The Philosophy of War and Exile: From the Humanity of War to the Inhumanity of Peace.
Below is a real conversation between me and a friend, which took
place in early February 2022:
- Man, you are hypervigilant now. This
is a sign of anxiety. Keep calm. Control yourself better, or visit a psychoanalyst,
I said.
- You might be right from a certain
perspective. But let me reverse it [your argument]. The thing that you see as
anxiety is the sign of vigilance. Not vice versa. I have peace without
any anxiety . . . name it craziness . . . name it anxiety. I do not care.
This conversation summarizes
the book idea, I would argue.
Nolen Gertz in his book, The Philosophy of War and Exile, unveils
the meaning of and the relations between three concepts: everyday life, the
common morality, and exile or anxiety as an existential experience. Everyday
life is our worldly home where we, human beings, conceive of familiarity,
safety, and certainty in/of this world. But this home is, in fact,
nothing but a mask. It is a mask clouding the Self’s eye, refraining it
from seeing the reality as it is; we are confused or, perhaps, deceived as we
see this everyday-home as equal to the world. The world and the everyday-home
become equivalent, their shapes are the same, their spaces are equal, and so are
their essence. This is an illusion. Our
everyday-home is made in the world, but it is never the world.
The everyday life/home rests on common morality gluing human beings with a feeling of certainty. In other words, the everyday life produces and is produced by common morality, a set of beliefs, values, premises, and cognitive schemata. We walk, work, sleep, and argue everyday in a way that conforms to and confirms these set’s elements, the common morality. Common morality, therefore, is carved out to channel our brains and hearts (to form the common, the sharable): What I see is exactly what you see, how I evaluate a phenomenon or an event is so similar to how you do. A man suffering from anxiety is a “deviant” man from the normal. A woman, in a traditional society, disobeying her husband is a “deviant” woman from the normal, the basic, the common morality.
When
you see a bird, you believe that this “flying-singing-beautiful-thing” has been
there, in the nature, in its world, forever. You are certain about it. The
existence of that bird (or of Bird as a universal category) and its beauty is
certain. Similarly, common morality makes us think of our social world, our
societies, as certain as this bird. I see what you see, I evaluate in the same
way you do, so our common world is real, is there, is right. Other ways of seeing
and evaluating are deviant, sick, unreal, and illusionary. Common morality is
certainty’s producer.
The
third concept is exile. Not everyone can accept or submit herself to the
common morality; i.e., some individuals or groups can be only “deviant.” Ideas
or beliefs that the majority of us take as premises, absolutely true, are simply
untrue, non-logical, or ideas that can be discussed and modified for those who
can only be deviant. Why some people are like this? Because of exile. Exile,
in this vein, is not a place to where prisoners are ousted. It is a metaphor, a
concept, alluding to what does not belong to the common morality, and it is a
living metaphor (as much as a cow is a living being) enabling people to reject
the common morality of their societies. If we stick to this spatial analogy,
then exile is what lies outside the common morality’s space, on the edge of
what is known to be a human enjoying her certainty about the world.
|
Exile à Anxiety |
|
Anxiety à a way of being in the world; Everyday-home
≠ the World Certainty à a way of being in the world;
Everyday-home = the World |
Fencing the Exile, Curbing the Anxiety, Protecting Our Home
We fight this exile, curbing it, and preventing it from seeping
into our “known” world and morality to sustain our certainty and to keep the
resulted anxiety away from our everyday-home. How do we so? By labeling this
exile and the people coming from it, feeding themselves from it, as deviant,
sick, insane, and needy for medical care. We bend exile-agents to fit into our common
knowledge:
- No sir, this thing, flying, singing
. . . is a bird. You do not see it as a bird, then I will drive you to a hospital
so they apply their knowledge-power to cure you; very soon, you will see it as
a bird again, or you will be kept captive behind the hospital wall until your
death.
