Delphic Maxim 89: Have no violence
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
89. Have no violence
The simplest thing I have ever known in my life is not to be violent. I mean this in the physical sense of violence: there’s a whole lot of theoretical literature about other kinds of violence (symbolic, linguistic, and so on). Maybe I will talk about that, if I still have time.
Non-violent movements have played a significant role in history. The most famous, of course, is Ghandi’s work striving for independence for India. Resistance and defiance of authority, without violence, is a powerful act. It shows the crushing, ‘legitimate’ violence of the state being enacted on people who are not being violent themselves. It crystallises the idea of injustice, it makes it concrete and visible, and in the process draws more people into the struggle.
Many people try to emulate this mode of protest today, and I reckon it’s more effective than recourse to violent action. I’m not necessarily on the same page as my radical philosophical idol, Slavoj Žižek on this. Not to say that he advocates violence, at least not the physical kind, but he definitely recognises that struggles take a range of forms and options shouldn’t be closed down if they will achieve a political objective. And Ghandi’s act — the rejection of the authority of the British State — is a violent act itself, if not physically violent. It acts and influences with force — particularly when it is multiplied by many thousands of people.
These maxims weren’t written for such substantial politics though. The Oracle at Delphi would occasionally advise war, and would provide guidance to generals and leaders in the conduct of war. The maxims were advise for lay people too — a way of conducting ourselves in the world, even the quotidian domains of work and home.
I’ve never understood how people are able to be violent towards other people. We’ve noted a number of times how temperance is a virtue prized by the Greeks. Losing our temper to the point where we become violent is a mark of unreason and intemperance. Recourse to violence means that we have lost control not only of our minds, but by extension our bodies.
When he was writing about Greek tragedy, Nietzsche argued that Greek society was a balancing act between the dionysiac and the appollonian: between our emotional id-impulse, and our rational approach to logic and reason. This isn’t a spectrum between violence and logic, by the way, but rather between unregulated emotion and overstructured order. A great society, a great person, is balanced somewhere between the two — the idea of balance between extremes is a strong one in ancient Greek culture, and especially in the thinking of Aristotle.
Striking that balance in life is challenging — we often slip up and cave into emotion. But that doesn’t mean we defer to violence. Violence is a corrupting influence on our souls — it’s not only lazy, but it is almost never used justly. So we should have no violence, in our politics as much as possible, and in our personal lives not at all.
