Violence as Self-Sacrifice: Creative Pacifism in a Violent World Author(s): AARON FORTUNE Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Speculative

Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 3, Essays from the Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (2004), pp. 184-192 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670517 . Accessed: 23/01/2012 20:43
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Violence as Self-Sacrifice:Creative Pacifism ina Violent World

AARONFORTUNE
Southern Illinois University Carbondale

E.S. Brightman said thatboth individuals and communities have moral experi ence, a proposition more easily understood concretely than abstractly (Brightman 1938, 57-64). Regarding violence, it takes whole communities to build bomb ers, but it only takes a few individuals with box cutters to turn a plane into a bomb. As President Bush realizes, either could be an act of war, but as he prob ably does not realize, either could be construed as terrorismas well. Brightman's postulate is thus illustrated in the terrible arena of violence, and it connects his pacifism with Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent social action. However, the sword cuts both ways. A consistent argument for nonviolent action must deal not only with Bull Conner inAlabama but also with Adolf Hitler inGermany. Violence is a cancer. Insofar as both societies and individuals are persons,
violence destroys both and perpetuates itself. Like cancer, which sometimes

is

overcome throughdamaging treatments like radiation and chemotherapy, some times violence is overcome only with more violence. For this reason, I will argue that absolute pacifism, while ideal, is not tenable in a world where vio lence exists. Though Brightman and King rightly observe that violence dam ages the perpetrator's personhood more than that of its victim, there are times when the loving act is to sacrifice one's person and end violence violently.1 My position includes Brightman's pacifism and King's nonviolence with out completely agreeing with them, so I will explore Brightman's and King's pacifism, followed by rebuttals fromCharles Hartshorne andMalcolm X.2 Both sides of this debate, I will argue, are fundamentally correct in their observa tions, but neither fully realizes itself as a complement to the other. Personalist

pacifism's weakness lies in its inadequate account of violence's effects in the real world. Hartshorne andMalcolm X correct thisweakness through their lim ited justification of violence as self-defense, but they fail to capture the bitter ness of their medicine. Violence, even as self-defense, destroys persons. Ifwe lose sight of this fact, violence as self-defense may aggressive violence; it may we choose between non become part of theproblem. Though King is right that
violence and nonexistence, sometimes free, otherwise nonviolent persons must

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18,No. 3, 2004. Copyright ? 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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choose nonexistence for themselves to keep violent aggressors from choosing

nonexistence for all.

and King on Persons and Freedom Brightmcm

To understand how violence destroys persons, one must first understand the personalist notion of person in community common toboth Brightman and King. According to Brightman, persons are the primary moral agents. Only persons make moral choices, and personal beings are those capable ofmoral experience

(Brightman 1938, 58). However, persons are not atomic individuals. Abstractly, shared value structuresdefine personal choice. Concretely, no person could sur vive childhood, much less adulthood, without community. Persons are always persons in community (58). The person is free in several senses. If persons are beings capable ofmoral moral experience consists of voluntary behavior, thenmeta experience and if freedom is built into the structure of the person, a freedom that, for physical Brightman, is thecondition for thepossibility of ethics (74). This freedom grounds themore concrete freedom of choice whose external manifestation is negative liberty.3Society should provide a minimum level of negative liberty to all meta physically free persons to recognize their dignity and worth as persons, but metaphysical and moral freedom still exist, according to Brightman, even if society grants no such liberty.Even if all my life circumstances are externally determined, I still choose my attitude. I can resist inmy will, or I can resign myself to oppression. For Brightman, this choice ismorally significant (75-76). King agrees with Brightman that theperson ismetaphysically free and thereforeworthy of dignity,moral value, and political liberty. However, King thinks some dignity and political freedom must be afforded a human before he or she can become a person. King sees Brightman's metaphysical freedom as possible rather than actual.4 Because King grew up a victim of violence, he could not take his personhood for granted, which made him realize that personhood ismere possibility ifdignity and political libertyare withheld from individuals in community.5 This stance strengthens the community's role in personal development. While political freedom's value depends on metaphysi cal freedom,metaphysical freedom's relevance depends on dignity and political liberty. From Brightman's and King's common outlook on persons in community and freedom springs theircommon opposition to violence. When violence harms

any person, itharms all persons because each person's possibilities for becom ing are bound, by community,with those of everyone else. Thus, violence against another is violence against one's community, and violence against one's com munity is violence against oneself.

