On Murder
Ellul, Kierkegaard, and the precarity of morality
Recent events1 have forced the odious conversation about moral relativism and ideological self-justification into the minds of “the public” on an international scale. It is interesting that in a world where “nothing happens”, something did indeed happen.
But, my reader, we might consider: how does a Christian respond to these events? I imagine many have found the outflowing of celebration and relief over the death mildly uncomfortable—isn’t it bad to kill people? It seems like one of the most basic tenets of the Christian faith to suggest that murdering another of God’s creations is an ostensibly immoral thing to do. But, hopefully, many have seen the hand-wringing opportunism of the moralists as equally as uncomfortable—killing people is bad, therefore we should kill the killer, to offer a parody of the type of who wields the Old Testament, salivating to be the judge described therewithin. As is so often the case, the way the dialectic falls upon us is not very dialectical at all; these false dilemmas, e.g., either justifying murder on ideological grounds or defending the establishment in the name of sentimentality or irresponsible judgement, are dilemmas that we can cut across—they are dilemmas which the Christian can run roughshod over, thanks to their freedom in Christ.
In that sense, we proceed:
“Thou shalt not kill.” (Exodus 20:13)
Ellul on Violence
Following Kierkegaard’s approach to philosophy, Jacques Ellul attempted to work out a “two-tiered” approach to morality that would evade simply declaring what we want to do as if that was in some way sufficient for establishing what is and is not moral. That is, only by recognising that moral ideals are, indeed, ideal can we proceed towards the point where we find that reality, our actual nature of existing individuals, must rise up to ideality in a choice which we are guided towards and must choose to fulfil. If we are going to assert that morality is objective, then we must be able to think and talk about it objectively; only from that position can we begin to think about how that could be expressed subjectively.
This all becomes balanced in the realisation that the one who does not know Christ’s voice can’t recognise this need to rise from the simple fact of received reality, in its apparent determinism and hopelessness; only the Christian can act as the light and salt of the world, that both illuminates the path to those who cannot see2 and provides the taste to a world without it3. Contra the Bakuninist or Marxist pragmatism that all morality is socially and temporally relative, ergo we can do away with it, we endeavour for a more rigorous approach that doesn’t abandon morality on the grounds that it is, quite simply, rather difficult. Even if there is a necessary doubt that comes with asserting moral truth, we must make the leap in order to do what we ought to do.
In order to clarify the divergence of objective and subjective reflection, I shall now describe subjective reflection in its search back and inward into inwardness. At its highcst, inwardness in an existing subject is passion; truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth becomes a paradox is grounded precisely in itsrelation to an existing subject. In this way the one corresponds to the other. In forgetting that one is an existing subject, one loses passion, and in return, truth does not become a paradox; but the knowing subject shifts from being human to being a fantastical something, and truth become a fantastical object for its knowing.4
As Christians, we might venture to say that if there is nothing that one can do with one’s life to show God in the world, then one’s life is not worth living at all. Ellul’s two tiers can be understood as such:
Ideality, which is an attempt to think about the matters at hand as objectively as possible, and
Reality, which is the world according to our subjective desires.
The essential and the existential, the objective and the subjective. In a sense, we are close to the Kierkegaardian practice of deliberation.
The point here is not to create a kind of “dualist” understanding of the world around us, but rather to expose the twin failures that we can fall into: either indulging ourselves in “imagination”5, whereby we allow ourselves to be overcome by the seemingly random flux of our lives and raise ourselves up over this flow that is outside the bounds of human control by imposing an ideal system onto it or reducing ourselves to fatalist and physicalist “bags of utility”6, whereby we stand like Zeno of Alea and insist that all movement is impossible, all change in mere reality acting upon us—to escape these traps requires a touch more sophistication in how we think about the world. In either direction, we find an embarrassing idealism that tries to rend reality into the categories we demand of it. This distinction runs deep through all of S. K.’s work, meaning that the implied division in Ellul’s socio-political writings is clear when we learn to read him through a Kierkegaardian lens: the Climacan insistence that “[i]mmediacy is reality; language is ideality; consciousness is contradiction [Modsigelse]”7 is realised in Ellul’s emphasis throughout his corpus on consciousness and mediating judgement that finds expression in authentic actions8; only in self-consciousness can we gain the ability to both do and think as we ought to do and think, but also that self-consciousness directed properly can deliver us to the position that we recognise this ought at all.