This imagined talk has the exact power (power of logic,
power of common sense, power of knowledge) of the conversation that I had with
my friend:
- Man, you are hypervigilant now. This
is a sign of anxiety. Keep calm. Control yourself better, or visit a psychoanalyst,
I said.
- You might be right from a certain
perspective. But let me reverse it [your argument]. The thing that you see as
anxiety is the sign of vigilance. Not vice versa. I have peace without
any anxiety . . . name it craziness . . . name it anxiety. I do not care.
My friend has just come from exile. He is now connected to it,
speaks of it, and from it he drinks, eats, and thinks. I tried to tell him you
are crazy. I did so to protect my everyday-home, the common morality and to
keep myself isolated from anxiety (although, indeed, I am super “anxious,” and a
super cursed exile’s man). He, on the other hand, pursued invading our (not
only my) world, the known world, the home (more precisely) with the exile he had
discovered.
This exile is, however, what we should embrace not expel, to welcome not fear. It is a (or maybe the) the source of nourishing our humanity and our potential, whereas the common morality is what refrains us from doing so. That is, exile opens new horizons for the Self to be. It creates. Common morality and the constant restoration to the everyday-home is cowardice; it imprisons the Self.
The Self shrouded into the common morality and the everyday-home is rooted or grounded into this world enjoying a high level of certainty, exactly as these plants in the picture happily rooted (Prairie Studies, John Earnest Weaver, University of Nebraska 1932-52). They hold their ground, their roots in the world, so they are certain about themselves. Exile uproots their roots, shakes up their ground, telling them, “Your roots are only a part of the world, of the reality, and you can expand your roots in other directions; you, dear plants, can even walk.”
These plants (analogy of the Self) conceive the space into which
their roots are grounded as the world. Exile, a deviant plant/Self, unmasks
this illusion. The roots occupy a part of the possible world; that is the
reality.
We need to live the experience of exile because it reveals to us
the reality as it is; in that, incommensurability is more real than
commonality (the common morality), and an open-ended and ever-unfolding world
is more real than a close-ended world.
This call for welcoming anxiety, emanating from exile, and the call for opening our Selves are elaborated on through three cases in this book: veterans’ PTSD, torture as a way to fight terrorism, and unmanned drones as a means of war.
Serene Everyday life, home. Painting by Paul Fischer.
Understanding instead of Judging
A veteran coming back from a war zone (in a Western country, the US
as the prevalent empirical base for the author’s argument) is diagnosed by
other people, by the authority, the medical authority as endorsing PTSD
when he fails to reintegrate back in the zone of peace, in the everyday life (home)
that is distinctive essentially from the life of war. The inability of a
veteran to draw a clear line between peace and war, between acting normally
in the zone of peace and abnormally in the zone of war is seen as illness: A
veteran suffers from PTSD, he is a deviant, he invades our home (the peace
zone) with things/feelings/actions that belong to the war zone. He invades our everyday-home
with the exile (the exile that was generated in the war zone). We, the people
who are instructed about PTSD, try to help that veteran to be back to the
normal, to the everyday life of peace. As we do so, he feels more and more
alienated. We neither understand him nor he does understand our world. We
ask him to be “normal,” but normality for him is no more what we understand.
The fact that suicide rate is extremely high among veterans in the US is not,
therefore, a result of less-professionality to treat PTSD veterans, but it is a
result of our persistence to see veterans as patients of PTSD, as
deviants.
We impose a picture that our world, our everyday life, is well grounded,
resting on our common morality, and veterans are the groundless because
they were immersed in a war that – by its nature – subverts the common morality
(through the action of killing, see below Box 1), so they fail to re-integrate in
the “common morality,” simply because they have subverted it during the
fighting. Hence, they become alienated (exiled, uprooted) and anxious.
But veterans are not those who are the groundless, but our world
is. What we think of as a ground is nothing but an illusion. The veterans
know that because they had experienced the exile. We did not.