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TheViolentReduction
Before exploring the aspects of violence relevant to nonviolence as a theory for social action, I need to begin with a disclaimer: violence is not primarily a con

make sense of cept. I conceptualize violence not to trivialize itseffectsbut tryto to contribute a creative response to it.That having been said, the relevant it, aspect of violence for this essay is its forceful reduction of possibility to actual This structure works on many levels, some more concrete than others. If I ity. kill you, I concretely end your possibilities for becoming in thisworld. If I maim you, physically ormentally, I impair your futureby reducing your physi

cal ormental capabilities or both for futureaction, perhaps handicapping you or traumatizing you such thatyou thinkof nothing except ways to get even. More abstractly, forcefully reducing your possibilities forbecoming characterizes your possibilities as unworthy of realization or as less valuable thanmine. I limit your freedom of personal becoming by telling your possibilities are no better than your actuality and your actuality is not valuable enough to exist. Any act thathas this effector intent is at least abstractly violent, regardless of its level of

physicality. However, the violent reduction is reflexive?in reducing another, I re duce myself. If I reduce another's possible becoming, I reduce another's capa This reduction is unmitigated by its bility to shape my becoming. violent reduction "community-mediated" is simply a more concrete way of say ing that a person implies a community. Reduction also explains violence's self-perpetuating tendency.Violence objectifies persons, and objectified victims, as they choose or are forced into the reduced possibilities left to them, aremore likely to react violently to their situ ation. King thuswarned Montgomery, Alabama, saying, "If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the futurewill be an endless reign of meaningless chaos."7 Violence is an ever
community-mediated aspect. Every moral choice implies community.6 Calling

widening circle, one thatBrightman and King thought could only be broken by without inflicting suffering. self-sacrifice. Someone must suffer This sentiment developed differently for Brightman and forKing, ac

cording to the circumstances of each thinker's life.Brightman formed his paci fismmore abstractly thanKing. However, to call Brightman's pacifism abstract is not to call ita priori. Brightman stressed that theonly good pacifist arguments were empirical (Hartshorne and Brightman 2001, 47-48). He believed that the consequences of war would never justify it.Brightman's pacifism was abstract in that themain violence of his timewas World War II, inwhich he was not a direct player. It was absolute in that though he believed in judging violence mor consequentially, he thought thatviolence's consequences always make it ally unacceptable.

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King's commitment to nonviolence formed under more concrete circum stances. Though Brightman and King shared assumptions about persons and freedom that grounded a commitment to nonviolence, King's development of nonviolence as social action came not from Brightman but fromMohandas Gandhi.8 For this reason, and because King spent his adult life in the civil rights movement, King had a more concrete idea of nonviolence as social change and a way of life.King was as interested inwhat nonviolence can do in this world as mean in an ideal world.9 When King says, "The choice today is no what it might longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexist ence," he means something slightlydifferent thanBrightman would by the same statement.10Violence destroys possibilities of personhood for everyone, so a violent choice is a choice against personal existence. King would agree with this Brightmanian notion, but this is not his primarymeaning above. King is

mindful of the realities of contemporary existence:

can win a are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody war.... I am no doctrinaire pacifist. I have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism ... I see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circum stances. Christian Therefore nonpacifist I do not claim confronts.11 to be free from the moral dilemmas that the

outer space and guided ballisticmissiles In a daywhen sputniks dash through

Both thinkers agree that violence is always consequentially wrong because it always reduces possibilities for personal existence and experience. Therefore, a violent act always involves a loss of personhood, both for the agent and for the
victim ever, because King's the seat increased of personhood is ideal concern for actual evil and structures his possibility. reluctance How to em increases

brace pacifism. This concern also grounds other personalist thinkers' rebuttals against personalist pacifism.