Conflating the objective and the subjective, the essential and the existential, for both thinkers, is a category error in attempting to make our interested, existing judgement calls into objective moral principles; it is only when we can bring them into agreement without degrading either that we can adopt a “realist” approach to philosophy9. Otherwise, we either get caught up in the hopelessness of repugnant reductive physicalism or the obnoxious idealist daydreaming of the classical utopian. A conscious and situated understanding of “the world as it is” is necessary for the actual application of moral ideals—and, indeed, grants us freedom from ideological pressures, both Christian and otherwise. By deciding to stick to moral principles in spite of what we know about the world, we gain “freedom from” the necessity of ideological pressures, i.e., freedom is found in actually having hard boundaries that we don’t cross, but also that we might make mistakes in which hard boundaries we set.
The Laws of Violence
Ellul, in Violence, identifies that violence follows five different rules of practical necessity. They are as follows:
Continuity10, i.e., all violence simply leads to further violent acts until a “brake” is applied in dialogue or patience.
Reciprocity11, i.e., the use of violence not only justifies but invites the other to use violence; wielding the sword against the neighbour is to draw the neighbour towards sin.
Sameness12, i.e., in condoning one form of violence, they condone all forms of violence; there is no higher ground, only propaganda that drags everyone down.
Violence begets violence13, i.e., no government has ever granted liberty or freedom to its people after using violence to seize power.
Self-justifying14, i.e., the use of violence is always justified through ideological means by the one intending to use violence.
While each of these factors demands some serious investigation, the most important for this question is that violence is self-justifying.
Violence is necessarily self-justifying in that groups or individuals willing to use violence to achieve their goals will always have an ideological justification for their violent acts that appeal to whoever it is that also wants to use violence; if we have decided that “murder is wrong” as an ideal abstraction (and, of course, there are a variety of religious and secular reasons to suppose this), then we will find that people who want to do away with this principle in particular situations are showing their ideological self-justification. In that sense, the subjective judgement of the ideologue clouds and does away with moral ideals—even though murder is wrong, etc., I am justified to undermine this moral principle because of my goals, my suffering, my perception of x, etc. But, to add a layer of nuance, we should not assume this is Ellul or S. K. disavowing the subjective aspect in the moral decision—in fact, the very opposite. This is a disavowal of an inappropriate subjectivity, in which it becomes “untruth”15.
Mehl illuminates us:
“To appoach matters from the subjective side, from the side of the moral and spiritual agent, rather than the theoretical observer, is not an irrationalism but an effort to expand the bounds of reason's employent into the existential and psychological.”16
Violence encourages the development of a false subjectivity, where the individual is swept up in ideology against themselves. In this position, it is impossible to expand one’s bounds of reason to include the existential and the psychological as the will to violence, the will to force oneself qua the genius onto the other, undercuts any capacity to think categorically and objectively in the practical demands of becoming the victor in the ideological, subjective situation. To genuinely approach the situation as a responsible subjective agent contra the objective situation requires the responsible, subjective appropriation of moral “contours” to our existence. While it might seem reasonable to entertain the “noncognitivist” position in abstraction, when life drives forward as if drawn by horses and we are forced to seize the reigns, there is no possibility to deny the “weight” of moral “contours” on our forms of life; to make any sense of what is going on around us, we must be prepared to hold boundaries that cannot be overridden through a new, faddish approach to moral thought—or, if we believe such things exist, “prudential oughts”—that run roughshod over the essential core that makes up the grammar for our consistent development of character. Otherwise, we are like loose papers in the wind—prone to any and all prevailing gusts and lacking any ballast to root us17.
