Publication Details

Abstract

The progress of human civilization has not met the expectations of the traditional moralism and has not pushed violence back to the periphery of social events as thier irrational moment; on the contrary, it extended, by means of rationalization, the range of the social employment of violence, it armed violence with new means and increased its intensity. This new practical actualness of violence also actualizes violence, at the same time, as a theoretical — moral and political — problem. The objective knowledge of the changed essence and accented social mission of violence in the world of today cannot, however, be reached by one-sided methodological means of moralism and politicism. A methodological and theoretical synthesis represented by Marxist thought makes it possible to raise a question of violence in a new philosophical complexity and relevance and to saturate it with a new historical experience with violence. The ambiguity of moral valuation of violence by contemporary common sense, evoked by the fact that violence is a negative form of human activity which can be a mediator of the positive social aims, gives in its own way the truth both to moralism and to politicism. The moral acceptance of violence by Marxism as an instrument of the revolutionary progress renders an absolutely negative valuation of violence as the qualitatively and quantitatively indistinguishable evil, relative. In contemporary open history, violence represents neither only the evil nor only the good, but both of them — to a degree which depends on the concrete conditions of its application. The moral value of a certain concrete act of violence is determined by the aims and conditions of its application.; If violence as a „possibility“ of politics becomes reality, this does not annul the ontological negativenss of its essence and the negative human consequences of its influence do not disappear. Independent of the social aims to which violence serves, it remains a communicative form of human negativeness in which the negative „entities“ — negatities — become a destructive element of human intercourse. This is the reason why violence in the form of terror can, it is true, upset the social integrity of society in a far-reaching way, but can never solve the positive tasks of its progressive development. Therefore, the acceptance of violence by morals must only be — logically and historically — conditioned. This particular imperative is respected by Marxism, in which morals becomes real humanism owing to the fact that it dialectically annuls its antinomy with politics. Through the conditioned acceptance of political violence by Marxism, the arrested contradiction of the outlasting valueless present and the alienated valuable future becomes relative and is being turned into the process of the revolutionary appropriation of the future, in which the probability of violent doing gradually decreases. However, the abolition of violence as a social form of doing is inseparably connected with a radical depoliticization of the social life, which thus becomes one of the most important tasks of the historical emancipation of man.