چکیده:
So long as there is law there can be no universal human right to peace.
This is because legalized violence, whether in threat or in deed, constitutes
the very antithesis of peaceful relations from the point of view of those
whom law represses. Law cannot define peace as the absence of all
violence—and still less as the absence of all legalized suffering—without
gainsaying justice, for as Pascal says, KJustice without might is helpless;
might without justice is tyrannical.L Although legal outcomes, like falling
boulders and pouncing lions, can always be imputed to historical causes,
experience teaches that legal actors generally seek to legitimate their deeds
by grounding the law in some non-causal narrative of the right or the good.
According to a tenet of political liberalism that can be traced to Descartes’
discovery 8or invention< of the irreducible KIL that thinks, the legitimacy of
law’s narrative is both given and taken by free and rational politico-legal
subjects.
In truth, however, the Western philosophical tradition gives us two
separate grammars for discussing what it takes to be two different kinds of
rational subjects: the causal subject and the grounding subject. The causal
subject stands in a relation to the world. Acting strategically as the cause of
effects, it uses the object world and other human beings as means to its ends.
But the causal subject is also itself caused: its desires and actions are effects
of history in the largest sense of the word. Such a one is fated by grammar
and custom to become an object and a means in its own right: an object for
scientific inquiry and knowledge, for example, and, more generally, a means
to the ends of other causal subjects. From the standpoint of the causal
subject, there can be no human right not to use or be used as a means.
Unlike the causal subject, the grounding subject is supposed to be a
genuine origin rather than a mere link in an infinite chain of causes and
effects. In Greek terms, this subject is an archē as opposed to an aitia. It also
corresponds to the original Latin meaning of the word Ksub-jectL: it is
thrown 8jacere< under 8sub< its world as 8not in< an unmediated relation to
its projects. This second kind of subject has gone by many different names,
including KsoulL 8Plato<, KfreedomL 8Kant< and KSpiritL 8Hegel<. In one way or
another, the idea of the grounding subject performs its primary task within
the moral sphere: it is supposed to provide a secure foundation which
explains how it is possible for its doppelganger, the causal subject, at once to
accomplish something in the world and to refute Plautus’s notorious
argument that man is wolf to man. If the causal subject reacts in the manner
of an animal, then the grounding subject allegedly responds in the manner of
an animal rationale. If the causal subject produces effects, then the
grounding subject is supposed to create and bear responsibility for those
effects.
Given the foregoing distinctions, the most pressing juridical and moral
question facing twenty-first century humanity seems to be: How can law and
politics become at once effective and just, coercive and compassionate,
responsive and responsible? How, in short, is it possible 8to borrow Kant’s
somewhat quaint terminology< to use oneself and other human beings
simultaneously as ends and as means? But here, as elsewhere in philosophy,
appearances can be deceiving, for this question presupposes far too much.
This paper investigates the strong connection between the foregoing
concepts of subjectivity and the notion of a just peace. The question is not,
KAre there rational subjects and can they found something new, such as a
just peace?L Instead, the question at the heart of the matter is how
something as flimsy and ephemeral as an KideaL could ever found anything at
all. I will attempt to unmask the terrible tensions or contradictions between
justice and ethics, freedom and responsibility, and reason and compassion,
and trace them to their origin: the will 8or desire< to deny tragedy. I claim
that the concept of the grounding subject represents a desperate and
ultimately futile attempt to repress awareness of 8and evade personal
responsibility for< the essential sadness and tragedy of the world. Reason
and faith provide the human body with a thin tissue of grounding statements
comprised of symbols and images. At best these symbols and images are
mere stimuli: action-triggers that will never adequately span the vast
existential distance separating the grounding subject from the causal subject,
our ends from our means, our words from our deeds, and, more generally,
human suffering from the endless secular and religious casuistries we offer
to justify it.
خلاصه ماشینی:
At best these symbols and images are mere stimuli: action-triggers that will never adequately span the vast existential distance separating the grounding subject from the causal subject, our ends from our means, our words from our deeds, and, more generally, human suffering from the endless secular and religious casuistries we offer to justify it.
" (Pascal, 1941: 103) Although legal outcomes, like falling boulders and pouncing lions, can always be imputed to historical causes, experience teaches that legal actors generally seek to legitimate their deeds by grounding the law in some non-causal narrative of the right or the good.
It has been said that ours is "the epoch of the subject," in the precise sense that for us the idea of the Individual Human Being has replaced both the Nature of the ancients and the God of medieval Christianity as the "new ground of being and meaning.
" Conceived of secularly as a "pivot of self-consciousness", (Kojéve, 1980: 86) this human subject is supposed to employ what the Greeks called logos, or discourse endowed with a meaning, to give and take grounds for itself in the form of THE LAW.
" (Hyppolite, 1996: 47) In identifying the rational with the real, and the true with the whole of reality, Hegel dragged Kant’s abstract, transcendental subject into time and history in the form of Spirit (Geist), and he equated world history with the continuous Sisyphean labors of human beings to negate the given through concrete work aimed at actualizing their ideas.