What is violence? What has been the time of greatest violence in the history of humanity? The word violence etymologically comes from the Latin word “vis”, strength, power, and this in turn from the Indo-European root “wei”: vital force, thus deriving from “vis” the noun “violentia”: violent or impetuous character, fieryness. , rigor. Hence, violence was conceived in the Roman legal world as physical and/or moral force imposed by the will of someone over that of another and that Roman law itself and later Justinian law have confirmed the existence of both the “vis maior” as of the “vis absolute”, the first coming from nature, the second from an external and irresistible human force. In short, “violence” that was since then linked to the verb “violare”: impose, hurt, damage fiercely.
Now, was physical and moral violence born at the same time as its theoretical conceptualization in classical antiquity? Unfortunately and tragically No. Violence is not only as old as the human being: it precedes him and has not only been one of the longest-lasting companions, but also the most deleterious of humanity.
Socrates considered violence as an action lacking conscience, mercy and meaning. Plato, in the Gorgias, will bring us closer to the idea that in the ideal state, under the mandate of philosophers, when justice prevails it could reduce or eradicate violence, since true power lies in wisdom. and properly in justice. Aristotle, for his part, will not only consider it also a danger to justice, but in particular an incarnation of the unnatural, that which goes against the sense of “physis”, of nature, of what is.
Later, during the Middle Ages, it would be up to Saint Augustine to determine that the will governed by violence is a will that is moved by fear and that prevents others from acting in freedom, to the point of ending up suppressing said freedom. Thus, if men act in community, they make public good possible, but when they do so in isolation they become sinners and need to confess their sins. Hence the concept of moral violence as concupiscence or libido: violence of the “libidinous” being that, loving itself, ends up devouring the other. And something else. Augustinian violence will have to admit a greater degree of perversity and this happens when that libido takes the form of the disease of power: political violence. From the perspective of Saint Thomas, violence should be understood from a triple meaning: the first, as a force exerted outside of the being and its will. The second, following the Aristotelian vision, as the force contrary to the purposes of nature (“violentia ut violentia”). The third, as a force contrary to the virtue of justice.
Arriving in the modern era, authors such as Hobbes, Hegel and Marx will find in violence an important driving force of societies and human relationships, Machiavelli being the precursor of this vision in “The Prince”, in which he states that violence It is an essential requirement to maintain the validity of state power. An agent that enhances life in the Nietzschean sense and of social transformation in the case of Sloterdijk. In contrast, there will be authors who later openly reject it. This is the case of Kant, for whom violence – particularly moral – implied the breach and destruction of moral equality, that is, it meant the rupture of interpersonal relationships, and Rousseau, according to whom although man was born good, he ended up being good. corrupted and instructed in violence by society itself.
However, the 20th century will be a key moment for reflection on violence. It is no wonder: humanity will have reached one of the moments of greatest and most execrable violence in its entire history, to the point where we are currently witnessing a universal resurgence of violence, not only hand-to-hand (there is the case every increasingly widespread in most European countries, Australia, Canada and the United States and, what can I say, in our bleeding Mexican society) but above all institutional, instigated by the voices of some of the agents under whose responsibility they are entrusted the destinies of his Nation. The latter is violence that, when initiated from the pinnacle of power, exerts and detonates a greater potential for harm and fracturing of human tissue.
Hence the importance of delving especially into the thought of the last century, from an Abbagnano who will define it as an action contrary to the legal or political moral order and a Sartre who, in “Being and Nothingness”, will declare it as a manifestation of the bad faith to which human beings resort when they are prey to existential anguish, that is, becoming a nihilistic choice of interaction with the world, until reaching authors such as Arendt and Derrida, among others, to whom we will allude. (To be continue).
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