there is in relation to that much more and more grounded reason for optimism than in relation to a human ethos which has turned out to be almost entirely uneducable. When nonviolence is a technical assignment, more than an ethical one, then the optimistic expectation in regards to its technical solution can even be accompanied by the trust that every step forward it makes, the technique will also further liquidate courage and sentiment, and with it educate ethos. Our ethos is bound to our possibilities, and where technique changes those possibilities, it also interferes on the terrain of the ethos. Every technical attainment can take away some of our fear and our hubris, and through that liberate the ethos from its primitivity.

The impotence of courage

(excerpt from ‘Against violence’, 1965)

Against the clarification of reality by technique, the feudal, sportive, proud courage is powerless. It can only violently and irresponsibly execute a will. Because of the negation of passivity, it can’t even get around to its own identity. Courage can only be created in concurrence with passivity. When it evolves from a temporary bridging of passivity to a principle of pure, totally impatient activity, it degenerates into an acceptance of violence as its designated partner, gives it a hard solidity and stops it from getting liquidated. Without justification it is given in its provisionality a lyrical dimension that only belongs to definitive existence. This is a form of deceptive violence in thought that is all the more tempting as in this lyrical violence a wound gets plastered over prematurely.
The phraseology that defends the handiwork of bravery prevents technique from doing its sober and businesslike but clarifying work. It is a feudal ethical obstruction in a matter that is not suitable for the lyrical violence of personal merits and awards. For nonviolence is not a favor and peace is not an exceptional state that should be maintained at the cost of great offers. Sooner violence is an ‘offer’; and an ethics of courage that demands offers, implicitly demands violence and catastrophe. So whoever suggests that nonviolence is an enormous ethical exertion, introduces a military and martial concept on to the terrain of peace, and by glorifying courage, they continue the war.

If thought wants to radicalize the utter annoyance about violence, it has to jeopardize itself in the liquidation of violence and not try to capitalize on its annoyance and its impotence by condensing it into courage. For the culture of courage is the culture of anger and of violence itself. Now when we call the end of thought, the liquidation of its lyrical dimension, sobriety, then we have to say that nonviolence is a strictly sober matter. This means that it should be realized on a technical and juridical level, where annoyed thought has already come to an end and given the decision out of its hands. The consequence of thought is then that it is not in control of its own deeds, but makes them available to the mediating reasonableness of technique that strips them of their lyrical violence. 

Just as in the area of tidy and clear use of language, analytical philosophy could be fruitful here too by creating or propagating a truly livable ethos of sobriety. If anywhere the question to the point and use of thought is important, then it would be here, where not the ‘luxurious’ meaning of life, but life itself is at play. By analyzing and pulverizing the nonsensical and unseemly sentiments that people can cherish and force onto each other, thought can in its own modest and impotent way contribute to the liberation of people. 

The effect of accelerated technical development is the liquidation of stiffened and feudal ethical principles that remain cramped around hypostated values and achievements, in the defense of which courage is being kept amongst the arms. Those values melt like wax or turn out to be more universal than the culture that hypostated them and by doing that has already put them partially in a non-active status. For example, no one has to give their lives for private ownership or for the particular form in which they are used to, if not experience, then at least worship freedom. Nevertheless those are precisely the grounds on which violence is based and courage is mobilized. Violence originates as a defense of values at the point where the discussion about it or the trade in it is ceased. Courage then gets the assignments that thought has succumbed to. It takes over thought’s impotence and is therefore based on the presupposition that the useful currency of the value has become dead capital. 

Courage is the lyrical density of misjudged impotence. Only the acknowledgement of impotence can liquidate courage without making it into cowardice. Without this acknowledgement courage stays in a phase of consciousness narrowing in which the unreasonable, but lyrical decision of violence is made. This courage bridges the distance between impotence and activity or violence and replaces thought here. It is the place where the jump into violence is made, because precisely at this place the other is hypostated as a threat and the liquidity of a value gets clumped into unusable cinders.

