Article
I Kill, Therefore I Am: War and Killing as Structures of
Human Spirit
Stefan Sonderling
University of South Africa
Department of Communication Science
stefansonderling@[Link]
Abstract
This article uncovers the function of war and killing as the primary and primordial
formative structure of human spirituality and religious experience. Tracing the
representations of war in texts of philosophers and social thinkers from ancient
Greece to the present, reveals a tradition of thought that considers war as the defining
characteristic of humanity and as the foundation for constructing human and divine
identities. While war is a social and collective activity, at its core are the actions of
fighting and killing that are forms of interpersonal engagement. It is this interpersonal
engagement that many thinkers imagine as being the source of human consciousness,
identity and meaning; as Heraclitus put it: war creates both men and gods, making
mortals immortal and immortals mortal.
Keywords: Heraclitus; Aristotle; Nietzsche; war; polemos; Hegel; immortals; killing;
consciousness; noble-savage
Introduction: Towards a New Perspective on War or Rediscovery of Old
Tradition
To speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death
for “recognition.” Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have
been human beings on earth. (Kojève 1980, 11–12)
This, O Muslim brothers, is who we are; we slay for our God, our God demands the slaying. I
kill; therefore I am. (Murawiec 2008, 9)
For contemporary scholars war and killing are assumed as universally traumatic experiences,
presumed as manifestations of the inhuman and deviation from what is assumed as the
characteristic of a normal human being. However, such assumptions are the product of a
social process for constructing meaning. The assumption that war can only be destructive and
traumatic emerged after the First World War and was elaborated on since the Vietnam War.
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However, such assumptions only see war as a negative and destructive activity and ignore an
older Western tradition of thought that considers war as a positive force, and selective acts of
killing as rites of passage enabling the warrior to construct a sense of spiritual identity
(Bourke 1999; Lomsky-Feder 2004, 83–84). Ever since the ancient Greek philosopher,
Heraclitus, identified war as the father of all things, almost all philosophers in every age and
culture affirmed war as a generative force and a meaningful human activity. War is the
central theme for the ancient Greek poets, Homer and Hesiod, while the first historians,
Herodotus and Thucydides, considered war as a way of life and recorded its occurrences in
great details (Havelock 1972, 21). For modern thinkers, from Machiavelli through to Hobbes
and Hegel, the reality of war is a subject for philosophical thought. Such affirmation is
expressed by Nietzsche’s (1968, 33) statement that life is the consequence of war, and society
is a means to war. In the twentieth century Emmanuel Levinas (1991, 23) contends that war
is human reality and ultimately the human being manifests himself in war. In the twenty-first
century a journalist, Chris Hedges (2003, 3–7), rediscovers that war remains a force that
gives us meaning when peace has emptied all meaning from life in the postmodern world
(Fukuyama 1992, 328–331; Gray 2003, 85; Hammond 2007, 11; Sonderling 2012).
Beyond the Myth of the Noble Savage
Most contemporary thinkers assume that the human being is characterised by a peaceful
disposition for cooperation, empathy and understanding others, while violence and war are
presumed as pathological manifestations of the inhuman. Underlying this view is the idea that
human beings are a distinct species far removed from nature and the animal world. Humans
are assumed as superior beings whose existence is imagined as a disembodied spirit alienated
from animal corporality (Sheets-Johnstone 2007, 340). If the earthly origin of the human
being must be acknowledged, it is assumed that man is a descendant of a primordial peaceful
noble savage that was a friend of all and enemy of none, as imagined by J-J. Rousseau. From
this perspective war and strife are pathologies resulting from the corrupting influence of
civilisation. But this view confirms the pacifists’ self-delusion for whom “it is far more
comforting to claim decent from imaginary pacifists who live in our dreams of prehistoric
peace” (Bigelow 1969, 156). Despite the fact that humanity is not removed from nature, the
belief in human superiority persists (Gribbin and Gribbin 1998, 1) and the presumed
peacefulness of human pre-history is the prevailing politically-correct orthodoxy enshrined in
international declarations and legislated as if the scientific truth (Keeley 1997; Pinker 2003,
336).
Against the pacifists, Hobbes contends that the original state of nature was a perpetual “war
of every one against every one” and life was solitary, brutal and short (Hobbes 1958, 110).