Thus, common morality assures an essential commonality on
which our humanity becomes possible. But what if commonality is just an
illusion, a suppression of otherness, and what if incommensurability is
on which our humanity should be (and in reality is) dwelled. In other words,
the everyday-home is the soil of communality where we are what we are; everything
is fixed and certain. Exile is the soil of incommensurability, where otherness
and openness, becoming and thriving allow us to change what we already are and
to become what we can be.
Box 1
A veteran knows that what he does in war is killing, and killing is
against common morality, and that his state has trained him to justify killing
enemies in the light of morality. A veteran would easily ask himself if killing
other human beings in a battlefield is justified morally, why then is not
everything also justified in the “normal” everyday life? The distinction
between good and evil, between war and peace becomes blurred. A veteran kills, but
the others, the non-combatants, do not. They assume that what belongs to war is
just ephemeral. A veteran does not share with them this belief. For
non-combatants, war is ephemeral – in terms of morality – because it denigrates
human conditions (we have to fight, we do not have another choice!), whereas a
veteran believes that the denigrated nature of human beings is what
produces war and what makes its condition possible, not vice
versa. As a result, a veteran develops a different view and understanding of
the world; he now sees what we call common morality, everyday normal life, from
his exile. We reject to admit this exile as a real realm. So, we
categorize that veteran as sick suffering PTSD. We judge him. Instead of
looking at our world, our humanity from his own eyes, from the exile, we
enforce him into our commonality again. We often fail, he kills himself.
What we must do is to allow for this exile to be alive, to admit
the incommensurability (so, otherness, the differences, etc.) so we develop,
improve our human conditions. This endeavour kindles anxiety, but we are
already suffused with anxiety. The problem is not preventing anxiety but
stopping to flee from it. We need to embrace it, so the Self is open and thrives,
is becoming rather than is what it is (p.63).
How Soldiers/Veterans Enter the Exile?
Soldiers enter wars and kill others because they experience ecstasy. Warring as an institutional action is ecstatic: A self is absorbed by a “bigger” reality than itself, by the outside that surrounds it, which might be the command, the comrades, the fighting itself. This ecstasy yielded by war is located out of the common moral realm; thus, it is neither moral nor immoral, it is amoral. Ecstasy penetrates the boundaries of the Self, exposing it to be absorbed into the world around. This process is not psychological, merely, but it exists in the reality of the war; it is natural in its existence as much a tree is natural in its existence and not merely a psychological perception: if “something can be attacked it must be attacked” (p.51). This is the ecstasy’s “natural existence.” As a soldier attacks what is, by its own, attackable, he loses himself into the realm of war, into the command and the relation with comrades, and he leaves the realm of morality. His conscience is silenced, and he is not responsible for what he/they/the nature of war does. He experiences this “amazing” feeling of making the Self absorbed in a “higher,” an outer reality.
However, once this soldier or veteran receives a command to kill
and suddenly recognizes that he, his Self, can disobey
the order and cease killing, his conscience comes back from the realm of
ecstasy to the realm of responsibility. He and his actions
become im/moral again. He looks at the killing, the horror there in front of his
eyes, and feels guilty. However, this is not his own guilt, but the guilt of the world, the state, the system, the human being itself which made this war
possible, the guilt of the possibility – for us as human beings – to
experience this ecstasy by warring (metaphysical guilt). Now, instead of being absorbed, the Self is disconnected
from anything. This disconnectedness’s anxiety should be assuaged.
It can be so only by putting the conscience to silence again. However, this
time silencing the consciousness cannot be achieved by ecstasy anymore (the
light of awareness is there, no absence into a higher reality). The
disconnectedness must pitter out; how? only more war and more engagement in
destroying others can silence the soldier’s responsibility, the moral
awareness, his metaphysical guilt. When the war is over, how can we, the
bearers of the common morality, ask the now-veteran to come back to the peace zone,
to the home of humanity. If we do not admit the exile he revealed and lived, he
never comes back to be like us.
