A the edge of the thinkable- An beyond / 3

Today I rely on reason. It is a fragile instrument, I know: it is in fact reason that human beings lose by agreeing to go to war. Reason can do nothing if it is not accompanied and supported by an exhausting exercise of unconditional loyalty to it and, it goes without saying, of freedom.

With reason I dismantle the traps that war only sets for us and into which we invariably fall, as if we cannot wait to end up in them. It is a trap to think that a legal framework can regulate the unrest that grips us when, by now and wisely exhorted, we abandon ourselves into the arms of violence. It is too late.

It is a trap we fall into when we think that there is a way of waging war that spares women and children, the old and the infirm, wounded soldiers and rescuers, and that does not even consider them as targets. Believe me, there is no such thing.

I know what is going through the minds of some of you: the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime MinisterNetanyahu and his former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimesagainst humanity committed in the Gaza Strip.

Many hailed this decision as a big step towards justice. It is impossible for me to escape the ICC's decision from the suspicion that it only nurtures the illusion of clean war, that it is even complicit in it. This is its function, after all: to cultivate the illusion of war without crime. It is more than an illusion: it is a powerful sleeping pill for the use and consumption of society.

On X Michael Young, a well-known US journalist and analyst, wrote, commenting on the ICC decision:

'Most people in the world can plainly see what a barbaric, inhuman war Israel is conducting in Gaza'.

The only conclusion that this post authorises is that there is a war that is not 'barbaric' and not 'inhuman', hence that there is a civilised and humane one. It does not exist.

So let me conclude.

It is characteristic of war and indeed its peculiarity to allow the human being to take the measure of the Possible (the 'Maß des Möglichen' of which Jean Améry wrote referring to the torture exercised by the Nazis), to witness all that is capable of accomplishing and suffering being in the world.

So vast are the lands of the Possible unveiled by war that they even make Good and Evil, what is right and what is wrong fragile and useless demarcation stones of boundaries that no longer exist. We only resort to the because we are taken aback,

we embrace them because we are led to believe that they guide and indeed inspire the necessity of warfare. They are, in reality, misplaced categories, because they belong to another place: to the privileged place of those who live in peace, but judge war, and to the backrooms of those who make war and only consider the war of theother belligerents, the enemy's war, to be outlawed.

If we were to cling to the categories of Good and Evil to define and describe war, then we would be confronted with a threefold impossibility.

The first: we would have to accept that someone would define war as a ‘lesser evil’ and thus subtract our experience and perception of it from the possibility of using a category such as ‘absolute evil’. That is, we would accept that war can be discussed and, thus, that different evaluations of it can be produced. Compared to the ‘absolute evil’, the ‘lesser evil’ acquires its own tolerability. When the doctor asks us ‘how much does it hurt’ we have a scale of one to ten to answer. Ten is intolerable pain. Everything that comes before is, of necessity, tolerable. The same must apply to the ‘moral’ evil of war.

The second: if, however, we insisted on using the category of Evil to describe war, and indeed insisted on resorting to the formula of ‘absolute evil’, we would be left without thoughts and without a vocabulary to describe it. It would be an Evil that thought and the alphabet cannot bear: they cannot, ultimately, support it. It would be an Evil of which the word exists, but not its definition, nor even the thought of its meaning. It would, therefore, be an evil free to produce itself in the face of our passive inability to think and say it.

The third impossibility: if we were to consider (as we consider, or, rather, as we are asked to consider) as belonging to the category not of the ‘lesser evil’, but rather and even of the Good some actions of war or, said otherwise, some manifestations of war, we could not avoid finding ourselves in the embarrassing situation of considering the Good itself relative. That is, we could not avoid grasping the fragility and, much more, the ambiguity of this word and the category to which it refers.

These three impossibilities apply equally to the legal categories applied to war.

In addition to all this, the recourse to Good and Evil, to what is right and what is wrong, prompts us to react, in the face of war, with our affections, i.e. our passions. We are naturally inclined to side with one belligerent side rather than the other and this for a whole series of reasons that are neither objective nor rational. We do it ‘from the gut’, i.e. on the basis of undefined ‘sympathies’.

We thous realise how recourse to apparently fundamental categories of our navigation of reality and life are misleading in the face of war (they always are, but that is another matter).

Although in the face of the consequences of an armed conflict it is very difficult to keep our passions at bay, it is only the effort to control them that will lead us to the identification of its causes, both superficial and deep. On this identification, I am convinced, depends the success that will be achieved by the efforts of those who, in addition to stopping this or that war, want to prevent all wars.

At the edge of the thinkable and beyond, where I intended to lead you, there is this to discover, to see and ultimately to grasp: the measure of the Possible.

We understand that it would be much more useful and honest to admit that war is the space within which human beings are free to do anything, because they are called upon to do so.

Should we find the scenes that such unbridled freedom produces unbearable, we are left with only one alternative in hand: avoid war. Banish it from our thoughts to the point of making it unthinkable.

Even Seneca's paradox would thus know its ultimate solution.

Is there hope?

If you ask me I will answer that yes, there is hope. There is, above all, much work to be done.

gianluca grossi
 

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Gianluca Grossi is the author of the book Sulla guerra perché non riusciamo a non farla , Redea 2023.