Paradoxically, Hobbes attributes this brutal state of nature to a divine origin being the “art
whereby God has made and governs the world” (Hobbes 1958, 23). While human life in
Hobbes’s divine state of nature was brutal, it was never solitary because human beings are by
nature political animals, as noted by Aristotle (1964, 28). For Hobbes the permanent warfare
is the result of primitive democratic equality: the ability of each man to kill. Presumably
equal ability to kill transformed primordial human beings into constitutional lawyers who
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signed a social contract to establish ordered social structure to avert the violent humanly
created and divinely ordained chaos.
Considerations of war and violence are largely absent from the images of man in the
discourses of Western science and philosophy. There are two dominant images claiming to
represent the primary essence of human nature: Man as a Homo Sapiens, which is the image
of a disembodied spiritual solitary thinking individual who affirms his humanity by declaring,
a la Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” The other image presents the human being as a
Homo Faber: man as the toolmaker and a proud craftsman or the manufacturer of goods
motivated by rational economic calculation. An extension of the economic image is the
Homo Laborans: man as the soulless labourer of the capitalist economy (Agamben 1998, 3).
From this perspective man is defined by his labour and work and proclaims his humanity by
declaring: “I labour, therefore I am.”
It is possible to propose an alternative to both the idealist and materialist conceptions of man:
the disembodied thinking Homo sapiens and the labouring homo faber, a new realist image of
man as a warrior: the homo polemos. As Bigelow (1969, 43) suggests, man should not be
“defined as the toolmaker, but rather as the war maker.” Thus the ancient warrior, and the
modern day warriors such as founders of nations, gangsters, radical Christians, Hindu and
Muslim fundamentalists, become human beings by proclaiming: “I kill, therefore I am”
(Murawiec 2008, 9).
The Primacy of War in Human Existence
The image of the human warrior claims primacy over the two traditional images of man,
because thinking and production are not primary characteristics of man. As Aristotle (1964,
32) contends: “Life is action not production.” In other words, the human condition is
characterised by three fundamental human spheres of labour, work and action. Action has a
primacy because it is the only activity that goes on directly between men without mediation
by things or matter (Arendt 1998, 7). Ultimately human action is the foundation for work and
human thought. What is the nature of human action? Huizinga (1971, 19–21) proposes that
the action of play is the foundation for civilisation (Huizinga 1971, 23). However, play is a
manifestation of a more primary activity of contestation (or agon). Play and fighting form a
single and indivisible field of human action (Huizinga 1971, 60–61, 95, 110), thus even when
play is deadly it still remains play (Huizinga 1971, 61, 69). Such unity is expressed in most
languages; “ever since words existed for fighting and playing, men have been wont to call
war a game” (Huizinga 1971, 110). War as play is coeval with speech, as recorded in
Homer’s characterisation of Achilles as the “doer of great deeds and the speaker of great
words” (Arendt 1998, 25). However, the act of fighting has primacy over speech because it
provides the theme for the wordsmith to immortalise in words.
War is the foundation of social life because it brings people into a military unit that
ultimately becomes a political community: it is as if war makes society and society makes
war (Tilly 1975). Marx (1972, 115–116) considers war for conquest of territory as the driving
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force of history and the foundation for division of labour and social hierarchy. For the ancient
Greeks labour can be synonymous with the noble work of fighting and killing—whether in
war or hunting—performed by the aristocratic master, and differentiated from the mundane
labour of slaves. In the ancient world and in primitive societies a nobleman was defined by
the ability to use leisure, and in turn war is the ultimate leisure expressing freedom, while
slaves and women were tasked with cooking and agricultural production (Davie 2003, 25).
Moreover, the life and work of the slave is entirely dependent on the master nobleman’s
action of fighting. According to Aristotle (1964, 40) “it is part of nature’s plan that the art of
war, of which hunting is part, should be a way of acquiring property.” As Schmitt (quoted in
Ulmen 1996) explains the priorities; territory and goods are firstly acquired through conquest,
then divided and distributed among the warrior fraternity and only then used for production.