If now violence would be the only way out of this situation, courage could, as resilience, as proper humility, suspend choosing any way out at all; but phraseology turns against it here. It is strengthened in this by collectivity, in which the structures of impatience and violence are more clearly sketched than those of forbearance. Cruelty is not a specific characteristic of tyrants and feudal rulers alone. The emphasis that courage has received functions in a thoughtless collectivity as well against a background of a lust for cruel spectacle that is experienced there. It is almost incalculable to measure how large the share of this cruelty still is in the ethical demand of bravery, and therefore how much people dupe each other, when they don’t see through the effect of this share and don’t discount them in the demands they make of each other. This too is an aspect of the complicated relationship between courage and violence: violence isn’t only accepted as a means, but also desired and demanded as a spectacle.

Sentiment and violence

Just like peace starts where it wasn’t intended, as an effect of technical communication and unity, so too can the source of violence lay on a terrain, where it wasn’t expected, not only as a direct starting point, but also as a remote cause. This justifies a continued vigilance. And this vigil is then more related to the functioning of communication than to maintaining of values or to courageously standing prepared. Courage isn’t vigilance, contrarily it is the stubbornness of looking in just one direction. If you just aim your vigilance at the eventual effect, peace, you already enter a dialogue with violence and prepare for war. Here the paradoxical effect occurs, that only the last lesson of history is learned. An army that is ready is prepared for the war that’s past. Its courage comes too late, as a good intention that is discovered and emphasized immediately after a failure, not to say:invented as a lyrical compensation for a technical defect.

There is another aspect to this emphaticism that could be described as the identity of sentiment and violence. It is an insurmountable annoyance that those who are held responsible for the violence of war aren’t born criminals with typical criminal defects, but people with an almost lyrical ‘sense of duty’, with accuracy, and mostly with sentiment. They were imbedded into a system that was violent merely by its systemic nature, and their sentiment is the way in which the rebellion against violence gets bent in reconciliation and resignation. In this, they don’t differ from their contemporaries, and this circumstance robs us of the chance to disconnect them as scapegoats from the context of our own community and send them into the dessert as alien things. As a figure of speech it is just a coincidence that it wasn’t us in their place. The blame of violence can never be calculated fully and be individualized, and this too belongs to the obnoxious of violence. And of sentiment, we should add to that. For sentiment is one of the forces that obscures the problem of violence, and try to make it into an impenetrable mystery. It is of vital importance that reason, in its annoyance about violence, does not get blocked by a possibly superfluous darkness of sentiment, which would steer it towards a misty and untimely reconciliation, where only long-term rebellion and an effective revolution are commanded. Sentiment blocks the way out from annoyance, makes it evaporate into a reconcilatory mist of resignation instead of giving it the opportunity to walk the ways of technique and revolution. Sentiment is the adversary of technique.

As technique increases, sentiment is being pushed back and made superfluous, and it’s already visible that computers will dispose of a piece of sentiment made superfluous. Sentiment only has the right to exist as that which needs to be clarified and liquidated, as a dark spot that’s busy dissolving itself, as the cathartic effect of an encounter with reality. It is an experience of provisionality and approaching redundancy, homesickness to the manual labour of defenseless thought. In the emphasis on sentiment, there are a false profundity and conservative quasi-wisdom that thwart the progress of the work on a technical assignment. Sentiment puts itself in the service of the constituted by buying off its liquidation. Sentiment is, to put it in an unmasking way, nothing more than a resignation to violence, anesthetized rebellion. It borrows its prestige and temptation from the wisdom of resignation to the passive violence of death and natural disasters. The displacement from here to active violence betrays itself as sentimentality.

Just as courage is the kitsch of pure activity, sentiment is the kitsch of pure passivity. Courage and sentiment are the paradoxal effects of a complete obedience to an authority, to ethically hypostated principles and values, upon which liberty and sobriety prematurely closes, in which the respite prematurely gets caked in by moral kitsch and the constituated violence is being accepted, perhaps doggedly or resigned, but in any case with a misguided and unbusinesslike lyrical compensatory move. The colossal temptation of collective emotions are an indication here. In the emotion we are being handled by the obscurity of the constituted at the cost of the clarity of our annoyance. The emotion itself is the movement of this turbid mixture. It is the conversion to the constituted via a small detour, through which the annoyance gets integrated into the constituted. The cult of sentiment holds back a painful realisation and obstructs an insight into the origins of violence and into the true nature of human cruelty. 