Morality is discarded in favour of the “practically necessary” show of force. This is why many Christians can be convinced that violence is a legitimate tool for them when they take a “God on our side” perspective18—seeing the failures of the interindividual approach of Christian love, the “Christian social ethic” swears to defend the poor en masse; the default protection for the poor is violence, so they accept violence.19 Ideology is adopted through the backdoor, as it so often is; violence becomes the mode of Christendom and Christ is gifted His cult of personality. Pacifism, while not a sufficient descriptor of the position, does seem to be a step in the correct direction.
In this terrible world, but not of it
For Ellul, he starts from the position that the world is contingently a bad place and violence is practically necessary, i.e., there are no societies which have done away with violence20. Regardless of whether we start from Christian premises or not, it seems fairly uncontroversial to say “the world is clearly not omnibenevolent,” but, rather, beset with violence that seems to roll over and over. Remember, my reader, that this is one of the Ellulian laws of violence: violence begets violence. The only thing that violence leads to is more violence, so the social murder of the poor leads to a violent assassination of the rich (see parallels to the Russian “bomb-chuckers”), which leads to the violent oppression of the poor through the captured state, which leads to rioting by the poor, and so on and so on—for Ellul, we’re now in a stage where we are awaiting a violent response against whoever is the unfortunate target in the situation-to-come. This, again, is the practical necessity of the world: the tit-for-tat use of violence across ideological boundaries.21
It is important to know that this practical necessity undermines all moral principles—when we become ideologically motivated, everything becomes possible within the bounds of the ideology; if they are ideologically inconvenient, they will be discarded. This, to be clear, is the very opposite of non-ideological moral principles, where they first operate through the denial of certain actions before empowering others towards a particular τέλος. As Kierkegaard put it, the idea of ethics becomes “paper money” in that it the ideological figureheads are moral in ideality, but readily do away with that ideality when a challenge appears.
The either/or
So, Ellul leaves us with two choices: either adopt a moral stance into our subjective existences, allowing for the “contours” of our forms of life to drive up against the world as it both builds and destroys the world around us or reject morality outright and become ideological, yoking ourselves to “the Crowd” in order to willfully mistake the reckless abandon of “untruthful” subjectivity for the passionate “holding oneself back” [at holde igjen paa sig selv]22 of “truthful” subjectivity.
Anyone who justifies murder is letting subjective matters cloud their judgement, caught up in the temporary problems that afflict us in our particular subjective experiences; anyone surprised that this kind of thing would happen is learning how difficult it is to hold to moral principles, especially when one does not hold close the idea that creation is redeemed and that life is transfigured in the body of Christ. In a sense, to judge the aesthete for their crime is to judge those who “know not what they do”—the ideologue is completely overtaken by the temporal and mistakes the apparent “truth” of contingency for the truth of eternity. “Someone who has chosen to stand before God... knows that if he rebels, God is still there to judge him”23, but the aesthete is not aware. Murder is a viable tool towards political ends because the aesthete is forced to view the political as “the interesting”, which then constitutes the entire horizon of their worldview.
Postscript
My reader, now is the time for me to eradicate your hope entirely. This world, the world, doesn’t understand the position above and won’t understand it; the world cannot be reconciled with Christ as only humanity can find rest in Him24. That there could be a path that doesn’t demand violence from us is unthinkable for those who have not found freedom in Christ, ergo to demand that the world abandon violence is a category error of the highest kind.