To the extent that labour may claim primacy, it is directly related to the labour of war as is
evident in Homer’s use of the word “work” to designate what is done in battle: the hard work
of killing (Coker 2007, 29). Similarly, Marx perceptively notes in the Grundrisse: “War is
therefore among the oldest labours” (Marx in Lichtheim 1982, 151). For Marx “war attains
complete development before peace” and labour and commercial relations “developed at an
earlier date through war and in armies” (McLellan 1973, 54). Hegel acknowledges that the
human “Work” is always interrelated with the primary activity of fighting. For Hegel, human
history consists “of war and of work” or “the Action of Fighting and of Work” (Kojève 1980,
38, 43, 185). Human history is inaugurated by the master and slave dialectic and it is the
primary war-action of the master that sets history in motion. As Kojève (1980, 52)
comments: “To be sure, without the Master, there would have been no History; but only
because without him there would have been no Slave and hence no Work.” For Hegel,
fighting and work are the only true criteria to evaluate human life (Kojève 1980, 186).
Ultimately, war expresses the way of life of a society and it “is always an expression of
culture, often the determinant of cultural forms” and “in some societies the culture itself”
(Keegan 2004, 12).
Inhuman is Human, and Human is Inhuman: Learning to Understand War
from the Ancients
Nietzsche (1997) argues that our understanding of the meaning of human and inhuman are
hopelessly reversed. The primacy of war in human life negates the belief in peace as primary
characteristics of the human being. As Nietzsche (1968, 33) puts it:
The valuation that today is applied to the different form of society is entirely identical with
that which assigns a higher value to peace than to war: but this judgment is anti-biological, is
itself a fruit of the decadence of life. Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to
war.
The inversion of values is the product of Christian religion’s distortion of reality.
Machiavelli’s (1970, 277–278) notes that Christianity holds the real world in contempt and
“glorifies humble and contemplative men, rather than acknowledge men of action,” as did the
ancients who prudently “did not beautify men unless they were replete with worldly glory.”
And worldly glory in ancient Greece was primarily gained in warfare, where a “man was a
fighting animal, or he was no man” (Havelock 1972, 25). Nietzsche, following Hobbes and
4
Machiavelli, accepts the primordial state of perpetual war of all against all and proposes to
make it the constitutive principle of human life, because one should be “able to derive a
moral code for life from the bellum contra omnes and the privileges of stronger individuals”
(Nietzsche in Safranski 2003, 113). Such genealogy explains why our understanding of
human and inhuman is reversed:
When one speaks of humanity, the basic concept implies that this is meant to be what
differentiates and distinguishes mankind from nature. But such a difference does not exist in
reality: “natural” attributes and those that are called truly “human” have grown inseparably
into one another. Man, in the highest and noblest of his strengths, is wholly Nature, and
carries her uncanny dual character within him. His terrible capacities that are deemed
inhuman may even be that fertile ground out of which alone all of humanity can grow forth in
emotion, deeds, and accomplishments. (Nietzsche 1997, 35)
Thus what is considered inhuman is perfectly all too human, as is demonstrated by the
ancient Greeks, who were the most humane people of antiquity and their humanness was
characterised by healthy cruelty and a “tiger-like pleasure in destruction” (Nietzsche 1997,
35). For the Greeks, “struggle signifies well-being and salvation; the cruelty of victory is the
peak of life’s glories” and culture develops from murder, blood revenge and overcoming
adversity (Nietzsche 1997, 37). Indeed, such understanding is confirmed in modernity’s
experience of the Second World War that refuted the Freudian inspired belief that when man
destroys he becomes an animal because he negates his humanity; however the converse is
true: the satisfaction man has in destroying is a particularly human trait, or it is devilish
because no animal manifests such a trait (Gray 1998, 54–55).
The ancient Greeks’ experience of life as war leads the poet Hesiod (1976) to assume the
existence of two war goddesses on earth: the one, Eris, is the cruel goddess of War, while the
other is the good goddess of Strife (Nietzsche 1997, 37). According to Hesiod (1976, 59)
while the one cruel deity of war is not loved by humans, nevertheless, because of the
necessity of war humans respect and endure her cruel demands (Hesiod 1976, 59). The other,
Eris, is the good goddess of productive strife because “she urges even lazy men to work” and
makes “neighbour vies with neighbour in the rush for wealth,” and productive competition
makes that “potter hates potter, carpenters compete, and beggar strives with beggar, bard with
bard” (Hesiod 1976, 59).