Sentiment is the flip side of violence. Therefore it cannot and will never be disconnected from it. If you cultivate one, you’ll also increase the other, even if you think you can turn against violence this way. War criminals were sentimental at Christmas, to serve violence the rest of the year without shock. Peace becomes a Christmas matter to justify and ensure the existence of wars. Guilt is ritually cranked up to sentiment and localized in a season, in which it can change very little of the normal way of things. It is no coincidence that the cosy winter fest gets celebrated during a time in which it was less opportune for the old Germanics to go to war. The ritual celebration channels the sentiment and puts it as it were in a remote place to make more room for bravery. This is how the equilibrium gets restored every time.

But an equilibrium between opposites is not yet an identity. The connection between sentiment and violence is more intimate than an opposition that will still give both opposites a chance to be insincere. Whoever cultivates the opposition gives sentiment and violence enormous opportunities and enables them to act as separate entities. Sentiment is at its most dangerous within this juxtaposition, that won’t recognise itself as its identity, because it’s precisely there that it seems most pure and innocent. The juxtaposition gets cultivated to hide the identity. But only within this identity does sentiment aim itself against violence, as a feint: it had already been incorporated into it in advance; it is the sultry heat itself with which the integration is forced. This sentimentality, forced back into a remote nook of existence, feeds violence and can make some of us into war criminals, others into hypocrites. Sentiment is violence, relapsed, palsied and postponed, but pure-bred violence. And ritually aroused sentiment is ritual violence. Ritual violence is even more dangerous than individual violence, because it releases the individual from the duty to personally justify for their actions and for the connection between their sentiment and their violence. The individual gets ritually collectivized and inspired to a lyrical form of cruelty. The feast of goodwill becomes a feast of personal powerlessness and impersonal violence. Good intentions get frantically emphasized to give violence a chance to escape. 

About fury

Where technique is the mediation in the postponement, the ideology of activity wants in its haste to pass by the provisionality of the means. Against this only thought can place its therapy here by admitting its powerlessness and saving the passive life as a reality. For what is at stake here is the denial of passivity. The ideology of activity is the articulation of an anger, more than a wondering or an annoyance. If thought’s wonder or annoyance is still an attempt of man to collect himself from the bewilderment of the situation and has not yet been substantiated into a stance, then the anger is already a step further: it is already a stance, in which the desperation seems to be conquered, and it is already at the point of switching to deeds. The old philosophers from Aristotle to Descartes and Spinoza describe fury or wrath globally as the impulse to really avenge the evil that is done to us, so approximately as violence against violence. To accommodate nonviolence they then design a technique of self-control, a postponing of a furious outburst. By postponing the energy of the fury is as it were divided into smaller quantities and invested into smaller projects. That way fury even becomes a useful, technically exploited inspiration, roughly in the same way in which modern technology has tamed the explosion. But this school presupposes that the fury stays within the competences of self-control: it denies at least partially its pathetic character or presupposes a philosophical culture, in which it can be made fruitful. Whoever interprets it too hastily in a modern way, could think that it is already based on the ideology of activity, that that school itself is fury already.

For what is attempted in fury is not so much to avenge the sorrow another has done to us, as much as to deny suffering in general, the reality of passivity. Fury is misunderstood sorrow, suppressed powerlessness, unresolved insight in one’s own impotence and rebellion against it. It is an indication that activity has failed, and a rejection of that indication. As a pathos the fury is that which happens to us during activity, a piece of passivity that we pushed back to maintain the illusion of the pure, efficient deed without paradoxical effects.In the fury the energy of a stuck rectilinearity gets kinked in a pathetic twist. The ‘other’ casts its dark shadow over the mind that will not acknowledge it and closes off to its opacity. Fury is the effect of a hero’s courage without melancholy, the revenge of reality to the arbitrariness of thought. And thought can more or less grasp that arbitrariness, because it can reflect upon itself as a source of its own non-identity. It cannoty grasp a constituted fury that is experienced as blind inspiration to action. Fury lies within the reach of thought insofar it remains the immanent impulse to action of powerless thought itself. So if it inspires at all, it sooner inspires a self-critique of thought rather than an irresponsible and in effect merely explosive deed. As a deed fury is the pure violence, namely an activity that wants to ignore all blows from the side of the obstacle. Pure activity is violence: its end term is total destruction. That is also the immediate stake of every big fury. Thus fury inspires a leap over appropriated technical means or ‘the way to go’ and designs its own technique of destruction, in which things are always destroyed more and differently than can be calculated or justified, the anti-technique with the greatest possible surplus of effect and with total destruction as an insane contra-effect. As a panicked impulse for activity without passivity fury places itself outside of reality. That determines its pathological and ‘unusual’ character. Violence is not a form of ethically responsible human behavior, but an abrupt fall into pathetic self-destruction. There are no rules for this anti-behavior and there are no bounds to it. There are no innocent or excusable forms of active violence. The only and most drastic excuse is that it happens, and that is not an ethical criterion. As soon as and in the manner in which there is talk of ethically responsible actions, violence is excluded from it. There can never be talk of ethically responsible violence: violence is a pure, innocent and not free happening or it is an ethically wrong deed. It can never be justified. What is at stake with every form of violence, from the slap to the hydrogen bomb, is total destruction. 

