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PARTISAN REVIEW
his march, and who constantly returns to collect the stragglers, moving
forward afresh to lead the advance guard of his posse. Only all mankind
does not agree to follow; some stay where they are or go by other ways;
some even try to halt their march and that of those behind. At the point
where persuasion fails, for self-defense only violence remains.
In a sense violence is not an evil, because one has no power either
for or against a man; to beget a child is not to create it; to kill a man is
not to destroy
him;
we harm nothing but the manifestation of others. But
it is precisely in choosing to work upon this manifestation that we re–
nounce the accepting of other men as one of our liberties, and we further–
more diminish the possibilities of expansion of our being; the man to
whom I do violence is not my peer, and I need men to be my peers.
Resort to
·~iolence
arouses the less regret according as it appears less
possible to appeal from it to the liberty of him who is violated; we use
force without scruple towards sick people and infants. But if I did vio–
lence to all, I should stand alone in the world, lost.
If
I make a human
group into a herd, cattle, by so much I reduce the human domain. And
even if I oppress one single man, in him all humanity becomes for me
a mere thing; if man is an ant which can without scruple be crushed, all
men together are but an antheap. Therefore recourse to violence cannot
be lightly accepted; it is the mark of a defeat which nothing can atone.
If
the universal ethics of Kant and Hegel were reached through optimism,
it is because denying individuality, they also denied the defeat. But the
individual exists; the defeat exists.
If
one scrupulous at heart hesitates
before taking a political decision, it is not because the problems of politics
are difficult, it is because they are insoluble. And further, abstention is
also impossible; one always acts. Because we are condemned to violence
we are destined to defeat; we are condemned to violence because man is
divided and opposed to himself, because men are separate and opposed
among themselves: violence will make a child into a man, a horde into a
society. To renounce the fight would be to renounce transcendence, to
renounce being. But in the meantime no success will ever efface the utter
scandal of each separate defeat.
We should not think that success consists in tranquilly attaining an
aim; our objectives are only and always new starting points. When we
have brought others to this objective, everything begins; where does one
go from there? I am not content with the idea that one will always go
somewhere. I wish it to be
my
project which is continued. Each one
must decide how far his project goes without destruction: was Kant re–
discovered in Hegel? Or would he have regarded the Hegelian system
as his negation? To answer, we must know what in
his
view was the
basic truth of his philosophy. But his project did not in any case extend
to infinity; if Kant had simply wanted philosophy he would have had
no need to write, for the philosophy already existed; he wished for
a