Shattering the belief in the illusions of original peaceful human nature, Levinas (1991)
contends that war is human reality and man shows himself in war:
We do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself in war to
philosophical thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but as the very
patency, or the truth, of the real ... Harsh reality ... harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of
its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war … is produced as the pure experience
of pure being ... The trial by force is the test of the real. (Levinas 1991, 21)
War is human reality because the central activity in war is to kill and to inflict pain (Scarry
1985, 4, 7). This implies that to have pain is the only certainty a human being can experience
5
as real, thus to have pain is to have certainty, because “physical pain is so incontestably real
that it seems to confer its quality of incontestable reality” (Scarry 1985, 27).
Creating Gods and Men: War as the Structure of Divine and Human Spirit
Many people escape from the harsh reality of violence and war, and attempt to find salvation
in religion. However, as Burkert (1983, 1–2) and Girard (1977) note, the person escaping to
religion is immediately “confronted with murder” and death at the very core of religion. The
holy texts of major religions tell stories of cosmic wars, bloody battles, massacres and torture.
It is as Heraclitus predicated: everything comes into being and passes away through strife,
and war is the father and king of all, it makes some gods and some men (Heraclitus in Kahn
1979, 67). In other words, the idea of God is born in, and through war. Freud suggests that
God was born from a primal act of murder, from “the killing of the primal father of the
primitive horde, whose image in memory was later transfigured into a deity” (Vance 1980,
378). In ancient Greece a mortal could distinguish himself in war and be transformed into an
immortal god by being posthumously honoured with a cult (Chaniotis 2005, 36). The ancient
Greeks constructed their gods thus:
God was created in man’s image ... The whole of the heroic society was reproduced on
Olympus in its complexities and its shading. The world of the gods was a social world in
every respect, with a past and a present, with a history. (Finley 1972, 154)
It is no coincidence that in religious texts the gods are represented as reflecting the
characteristics of the human group claiming ownership of such gods. As creator of men and
gods, war is of divine origin. According to De Maistre (2009, 89–91) war is divine in itself
because it is the law of the world; it is beneficial for human existence and it is a great
privilege to die in battle; war is surrounded by mysterious glory, it provides protection to
great leaders and is a quest for justice and revenge for inequality; and ultimately God is
always found on the winning side.
The Bhagavad-Gita presents the god Krishna as a charioteer and war counsellor to princes on
the battlefield, which is described as “the field of sacred duty” (Bhagavad-Gita 2004, 32).
The Qur’an proclaims war as a divinely ordained duty for Muslim men (Malik 1992, 38):
“War is prescribed for you and ye dislike it but it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is
good for you and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know
not” (Koran 2, 216). Malik (1992, 50) notes that: “In Islam, a war is fought for the cause of
Allah” and it is clear that “a Muslim’s cause of war is just, noble, righteous and humanitarian.
A victory in Islam is a victory for the cause of Islam.” This self-affirming logic is a
fundamental axiom of many ancient religions (Ruthven 2004, 62). This is so because in the
ancient world, “winning as such is, for the archaic mind, proof of truth and rightness”
(Huizinga 1971, 103). Every war is a just war and the proof of its justness is in the victory,
because victory proves that the war was fought for a just cause. Affirming this tradition,
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra exhorts the good value of wars: “You say it is the good cause that
hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause” (Nietzsche 1969,
74).
6
Contrary to the common assumption that religion is an expression of piety and peaceful
spirituality, the act of piety is grounded in, and emerges from, the bloodshed of sacrificial
killing, as Burkert (1983) puts it:
The worshiper experiences the god most powerfully not just in pious conduct or in prayer,
song, and dance, but in the deadly blow of the axe, the gush of blood and the burning of
thigh-pieces. The realm of the gods is sacred, but the “sacred” act done at the “sacred” place
by the “consecrating” actor consists of slaughtering sacrificial animals. (Burkert 1983, 2)
The original meaning of the Greek verb “to act” is to make an offering to the gods or “to
sacrifice,” and the ancients considered sacrifice as “sacrificial killing” of a human victim: in
ancient Hebrew and Hittite the verb “to do” means “to sacrifice” (Burkert 1983, 3).