When the dialogue between the one and the other with the same, that is to say normal, behavior, is interrupted, the continuity of behavior and reality, the technical character of behavior, is broken and given up. What remains then is a mere persevering to the bitter end, the bad form of rectilinear and mad consequence, in which reality is ignored.

The copier is copying

I don’t know exactly what made me laugh so much with that sentence, and why it remained funny in my eyes even after many repetitions, but during the time I was copying my father’s early essays, every time I clicked the the copy button, the phrase “the copier is copying” appeared in the screen of that copier, and it tickled me. Perhaps it was the reverse of what Bergson called humor, namely sticking something mechanical on something natural, for here was something mechanical that tried to be natural, attributing to itself a consciousness that, strictly speaking, it could not claim. It is a pretty clever device, nothing against it, and it can also scan and enlarge and so on, and if something went wrong, for example with the paper supply, it also mentioned that diligently, but that sentence ‘the copier is copying’ implied that it was doing it out of its own volition, because it felt like it. I have often stood there hoping that something along the lines of “The copier is on the phone with its mother” or “the copier is getting ready for a walk and will consider your request after lunch ”, But the copier just kept copying and reporting it. “The copier is making coffee” would have been handy from time to time, because it was quite a chore, but many thousands of times the copier only said what it was doing, which was copying.

Having a machine talking about itself in the third person was probably part of what I thought was so funny about the whole thing. In the first place that a machine was referring to itself, but then you could also imagine, for example, that there was a meeting about it in Japan: what should the machine show in the display? Should it be “I copy”, or “I’m copying”, or “copying”, “copy being made”? And during that meeting, the first in a series, it is then decided to keep it impersonal and therefore never to use the first person singular. Subsequent meetings will discuss the essence of what the machine does, what actually happens, and six months later it is concluded that the copier is copying. And that that will be shown in the screen.

After a while I also started to find the sentence funny because it seemed, if that copier knew it was copying, it also knew what it was copying; actually i was waiting for comment from the device. Every now and then an offhand remark such as “the copier copies a beautiful handwriting”, or even a step deeper, “the copier copies an impressive piece about the symbolism of verticality”, or “The copier does not understand how the author could come up with something this smart!”. Excited by the repeated notification from the device, I entered into an imaginary dialogue with it, because I also found the dry repetition funny. There was such a contradiction between the work the machine did and the work it copied, the difference between originality and copy, creating and repeating, that I would not have been surprised if the genie had gotten into the machine and the machine at a time had gained self-awareness in a moment of ‘deus in machina’ and made a statement like “The copier is now going to write an essay itself.” Okay, that might have surprised me, but the fact I had that thought did not surprise me, because copying is boring work and although the copier copies, people have to feed it things to copy and the mind wanders doing that.

I wasn’t just thinking about what a copier would write while the copier was copying and the clock was clocking. I actually thought mainly about the work I was doing, not so much the work that I did, but the work I had in my hands, the early work of my father. The work that was not work, but was born of passion, of lust to write. The enormous amount of papers full of writing, which at first made me dread this enormous project, like scaling something insurmountable, now spurred me on, because it became so clear that they came from someone who was so enthusiastic about them, who was writing every time he had the chance, who felt the urge to put it all on paper, without ulterior motives, with no intention of publishing it, without anyone asking him to, and despite the fact that he was busy studying and working. My father was at his happiest, I think, when he was allowed to write, and every single piece of paper that passed through my hands was evidence of his happiness. With thoughts like that, the work I did became very easy, and the copier copied.

