On Warrior Absence

War is the abdication of our humanity, pacifism its highest affirmation. Between the absence from self imposed by violence and the presence to the other demanded by peace lies, in my view, the ethical destiny of humanity.

War as denial of humanity

The political instrumentalization of warrior logic

War and warrior logic are mobilized in places where they should never be encountered. War implies a conflict that can only be conceived in terms of power relations. Violence then becomes the justification for destroying the other, which is the only path envisioned to resolve conflict. War represents an exception to fundamental rights; it permits all abuses. This is why it is increasingly invoked, as it suddenly confers almost absolute power to the leader. And moreover in war, one owes blind obedience to the leader’s orders.

We know that any criticism of obedience in times of war is severely repressed, as it is considered contrary to interests, which are then borne solely by the leader(s), but no longer by the citizens. What the exception to law that the warrior state permits is precisely all abuses of power. War dangerously facilitates the criminalization of those who disagree with the leader, exceptionally canceling democratic principles to replace them with authoritarian ones.

A particularly shameful example of using the concept of war was its mobilization during the Covid-19 epidemic by the French government. This warrior rhetoric enabled undiscussed authoritarian decisions, fundamentally anti-democratic, which were obviously linked to conflicts of interest and not to the benefit of citizens. But all these decisions, due to the warrior state of exception, are protected by defense secrecy for 50 to 100 years. Thus, those responsible for the absolutely deplorable management of this crisis will be long dead and buried when we can finally shed light on the truth of this management.

Absence from self and other as condition of war

To be able to make war, one must be absent from self and other. One must exit empathy. One must be able to accept that the other is only a dehumanized enemy, whom it is justified to kill. In my humble opinion, the non-respect for the other’s life goes hand in hand with a non-respect for one’s own life, philosophically speaking. Let me explain:

• It is unbearable to kill another, except for beings like psychopaths who have mental disorders that place them outside empathetic feeling for others.
• Certainly, in every human being there is a small part of psychopathy, but it is much less than the part of empathy.
• Thus, to make war, one must absent oneself from empathy for self and others. One must construct a denial of empathy. That is to say, become absent. Enter simulacrum. Exit life.

We know well that in most bloody wars, murderers or heroes, as we choose to name them, to be able to bear their ignoble acts, must absent themselves, exit life, and to do so they very often employ hard drugs like methamphetamine used so generally in Nazi Germany for example. Or else one must be completely brainwashed to believe oneself animated by a national or divine mission, and no longer see the human being in front as falling under the regime of humanity (to do this, one names one’s opponents “animals,” “barbarians,” etc.).

The indelible sequels of violence

We know how much people who return from war never heal from it, because they left their humanity there. It is buried there with the dead. If they became present to themselves and others again, they could not bear to live, quite simply, or else with immense work of psychic re-elaboration, notably through psychoanalysis, which seems well suited to this type of post-traumatic situation, but this can be discussed of course.

War therefore harms those who are its victims as well as those who are its executioners. In my view, philosophically, war, or rather the culture of war, that is to say the justification of war, is evil incarnate and precisely the inverse of what humanity should cultivate.

Pacifism as philosophy of presence

Non-violence: a force superior to violence

Pacifism, that is to say the refusal of war, its absolute refusal as it could be carried by Gandhi for example, is in my view the highest level of presence because it is a presence to humanity greater than violence. As Gandhi affirmed in 1935:

The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence.

Faced with this institutionalized violence, non-violence represents a superior moral force.

The fact of not responding to violence with violence is actually the greatest force that can be deployed because it proves to violent men that facing them is someone who, despite the war, remains present, who situates himself above their absence, who therefore inspires humanist greatness, and who affirms it, even in the heart of the worst violence legitimized by sick institutions, led by absent humans, drugged, lost, violent, warriors.

This philosophy of non-violence, which Gandhi called Satyagraha, “determined but non-violent resistance to evil”, is not passivity but conscious and courageous action. Gandhi himself specified: “Victory obtained through violence is tantamount to defeat, because it is momentary”. Gandhi was moreover nourished by the writings of Henry David Thoreau to support his movement, the “determined but non-violent resistance to evil”, civil disobedience (1849), an active and peaceful resistance to unjust laws, in short a refusal to cooperate with evil, without resorting to violence. This perspective also joins the thought of Leo Tolstoy who, in The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), advocated non-violence as a vector of social change.

The ethics of alterity as foundation of pacifism

This is why, in my view, war has no meaning and cannot have meaning. The only human meaning is pacifism. In my vision of the world, it is the only true force. It is obviously infinitely more difficult, more demanding to be peaceful than to be a warrior.

This ethical demand finds a deep echo in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, for whom “the face of the other faces me and tells me: ’Thou shall not kill’” (1961). This prohibition is not a simple moral rule, but the recognition of the absolute alterity of the other, who “obliges me and justifies my existence”. The face of the other, in its very vulnerability, constitutes an ethical call that precedes any rational decision.