According to Burkert (1983, 3) the sacrificial killing constructs the human being: the human
animal becomes human because he is a Homo Necans; it is the act of sacrificial killing of
other humans that makes man a Homo Sapiens. The human sacrifice predates animal
sacrifice: animal sacrifice replaced earlier cannibalism (Burkert 1983, 8, 43). Evidence for
substitution of the human for an animal is the example of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice
his son—and at the last moment by divine intervention was persuaded to exchange him for an
animal.
Symbolic remnants of human sacrifice and cannibalism can be found in Christianity: the
death of God’s son is an example of perfect human sacrifice and it is re-enacted in the
celebrations of the Lord’s Supper whereby “the body of Christ” is eaten, and wine, as if
blood, is drunk in the ritual of the Eucharist and hymns about blood and battle are sung
(Burkert 1983, 8; Juergensmeyer 2003, 162). Moreover, the ancient myths show that the
preferable victim for sacrifice was a human being, and much later animal meat was
substituted for human flesh as a meal fit for the gods (Ehrenreich 1998). The biblical myth of
Cain and Abel confirms God’s preference for a meal of meat: Cain, the farmer, had his
sacrificial offering of vegetables rejected, while Abel, the herdsman, had his offering of meat
accepted by the deity. Indeed, in the ancient world it was assumed that gods ate meat.
The Aztec gods ate people. They ate human hearts and they drank human blood. And the
declared function of the Aztec priesthood was to provide fresh human hearts and human
blood in order to prevent the remorseless deities from becoming angry and crippling,
sickening, withering, and burning the whole world. (Harris 1978, 99)
Enemy prisoners were brought from the battlefield to be killed in order to fulfil the required
daily quota of killing demanded by the tribal or national gods (Burkert 1983; Harris 1978,
100; Ehrenreich 1998; Todorov 1992, 143–144).
The ferocity of the gods is evident in the names given to them and their characteristics
narrated in religious texts: the gods are conquerors, their names are “the destroyer,” “the
avenger” and “god of battles” (Davie 2003, 113). In monotheistic religions the emphasis is on
the god of war (Lang 2002), for example the Hebrew Bible acknowledged that “God is a
warrior” (Longman and Reid 1995). God, as a warlord, fights on behalf of his people or
7
stands in the ranks fighting side by side against common enemies (Niditch 1993, 28). Early
religions assumed that war was also conducted by the gods in the heavens, and the priests and
shamans were considered “spiritual warriors” doing battle on behalf of their group in the
world of the spirits (Boyd 1997).
Thus, killing and the ritual of human sacrifice are considered as acts of communication:
dispatching a human messenger to the ghostly world of the gods (Davie 2003, 131). The
traditional assumption that the sacrifice—giving a gift of flesh to the gods—establishes a
communion with the gods may be erroneous because the preference for meat indicates that
the original deity may have been a carnivore (Ehrenreich 1998, 31, 34). Therefore, it is hard
to imagine that one could have a communion with such a beast. Evans-Pritchard (1954, 23)
argues that the sacrifice is made against the gods: because the sacrifice is made in times of
trouble, the purpose of such being as described below:
… sacrifice is to establish communication with God rather in order to keep him away or get
rid of him than establish communion or fellowship with him ... the trouble comes from God
and is evidence of his intervention in human affairs. Sacrifice is made to persuade him to turn
away from men and not to trouble them anymore. It is made to separate God and man, not to
unite them. In a sense they are already in contact in the sickness or other trouble. (Evans-
Pritchard 1954, 23–24)
The divine power is ultimately expressed in war and the major religions owe their existence
to success in war. Christianity expanded when it was co-opted by Roman emperors while its
pacifism was, in part, responsible for the demise of the Roman Empire (Santosuosso 2004).
The early Christian church realised that pacifism would prevent expansion (Seaton 2005, 74).
During the Middle Ages the church successfully acquired property because its popes,
cardinals and monks became formidable warlords (Chambers 2006, 1). Indeed, success in
battle was the original guarantee of success for all religions (Chambers 2006, 90).
Christianity was successful in the wars against Muslim invaders and later embarked on its
own crusades into Jerusalem, as well as aggressive expansion in Africa and the Americas
(Chambers 2006). As Chambers (2006, 1) puts it: “Blessed are the peacemakers. But blessed,
too, have been the warmongers throughout the Christian centuries.” The crusades
conceptualised as holy wars were in part inspired by the Muslim practice of Jihad. The
vocabulary of Jihad is discernible in St Bernard’s imploring the French knights to embark on
a holy crusade:
Clothe yourself with your impenetrable bucklers; the din of arms, the dangers, the labours, the
fatigues of war are the penances God now imposes on you. Hasten then to expiate your sins
by victory over the infidels, and let the deliverance of the holy places be the reward of your
repentance ... Let a holy rage animate you in the fights; and let the Christian world resound
with the words of the prophet: “Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood.”