Every now and then the copier made duplicate copies, without mentioning “the copier is copying again”, because I not only wanted a copy in the archive, but also wanted to take it home to read in the evening. It was the treasure I discovered, the five folders containing some 200 unpublished essays, and I wanted to reward myself with possibly being the first to read them. Some of them I didn’t quite understand, some of them felt like dad hadn’t found his way yet, a bit uneven but exciting, and some I recognised like seeing my own hands, or that smell when you walk into the door of your parent’s house. “There you are”, i’d think, and smile. It’s funny to recognise things you haven’t seen before.

Although – I’d really been seeing them all my life. They stood in black binders in between my father’s desks. My father had two desks: one enormous roller desk that we called his ‘pen’ desk, where he’d read, make notes, and wrote with a fountain pen, and his ‘type’ desk, a simple table against a wall, where his type-writer and later his computer stood. In his study there was also his work library, his archive, his copier (without a LCD screen) and lots of lose books, on the pen desk, on the stairs, everywhere. But not his own books – he had copies of those in a closet in his bedroom, but nowhere else in the house.

Those binders always intrigued me. I glanced in them as a child, and i’d see those thin papers in A5 format, full of a neat handwriting that looked like dad’s, only a bit bigger and rounder, and in blue rather than black. Somewhere in 1954 it transitioned to typed pages, with almost no margin. Dad was a poor student in those days, with a side job teaching Latin and Greek at a high school to support him finishing his degree in Classics and to be as less of a financial burden on his dad as he could be. He used to tell stories that he’d often eat bread with coconut slices to save money, and I suspect that the narrow margins were another way to keep costs down. 

Dad writes in his memoirs ‘The shine of old iron’ that he had handed in three thesis to eventually get promoted on. His promotor Karel Leopold Bellon picked from those ‘Symbolism of the foot’, with which he became a doctor in 1956. Its manuscript, together with many of dad’s originals, are now in the museum of literature. So too those binders. In the end he amassed five binders full of work, with 250 essays. 42 of those we found in his archive later, meaning he used them later in publications or as part of a book. He writes: “One of those binders contained notes about the word Substantia, which I suspected wasn’t so much a learned philosophical term and a slavish translation of the Greek hupostasis, as an important bearer of vertical symbolism or a metaphor for presence.” These notes were later included in his book ‘Past the beginning, part 2’ from 1985 – about 30 years later.

The 208 remaining essays have not been used or published before – though everyone who reads them will recognise themes that occupied dad his whole life. The run-up to the jump he never made into his own metaphysics can be read in some of the essays, but some of them also deal with frivolities like eating beets, or a dream he had. As a child, I couldn’t comprehend one thing about the essays in those binders – I was more fascinated by their quantity – and as a grown-up I can’t really place the more scientific essays for their philosophical merit; luckily i’ve inherited some clever acquaintances. But the spot they occupied in our house between desks, in a place where none of dad’s other work stood, told me enough about their personal meaning to dad. The essays themselves are also between pen and type-writer, from an incredibly fruitful period before he became officially erudite and a doctor, in between farm and classroom. “Never again have I had the opportunity to work for three months without pause on something”, he writes, and what a joy that period must have been for him. Five black binders, the only evidence of his own work that remained in his study.

And now some of them are about to get copied again. After a long time being just copies and only read by a few, they actually get published, printed by big machines that might say ‘the printer is printing’. Three dedicated readers went through them all and picked the ones they deemed most suitable for being copied again. After enough expressions of interest by readers, the publisher will publish, and the reader will read. While the copier was copying, I was already hoping this book would get booked. Now that it is time, I hope that the work still works. 

*normally I only publish work by my father that I’ve translated here, but I was asked to write an introduction to his new book of early essays, and figured it might be of interest how this book came to be. The previous post ‘To own books’ is an essay from that book; you can order it (in Dutch) here: https://damon.nl/book/alledaagse-mijmeringen