This responsibility, the anxiety that humans are all apt to endure
(and we really do as we, the common morality bearers, design wars and justify
them, designate military, and invent nation states), “is best understood
as a matter of identity rather than morality,” so we accept the exile
as a place into which our identity (not reducing it into morality) can grow,
blossom: “we must become becoming” rather than being that “we
are who we are” (p.63).
On Torture
Torture is not a moral issue to be questioned whether it is right
or wrong in case of investigating a terrorist hiding a bomb and aiming to kill thousands
of innocents. It is a matter of identity (p.83). This what we will elaborate
on.
Torture is not a personal action; rather, it is institutional. A
recruited person, who will be a torturer later, is integrated into an
institution, which will be seen as the moral agency by which the responsibility
of torture is hefted. Entering this institution, voluntarily or not (by
kidnapping, for example), is masqueraded with an illusion of free choice. The
recruited is given a choice: either he becomes a member in this institution, or
he faces his fate, which could be death. As the recruited chooses joining and
integration in the institution, he seems as if he had freely chosen to do so.
He had the choice to leave, but he preferred to stay. This choice will be
later the choice of being a torturer instead of being tortured or dead
(torture is a matter of identity not morality).
Being a torturer, after institutionalization, requires training or routinization.
A torturer himself passes through torture, watches torture videos, so he
isolates his feelings from his later actions (torture), and he takes torture as
a duty, a moral duty: If I could stand pain, he tells himself, then a tortured person
can do so.
This process of torture is competed by dehumanizing both the
tortured and the torturer. It is the empirical fact both of them suffer
from similar traumatic symptoms. Torture as a process of denigrating human
beings, similarly to a war experience, forms a re-transformation of
dehumanization, eternally passing, between the tortured and the torturer.
Torture should be/is a matter of identity not morality because it is
imposed forcefully into our common morality (understanding) as torture of
the body not of the soul. It is your body what was tortured not the real
you. It is impossible for whoever to torture the real you. This
understanding or framing of torture dwells on the dualism doctrine of
mind/body, human/universe, the Cartesian doctrine. However, this dualism is not
real. The tortured is - really - his body and his body becomes everything as
he is fumbling into pain. It is not that, as we are pushed to believe, the
body of the tortured is a façade of his real identity, and it is not that death
embraces only the flesh while the soul is untouchable, and it is not that pain
can pass because it is less real than the mind/soul (under the umbrella of dualism).
The dualist doctrine frames responsibility of a wrongdoing (e.g., torture) as
something attached to an action, so it is easily isolable from our normal,
common life. It is a wrongdoing, simply an action, simply belonging to the body
not the real you. So, do not worry, it is an exemption of the everyday life, and
the common morality is still clean from this wrongdoing; and we are irresponsible
for what some of us have done. But no. The responsibility of wrongdoing is not
a feature of actions, it is us. It is our identity.
When we ask a tortured to forgive or forget, or when we ask a torturer to justify his torture by the morality of saving innocents, we prevent the exile from showing us our own identity, as human being, as the real responsible of torture. It is our commonality and our present human conditions, which make torture possible. Again, that is why torture is a matter of identity not morality: It is we, not our morality, which tortures. It is we, not the lack of morality, which makes us suffer. We are the suffering, we are the responsibility, Gertz firmly stresses.
NOTE: The author discusses unmanned drones and their usage in war, contending that drone operators suffer from trauma as much as those who fight at real fronts. However, I will not discuss it here.
Finally . . .
Everyone of us should be the veteran experiencing anxiety and exile: Through anxiety the “I” is unmasked and comes under the spot of reflection. Anxiety is not a feeling we pass through, but it is who we are (p.143). Martin Luther King is seen (through the same logic of seeing PTSD veterans and torture as an exemption/ephemeral/outsider), as an exemplar. He is not. He should not be. He is like as anyone of us, who could enter the exile and see what is real about our own identity (not morality) as humans.
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