Abstract
This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of violence from his Notebooks for an ethics constitutes an attempt to go beyond an instrumental view of violence. An “instrumental view of violence” essentially assumes that violent behavior is a form of pragmatic behavior whose distinguishing feature consists in the kind of means one employs for reaching one’s goals (violent behavior resorting to means that are harmful for others, whereas non-violent behavior does not). For his part, Sartre attempts to provide a stronger demarcation between violent and pragmatic behaviors. First, violent behavior is, for Sartre, not necessarily characterized by the use of particular means, but by a particular manner of using means, one that involves a certain “forcing” or “straining” of the means. Second, I argue that, according to Sartre, in contrast with pragmatic behavior, violent behavior involves a modification of one’s attitude towards one’s goals. Three such modified attitudes with respect to one’s goals are detailed here, namely the non-productive attitude (the assumption that the goal is not to be produced or that it is not to be produced by means that are under our control), the counter-productive attitude (the exacerbation of one’s proximate goal at the expense of more distant goals) and the anti-productive attitude (the active refusal of one’s previously set goal). Moreover, I show that Sartre’s view that violence involves the “straining” of one’s means is undergirded by his idea that violent behavior presupposes the modification of one’s attitude with respect to one’s goals.
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Notes
Recall that the Notebooks for an Ethics (written in 1947–1948) have not been published by Sartre himself and have only appeared in book form posthumously in 1983.
“Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues” (Arendt 1970: 51).
This point is almost certainly inspired by Sartre’s considerations about “destruction” at the beginning of Being and Nothingness, but also goes somewhat further than those considerations. In Being and Nothingness, he had argued that natural events (geological, storms) only “modify the distribution of masses of beings” and they cannot be said to destroy directly; and, he continues, “In order for destruction to exist, there must first be a relation of man to being—i.e., a transcendence; and within the limits of this relation, it is necessary that man apprehend one being as destructible” (Sartre 1993: 8). Thus, in order for destruction to take place, it must be experienced as such (by a human being, Sartre says). In the quotation from the Notebooks given above, Sartre similarly states that there is violence only when “the form that is opposed to you is destructible”; but here the fact that a given object or entity is “destructible” does not only mean that it is experienced as fragile by a human being, but also that its usefulness is established by “human lawfulness,” i.e., by the laws of normal usage within a given society.
This would be the case, for example, when the violent agent purposely destroys someone’s property: it is the owner that is targeted by this thrashing, her/his interests get harmed, even though the destructive behavior only deals with inanimate objects. This kind of case has already been taken into account in the literature on violence (e.g., Audi 1971).
Sartre (1992: 183) states this in the Notebooks by saying that, as opposed to a pragmatic attitude in which the goal is “somefthing to be done,” in violent behavior the goal becomes “something to be rejoined”.
Let me briefly note that creative acts are sometimes also interpreted as “disclosing” something that is already assumed as present. However, in my view, this interpretation is metaphorical only and, on closer inspection, the attitudes towards their goals of creative and violent agents appear very different. When we say that a sculptor looking at a stone block “sees” the sculpture that is concealed therein, we are merely saying that there are particularities of the stone (color, texture etc.) that seem, to the sculptor, appropriate for rendering a particular subject. But the statue will still have to be produced by the sculptor and for this production s/he will have to use the appropriate means: the statue thus remains a goal in the usual sense of the term and the sculptor’s entire work is guided by her/his idea of the future form. And the stone block is not an obstacle that needs to be eliminated in order to reveal the sculpture; on the contrary, it is something that the sculptor needs to “work with” in order to properly render the intended subject.
Note that not all cases in which a person uses an intermediary to carry out an act fall into this category. Neither God, nor hazard are simple intermediaries here, given that they belong to a different, metaphysical causal order, one that is, precisely, beyond our control.
For lack of space, I will not make a full-fledged defense of this claim here, but I will quickly point to two examples in its support. The passionate anti-Semite from Anti-Semite and Jew is said to “wish to exist all at once and right away” (Sartre 1995: 13) and “to choose for his personality the permanence of rock [la permanence minérale]” (Sartre 1995: 19); about 1 year later, the violent agent from the Notebooks is said to “want everything and want it immediately” (Sartre 1992: 173) and to turn herself/himself, in her/his relationship with the other, “into stone,” that is “to mimic the most elementary object in the other’s eyes (…): being a mineral object” (Sartre 1992: 214).
Consequently, criticizing violence on grounds of its unpredictability is not so straightforward, as has been nicely pointed out by Gines (2014) precisely against Arendt’s views from her 1970 essay On Violence.
By this I do not deny that violence may be (or become) goalless. More on this below.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Cristian Ciocan and two anonymous reviewers. Their comments have greatly improved this paper. This article is part of the project The Structures of Conflict: A Phenomenological Approach to Violence (PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0273), funded by UEFISCDI.
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Jeler, C. Beyond an Instrumental View of Violence: On Sartre’s Discussion of Violence in Notebooks for an Ethics. Hum Stud 43, 237–255 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09522-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09522-6