Levinas teaches that “ethics is first philosophy”, and that our responsibility toward others is infinite and asymmetric. This responsibility does not depend on reciprocity: I must answer for the other even if he does not answer for me. It is precisely this asymmetry that founds the possibility of true peace, because it breaks the cycle of reciprocal violence.

Pacifism and lucidity: responding without reacting

But to say peaceful does not mean naive, because we often associate the two, as if someone realistic could only be a warrior. It’s like in businesses where we are told we must “trim the fat,” so we become inhuman for financial reasons. Is this defensible? Fortunately not, because what makes the beauty of who we are, what distinguishes us from mechanical thinking about the world, is precisely our irreducibility, our more essential greatness, the value of our life more important than the existence of an organization for example.

What is naive is to believe that war can help humanity. War always leads humanity into the greatest moral and spiritual abysses. It is never a space where the human grows: he debases himself, he dies. Even those who remain alive have become absent, that is to say dead to themselves. Is this what we wish to cultivate for a better world? Are there not ways of envisioning the world and life that are deeper, more engaged in humanist terms than this brutal superficiality, these unconscious destructive practices of all the damage they will produce, of all the misery they will sow?

The practice of pacifism as transformation of self and world

Acting rather than reacting: the path of construction

When one is a pacifist, one knows one has enemies and one also knows one must work for peace. This in no way consists of letting oneself be mistreated without reacting. But then, you will tell me, isn’t this indeed a warrior attitude? Well no, because what is warrior is to react, that is to say action-reaction, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. That is warrior logic.

In pacifist logic, faced with action, with aggression suffered for example, it is about acting and not reacting. Acting means taking reality into account and rebuilding with it, strengthening oneself with this new reality. Making war is fundamentally being in denial of a reality, the reality of the possibility of peace. Whereas being pacifist is putting oneself face to face with the reality of an enemy sick with his hatred and working within oneself to be greater than hatred, to remain human despite the hatred around.

This distinction between action and reaction joins Gandhi’s thinking on Satyagraha, which is not simple passive resistance but an active force of transformation. As he explained:

The search for truth should admit that no violence be inflicted on an adversary, but that he must emerge from error through patience and sympathy.

Individual responsibility as foundation of collective change
If we succeed in this masterful effort of always returning to our responsibility toward ourselves as ultimate responsibility toward others, in cultivating our own humanity so that it can infuse around us, we will here and there sow seeds of peace.

I return to the example of aggression: if someone aggresses us, let us strengthen ourselves, let us be quick to flee, to avoid, let us be much more agile. Let us know the enemy to put ourselves in a position not to dominate him as Sun Tzu advocates in The Art of War (5^th Century BC), but to strengthen ourselves through awareness of his strategies, of his malevolent intentions.

Pacifism at the heart of war: the ultimate presence
Thus, at the heart of a war, when one is a pacifist, one will not flee, one will grow. And even at the heart of the worst wars, one can sow seeds of peace. Of course, war is much easier than pacifism, and undoubtedly the majority of human beings will always go primarily toward war rather than toward peace because they are too absent from themselves and believe that the destruction of the other will allow them to solve their problems, whereas the destruction of the other will only plunge them deeper into their problems, and forever, for themselves and also for their descendants. All wars show this. But most do not have the capacity to perceive further than their reaction to aggression.

On the other hand, some do otherwise. It’s not that they learn to defend themselves, they learn to build themselves, to strengthen themselves in their spirituality, to never enter conflicts but to always listen, even to the worst things. Why? Because a person at war against you, that is to say absent from herself, if she encounters someone who considers her as a person, that is to say who respects and listens to her despite the animosity, it is a value of presence that reopens, it is a possibility of presence that dawns in the relationship, it is an energy of peace that circulates, because the person feels respected, considered as a person because listened to, and she can thus also consider the one who listens to her as a person. This may seem modest, even ridiculous in the face of the stakes, but the transformative power of listening, its power to give life is in fact immense.

Pacifism as act of life

Only peace has the power to give life, and pacifism has the power to give life. War gives only death. This is why there is no more demanding, more difficult, more spiritual combat in my view than pacifism. Pacifism always and without condition.

Pacifism is humanist lucidity. War is denial of life. War precipitates everything into the abyss. Pacifism always opens toward life.

This radical philosophy of pacifism is not a naive utopia but an absolute ethical demand. It recognizes the reality of violence while refusing to submit to it. It transforms vulnerability into strength, presence to the other into resistance. Yes, warrior rhetoric invades all spaces of social and political life, so affirming pacifism as the only truly human path is not only a philosophical choice, it is an act of spiritual and political resistance, an affirmation of what is most precious in us, our capacity to recognize in the other not an enemy to destroy, but a face that calls us to responsibility and peace.