(Turner 1958, 11)
Military vocabulary is central to religious discourse and the “model of warfare” is the
underlying inspiration for the religious model. For example, the Christian way of life is
described as being at war and should be joined by zealot believers (Juergensmeyer 2003,
8
160–161). There is a symbiotic interrelationship between war and religion, which implies
that:
…a society’s military ethics and its dominant religious mythology constitute a single, unified
structure of meaning. A society’s Kriegethik—its preferred style of collective raping, looting,
burning, and killing—is often “dialectically” or “reflexively” interrelated with its prevailing
religious mythology. (Aho 1981, 3)
Religion gives strength to the warriors by promising the strongest warriors on earth their
rightful heavenly rewards.
The Gift of Death is a Gift of Life: War and Killing as Sources of Meaning
Participation in war creates religious experiences out of the intense feeling of fear and ecstasy
of battle and victory, and in turn such intense feeling are recreated by the ritual sacrifice. In
other words, for the ancients the acts of killing in ritual and in battle justified life (Burkert
1983, 40). Killing gives meaning to death by elevating a common, meaningless, natural event
to the level of primary significance. For the warrior, war provides the opportunity to prove
one’s courage by defying death in battle and surviving victoriously, and this is seen in the
fact that most combatants describe their participation in war as the most rewarding
experience of their lives (Bourke 1999, 364; Holmes 2004, 380; Van Creveld 1991).
For various religions death in battle is meaningful as it guarantees martyrdom and eternal life.
Christianity is a religious cult created by death: by death Christ was elevated to immortality.
The rituals of remembrance, performed by disciples, keep his memory alive and inspire the
faithful by reminding them of their eternal fraternity even after death. Death is important for
a warrior, as Plato observed: “Life measured solely by its length falls short, but a life
shortened by honour reaches its fullest measure” (Gelven 1994, xii). As Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra advises the warrior: “Thus live your life of obedience and war! What good is
long life? What warrior wants to be spared?” (Nietzsche 1969, 75). This is also the spirit of
the Samurai warrior: he accepts death a-priori and becomes invincible in battle (Nitobe 2006;
Yamamoto 2001). In the Bhagavad-Gita (2004, 37) Lord Krishna advises the warrior-king,
Arjuna, that once you are forced by enemies to do battle, it becomes a sacred duty to fight to
the death without fear because to refuse fighting will bring dishonour that is worse than
death. Krishna opines that one has nothing to lose: “If you are killed, you win heaven; if you
triumph, you enjoy the earth.”
Killing the enemy is also infused with meaning, as is the self-sacrifice that gives life to the
community. As Derrida (1995, 17) notes, life depends on the gift of death: “I put my enemy
to death and I give my own life in sacrificing myself ‘for my country’.” Through the gift of
death the ancient Greeks constructed their political life in the polis extracting “life from
death, from the relation to death, from the awareness of death” (Virilio 1997, 135).