Actual Evil inthe World: Hartshorne and Dealingwith Malcolm X Respond

Charles Hartshorne is as committed as Brightman to the relationship between person and community.Hartshorne does not dispute theperson as primarymoral agent ormetaphysical freedom and possibilities for becoming as necessary for personhood. He would no doubt agree that violence damages possibilities for personal becoming and that in a perfectworld everyone would be pacifist. How ever, Hartshorne did not see ideality as themost relevant issue. If all agree to pacifism and everyone knows that everyone has agreed to pacifism, thenpaci fismwould be a workable social ideal, one that would be preferable to any state

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of affairs that includes violence. However, itdoes not follow thatunilateral paci fism will keep violence from destroying everyone. Today, as inHartshorne's day, violence, sadly, exists. Thus, Hartshorne says, "if all good men adopt the ... that principle theywill never use force, then force will be left as themo nopoly of any men not good enough or wise enough to abstain from it" (Hartshorne and Brightman 2001, 53).12 For Hartshorne, a consequentialist ar gument for pacifism must prove not only that the results of nonviolence are where violence is given, nonvio always preferable to those of violence but that, lent response to violence is always preferable to violent response. Hartshorne

Though Hartshorne, in 1942, probably did not envision theCold War that fol lowed the violent end of the Axis, his point cannot be brushed aside. Would we not like to believe that the Cold War and its aftermathwere preferable to the world a thousand-year Reich would have wrought? Malcolm X makes the same point as Hartshorne, but likeKing in relation to Brightman, he does so as a victim of violence, one who could not take personhood forgranted. Though Malcolm X does not share all of thepersonalist assumptions of these other three thinkers,he realizes the power of violent re duction in community: "When you let yourself be influenced by images created by others, you'll find thatoftentimes the one who creates those images can use them to mislead you andmisuse you."13 Like Hartshorne, Malcolm X concluded that some people are so ossified by and intenton violence that the only way to overcome them ismore violence. For him, one must, regrettably, speak the lan guage of violence to thosewho understand nothing else. Practically, one of the when attacked: ways to actualize one's personhood is to fight for it
It is inhuman, fight back. Let put water hoses absolutely someone subhuman, to let a dog bite him and not let him not fight back, or let someone his mother and daughter and babies and let him for a man

challenges Brightman, saying, "In any case, the primary consequences to be considered are those likely to follow from an Axis victory compared to those likely to follow from an Axis defeat" (Hartshorne and Brightman 2001, 54).

club him and

on his women, .. .then he's subhuman. The a human being he not fight back day he becomes ... will hold it will react as other human beings have reacted, and nobody him.14 against

Malcolm X, likeHartshorne, limitsviolence's scope to reaction, to self-defense, warrant self though he might differ fromHartshorne on the circumstances that defense. Hartshorne andMalcolm X share Brightman and King's goal of actual izing the dignity and worth of all persons, but they see a limited notion of self-defense as a criticalmeans toward thatend, given thatviolence exists in the
world.

Hartshorne andMalcolm X present almost too-solid rebuttals to thepaci fistposition. In theirpresentation of violence as necessary evil, they emphasize necessity toomuch at the expense of the fact thatviolence is still evil. A synthe

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personalist pacifists must deal with violence in the real world, personalist nonpacifists must deal with what pacifists understand?that violence, regardless of its ends, destroys possibilities forpersonal experience. Hartshorne with his realization that "To oppose by force is not necessarily almost gets there to fail in social appreciation; one may be sorrowfully aware of what the force means to its victims, innocent or guilty" (Hartshorne 1941, 168). This realiza tion grounds personalist nonpacifism. However, to synthesize both sides of this issue, one must account not only forviolence's effects on another but also for its effects on oneself.

Violence as Self-Sacrifice
Neither Hartshorne nor Malcolm X adequately assimilates the pacifist argu ment thatviolence objectifies both the oppressor and the oppressed. Malcolm X realizes it somewhat, but he applies it to the oppressor's moral depravity and inability to judge thenature and scope of oppression. His observation is correct,

Moreover, the dog shooter must realize the shooting's impact on himself or herself. There is a sense inwhich thatperson will forever be the one who shot the dog, so the shooting harms the shooter as well as the dog. Violent response may be justified ifand only ifa person can appraise both these terribleeffects of

but his application of it is not broad enough to account for all the effects of violence on society. The broader point thatmust be made is this: if violence destroys thepersonhood of both the agent and the victim, then violence as nec essary evil, the only loving violence, would take the form of socially aware self sacrifice. Pacifists correctly observe thatunmerited suffering is redemptive, that the circle may be stopped when someone receives violence without returning it, but they are wrong to limitartificially thepossible modes of self-sacrifice. Non violent resistance does not always work, which King realized, even if many of his followers did not.15Sometimes thebiting dog, if it is big enough, simply eats you alive. If it ended there, it might be right to let the dog eat you, but "dogs" like theNazis never get full. In these cases, Hartshorne andMalcolm X rightly assert that it is better to shoot the dog than to let it eat everyone. However, the one who violently ends violence must realize that in so doing, he or she asserts that the enemy is and foreverwill be a violent, rapacious dog?nothing more.

self-defense and find them still preferable to the advancing aggressive violence. In shooting the dog, the defender must assert, "I sacrifice both the person that this violent aggressor might have been and much of who I might have been because the violence at work here is so dangerous to other persons in creation
that there is no other

Violence as self-sacrifice is superior to violence as necessary evil be cause it limits violence's justification externally and internally. Externally, vio

option."

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lence as self-sacrifice is limited by a rigid consequentialism thatapplies neither to nonviolence nor to violence as necessary evil.When faced with violence, we with pure motives but may "rush into" various nonviolent options to curtail it, methods of dubious efficacy. However, before violently ending violence, we must confirm that our violence will end not only aggressive violence but also our violent response and thatour violent response will not provoke retaliation.

which I may violently defend, ends and where my community begins. In per sonalism, selves are not usually located in specific organisms, so violence as self-defense is hard to consistently apply.Moreover, Malcolm X, by saying that a person must be willing to fight for his or her own personhood, seemingly builds violence into the structure of the person. Thus, his violence as self-de Malcolm X is correct thatall persons fense can never rid us of violence. Even if in the past had to assert theirpersonhood by fighting for it, it does not follow that moral persons must fight in the future.Thus, violence as self-defense sends us down a slippery slope thatviolence as self-sacrifice does not. Complementing this advantage is an internal limit to violence as self sacrifice. If one understands thatviolently ending violence will harm one's own

Violence as self-defense does not provide this rigid consequentialist limit. It sounds fine to say that violence is only excusable as self-defense, but the personalist view of person in community does not provide an atomic individual around which to draw the relevant battle lines. It is hard to say where my self,

personhood, one will not act violently before exhausting all other options. Vio lence as self-sacrifice would not become aggressive violence because the ideal self-sacrificing violent agent realizes that one possibility, among others, from which violence precludes him or her is the possibility of judging whether vio The end of violence as self-sacrifice is not power, lence is necessary in the future. or even theexpansion of one's own personhood. The end is the community's ego, collective good, fromwhich other, fuller persons may spring if the self-sacrifice is successful, making violence as self-sacrifice a form of King's creative non violent social action.

Conclusion
more I limit Obviously, I cannot solve theproblem of violence in one essay. The and idealize acceptable forms of violence, themore I risk ignoring actuality myself. Even as I speak of the "ideal self-sacrificing violent agent," Iwonder if I have ignored actual power as much as some pacifists have ignored some of the effects of actual violence. Could a violent agent willingly put down the sword and wait for others to decide when to take itback up? I do not know.What I do