9
I Kill, therefore I Am: Killing as Source of Consciousness and Self-
Consciousness
Most contemporary scholars assume that war is synonymous with self-annihilation. This is a
mistaken assumption because “the characteristic act of men at war is not dying but killing”
(Bourke 1999, xiii). The idea of self-annihilation was popularised by Freud’s claim that war
is an act of suicide expressing a biologically programmed “death drive” (Freud 2004, 70). For
Freud, the “goal of life is death” and the tendency of all living matter is to return to the
peaceful immobility of inorganic matter (Levin 1951, 257). But Freud’s assumption is absurd
because death is not an instinct and the aim of all organic life is to survive death. Indeed,
even Freud contradicts himself and denies the existence of such suicidal drive:
We have shown the unmistakable tendency to push death aside, to eliminate it from
life ... Our own death is indeed unimaginable, and however often we try to imagine it, we
realise that we are actually still present as onlookers. Thus, the psychoanalytic school could
venture to say: fundamentally no one believes in his own death or, which comes to the same
thing: in the unconscious each of us is convinced of his immortality. (Freud 2005, 183)
Disregarding the possibility of one’s own death, the human being ensures his existence
because of the ability to kill. De Maistre (2009, 89) contends that life is a manifestation of
killing, and the world is a divinely ordained permanent carnage:
You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the immense catalpa to the humblest herb,
how many plants die, and how many are killed! As soon as you enter the animal kingdom, the
law suddenly becomes frighteningly obvious. A power at once hidden and palpable shows
itself continually occupied in demonstrating the principle of life by violent means. (De
Maistre 2009, 86)
Killing is central to human existence, because in order to exist, man has to kill:
He kills to nourish himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to
attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he
kills to kill. (De Maistre 2009, 86)
Killing is not entirely destructive, and since antiquity it has been acknowledged as the
original foundation of the social bond. According to Hannah Arendt (1990) every act of
establishing a society is an act of violence:
That such a beginning must be intimately connected with violence seems to be vouched for
by the legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and classical antiquity report it:
Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence was the beginning and by the same
token, no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating. The first
recorded deeds in our biblical and our secular tradition, whether known to be legendary or
believed in as historical tradition, have travelled through the centuries with the force which
human thought achieves in the rare instances when it produces cogent metaphors or universal
applicable tales. The tale spoke clearly: whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable
of has grown out of fratricide; whatever political organisation men may have achieved has its
origin in crime. (Arendt 1990, 20)
Such genealogy shows that killing is not always a crime. The belief that killing is a crime
emerged from misunderstanding the biblical commandment “Thou salt not kill” and the
injunction to love your neighbour. However, the biblical prohibition is against “murder” and
10
not “killing.” Prohibition against murder is a form of social control operating within a kinship
group, but it does not apply to external non-members. Killing a member of the clan is a crime
because it demands revenge, but killing a stranger is a virtue and demonstrates courage
(Davie 2003, 18). But even within a kinship group, the most enjoyable fighting is to fight an
enemy one knows well (Enzensberger 1994, 11). This joy is recorded throughout history, as
St Augustine reports: “neighbours, brothers, fathers and sons ... divided into two factions and
armed with stones, fought annually at a certain season of the year for several days
continually, everyone killing whomsoever he could” (St Augustine in Salazar 2009, 33).
According to Cramer (2006, 283–284), civil war is not irrational but makes perfect sense
because one knows whom to love and whom to hate and “no-one makes mistakes about
choosing which side to be on” (Sciascia in Cramer 2006, 1).
The common types of killing within a kinship group are patricide and fratricide. Patricide is a
social succession process, narrated by the myth of Oedipus where the son or a band of
brothers kill the father and take his position of power. Fratricide is a power struggle among
brothers, which eventually establishes a social hierarchy. The nation-state can be considered
as being in a permanent state of warfare: “The state is nothing more than the way that the war
between the two groups ... continues to be waged in apparently peaceful forms” (Foucault
2003, 88). The fight brings the opposing groups together because they have a vested interest
in the object over which they fight. Moreover, the appearance of a common enemy suspends
the internal fighting and unites the parties against the common external enemy.
War brings two collective bodies of men into conflict; and killing in battle constructs a sense
of individuality. From the moment these two bodies of anonymous warriors collide, the
action becomes individualised: each man enters into a hand-to-hand battle making the
individual stand out from the crowd. According to Connor (1988, 14), “the transformation of
collective anonymous combat into hand-to-hand fights with sword or dagger” means that the
“anonymous, narrativeless combat is suddenly turned into a replica of the Homeric battle
scene.” Moreover “the dramatic change at the moment trope—the shift from collective to
individual fighting—reappears at the end of the battle through the censure of those who left
the expedition at some point and through awards to those who distinguished themselves in
courage” (Connor 1988, 17). This is the foundation of individual distinction and the basis for
constructing social hierarchy. The way a social group fights is a mark of distinction
establishing its singular identity (Sidebottom 2004, 20).