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know is that ifnot, thepacifists are right,and we must keep on tryingto contain violence without resorting to it,no matter how badly we are bleeding from dog bites and no matter how many of our children the dog decides to eat.16 Notes
in the Hartshorne-Brightman 1. Mark Davies concludes "The Pacifism Debate Correspon dence" with the following challenge: "One hopes that by wrestling with the issues thatHartshorne and Brightman were struggling with over half a century ago, we will be able to derive some lessons

article is reprinted as to, this essay proceeds in response to this very laudable challenge. Davies's Appendix 5 inHartshorne and Brightman (2001). 2. By this, I mean not that there is some explicit or implicit relationship between Hartshorne served as X that mirrors that between Brightman and King. Rather, Hartshorne and Malcolm Brightman's foil in this discussion in a way similar, on a conceptual level, to theway Malcolm X's

for the construction of a more peaceful world, where the language of war will be heard no more, or at least less often than is presently the case" (1998, 200-214). Though I do not quite see King as seems the answer to the conflict between Brightman and Hartshorne on this issue theway Davies

ideas interacted with those of King. I know of no evidence that should lead us to strengthen the comparison or relation of Hartshorne toMalcolm X. 3. For more on the connection between metaphysical and political freedom, see Parisoli (2001, 345-63). 4. Among others, see King's 5-9). concern for actuality in relation to possibility, 5. For more on the differences between Brightman and King, especially as concerns King's see Davies (1998). 6. For an extension of thismediation to include even the seemingly isolated "relation" of self article "Nonviolence and Racial Justice," reprinted inKing (1986,

(1926), esp. 315-17. knowledge, see Hocking 7. Excerpt from a 1956 sermon in Montgomery, 8. Among

Brightman's position in the aforementioned article thatappears in the book as Appendix 5. Brightman makes the (probably true) observation that World War II would never have been ifpeople of good will on all sides had shaped and kept the Treaty of Versailles. For all its truth, it is not clear that this terribly applicable in 1942. As we shall see in the next section, Hartshorne takes him to task in the correspondence for, in essence, refusing to deal with actuality. Davies presents King's position as a synthesis between Hartshorne and Brightman, but I am not sure, in the end, thatKing sees just how bad actuality can be either, though he seems to get closer later in life. 10. King, "Pilgrimage toNonviolence," printed inKing (1986, 39). 11. Ibid. comment was

Alabama, reprinted inKing (1986, 10-11). others, see "An Experiment in Love" and "Pilgrimage toNonviolence," reprinted inKing (1986, 17-20 and 35-42, respectively). 9. For the idealist, in the sense of abstract, nature of Brightman's opposition to World War II, see his comments on the subject in Hartshorne and Brightman (2001); Mark Davies discusses

12. For Hartshorne's more complete discussion of this issue that started the argument in the see Hartshorne (1941, 166-73). correspondence, 13. Quoted fromMalcolm X's December 16, 1964, speech to theHarvard Law School Forum, Malcolm X (1991, 162). reprinted in 14. Ibid., 171. 15. For King's continued commitment to nonviolence even in the face of its impracticality, see Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? reprinted inKing (1986, 555-633). 16. I would like to thank Randall E. Auxier, Thomas O. Buford, and J. Craig Hanks, all of whose comments were invaluable in writing and revising this paper. A previous version of this

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paper was presented at the International Conference on Persons at the University of Memphis, August 2003. The version of this paper printed here was presented at the Society for theAdvance ment of American Philosophy, Birmingham, March 2004.

Works Cited
Brightman, Edgar Sheffield. 1938. Moral Laws. New York: Abingdon. in the Hartshone-Brightman 1998. "The Pacifism Debate Davies, Mark Y.A. Process Studies 27:200-214. Hartshorne, Charles. Hartshorne, Correspondence ."

1941. Man's Vision of God. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. and Brightman on God, Charles, and Edgar Sheffield Brightman. 2001. Hartshorne ed. Randall E. Auxier and Mark Y.A. Process, and Persons: The Correspondence, 1922-1945, Davies. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP. of The

Hocking, William Ernest. 1926. Man and the State. New Haven: Yale UP. The Essential Writings and Speeches King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1986. A Testament of Hope: Martin Luther King Jj; ed. James Melvin Washington. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Parisoli, Luca. Personalist X, Malcolm. 2001. Forum "The Anthropology 15: 345-63. X: Speeches of Freedom at Harvard, and theNature of theHuman Person."

1991. Malcolm

ed. Archie Epps. New York: Paragon House.