The way an individual’s identity and spiritual existence are established by violence and
killing, is described by Hegel’s story of the primordial battle to the death between two (not
yet complete) human beings. Their human identity is formed through their mutually pressing
demands on one another to be recognised as human beings. For Hegel, it is the ability of a
man to risk his life for pure prestige that distinguishes the human being from animals that
merely struggle for survival. Human beings give meaning to their lives by spiritualising the
struggle for survival and transforming it to a struggle for recognition. According to Hegel:
11
To speak of the “origin” of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death
for “recognition.” Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have
been human beings on earth ... The “first” anthropogenetic action necessarily takes the form
of a fight: a fight to the death between two beings that claim to be men, a fight for pure
prestige carried on for the sake of “recognition” by the adversary. (Kojève 1980, 11–12)
War is “coeval with the moment of becoming human ... because the transition from animal to
human required the willingness to risk life, to transcend the survival instinct and set
immaterial values above material ones” (Margot Norris in Krimmer 2010, 3–4). The battle
for recognition is re-enacted throughout history, and in the contemporary world is evident in
African decolonisation. Following on Hegel’s description of the battle for recognition, Fanon
(1973) and Sartre (1973) contend that violence and killing are the ways the colonised man
can prove that he is a human being. Initially the European oppressor attained a sense of
humanity through the violence of colonial conquest; and in turn the oppressed natives rose in
violent revolt. The liberation armed struggle confirms a sense of humanity. This is so
because, in the words of Sartre (1973): The “rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity” and
for the colonised a life of freedom, as expressed by Fanon “can only spring up again out of
the rotting corpse of the settler” (Fanon 1973, 73). The act of liberation comes from killing,
as Sartre argues: “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an
oppressor and the man he oppressed at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free
man” (Sartre 1973, 19).
The ancient experience of spiritual pleasure associated with killing is well documented in
modern Western warfare (Bourke 1999, 358; Ferguson 1999, 360–364, 447). Despite war
becoming instrumental and killing becoming mechanised and impersonal, the modern soldier
imagines himself as a warrior and attempts to disregard alienation by insisting on asserting
his own active agency and demanding to take responsibility for killing, as if it were an
intimate act. As Bourke (1999, xviii, 360) documents, because modern military technology
prevents the combatants from seeing the effects of their weapons on the enemy, they imagine
these as if they were face-to-face encounters, and for many participants killing is a personal
and intimate dialogue that makes the experience “a lovely war” (Bourke 1999, 364). Such a
personal engagement in killing negates the prevalent assumption among academics that social
identities are imagined communities constructed by national language and literary narratives
(Anderson 1983). However, the social bond is constructed from a real bond of blood and
corporal sacrifice:
Not by accident, ceremonies of nationalism are about death and not literature, though
literature may remodel blood sacrifice. When armies assemble as fighting forces, their
members are deployed in loyal, close-knit groups. Effective armies are not faceless
bureaucracies in which soldiers apprehend their comrades at the distance of the written word,
but countless small bodies of men and women tightly bound in mutual comradeship. A textual
community does not fight. An army is not a textual community, but an organisation of
hunting groups. (Marvin and Ingle 1999, 27)
A social group’s or a nation’s identity is not simply constructed by imagination and linguistic
abstraction, but is based on embodied face-to-face encounter that “connects language to ... a
community of bodies” (Marvin and Ingle 1996, 773; Marvin and Ingle 1999, 26–27). War
12
and blood sacrifice construct the community and the liturgical texts of identity—whereas war
is the theme of religious and secular literature (Brosman 1992, 95; Bartlett 1994; Bryant
1996; Tilly 1990). Throughout, history was and remains the context against which the
everyday is lived (Cuomo 1996, 42; Favret 2005).
Conclusion
From the time of the ancient Greeks, war has been the model for human life and the
foundation for communication, culture and religion. Since the Islamist terror attack on the
West on 11 September 2002, war emerged again as a key principle for organising societies
(Alliez and Negri 2003; Hardt and Negri 2006, 12; Montgomery 2005, 149; Foucault 2003).
For contemporary society, as it was for the ancient Greeks, “warfare constitutes the chosen
framework within which all other activities of men are placed, and to which they relate”
(Havelock 1972, 21; Sidebottom 2004, 16). An understanding of war is important in the
postmodern global world, because as Kaplan (2003, 15) contends: the world is not “modern”
or “postmodern,” but only a continuation of the “ancient.” It is thus not surprising that the
image of ancient warriors once again provides a suitable model for living (Bryant 1996, 28).
To live in the postmodern world, the West will need to rediscover its own warrior spirit.
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