To treat the world, largely aesthetic in its perspective and constantly impressed with large numbers and demanding apparent proof before their eyes, as if it could understand the ethical-religious orientation that all is a failure to understand Christ’s dichotomy in John 17—there is an infinite qualitative difference, i.e., a transfiguration, between the aesthetic or the ethical and the ethical-religious. Only by ascending to ethical-religious perspective can one learn to trust in Christ, to trust in His guidance, and to trust that it is through Him and Him alone that salvation comes. To expect the world to understand this is unfettered arrogance, to assume that Christ’s lament “I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world” (John 17:14) was a problem that He simply wasn’t clever enough to figure out—unlike us, with our neo-foundationalism! Lord Almighty, All-Knowing and All-Powerful, why didn’t you simply look into the future and see that have reduced this qualitative difference to a series of elaborate syllogisms?
Regardless of who we are or who we have been, the Christian path to freedom is found in the unconditional adherence in faith to Christ’s freedom-granting teachings. While we might turn to the Sermon on the Mount or the parables, we will look to Paul:
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. (Galatians 5:16)
We should remind ourselves here, my reader, that people don’t like to be told how to act. The dangerous temptation to preach blood and fury at the faithful is one best resisted. The Law, brought through into the ethical-religious, is no longer an imposition, no longer the curse that hangs over humanity; it is the method for letting out steam, for releasing the pressure, for finding freedom in the negative spaces of a world which makes violence necessary to survive. Where the secular world demands a blood sacrifice at the altar of the machine, the Lord roars forward like a whisper in the desert and brings the bones of the dead back to life—“you shall not kill” implies “you can live in this world and not kill”; “you shall love your neighbour” implies “you can love your neighbour, whoever they are”.
Ideological necessity is found exposed; there is always another choice we can make by listening to that bone-crushing quietness—time stops and Christ speaks in the fullness of “the moment”25: there is no essential Christian life and no essential way for the Christian to act as the Christian is free.
Despite the particular concrete event that this was written about was, indeed, particular and concrete, I imagine that this will also apply to other high-profile cases of violence.
“You always need one more light positively to identify another. Imagine it quite dark and then one point of light appears; you would be quite unable to place it, since no spatial relation can be made out in the dark. Only when one more light appears can you fix the place of the first, in relation to it.” JP I A1
“I cannot endure my life any longer. I loathe exstence; it is insipid, without salt or meaning. Even if I were hungrier than Pierrot, I hope I would not stoop to eating the explanation people offer.” Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, p. 59, [C. Constantius]/[J. Climacus], ed. M. G. Piety
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 73, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie
Sickness Unto Death, p. 16, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard
Ibid., p. 43
Johannes Climacus, or, De Omnibus dubitandum est, p. 168, [J. Climacus]
The Technological Society, p. 20, J. Ellul
Money & Power, p. 24, J. Ellul
Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, p. 94, J. Ellul
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 97
Ibid., p. 100
Ibid., p. 103
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 207, [J. Climacus], tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie
“Postscript to Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge”, P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 38, ed. J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd
“Command the seaman to sail without ballast—he capsizes; let the generation, let every individual in it try to exist without the unconditional it is and remains a vortex.” "On My Work as an Author" in The Point of View, p. 19, S. Kierkegaard
The examples here are replete—for the sake of antagonising you for my own amusement, my reader, I will present three examples: George W. Bush, justifying the use of violence in the wake of 9/11; the Nazi theologians like Hirsch, justifying the Messianic figure of Hitler towards an antisemitic and ultranationalist telos; and the liberation theologians, justifying the appropriation of material wealth through pseudo-Marxist syncretism. If we are to take Leviticus 19:5 (“You shall not change your opinion whether your brother is rich or poor”) and the “infinite qualitative difference” between humanity and God seriously, we should understand the temptation of humanly-derived, temporally-captured, ideological justifications.
Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective p. 34, J. Ellul
Ibid., p. 127
While appeals to class differences do lead to generally satisfactory social analysis in many respects, the Marxist notion of a proletariat and a bourgeoisie is far too simplistic for a real-world consciousness. When we begin to assign them qualities or teleological interests, we create the idea of “the proletariat” that hangs over the proletariat, etc. See “Absolutely relating to the relative”.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 165, [J. Climacus], tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie
Sickness Unto Death, p. 13, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard
Violence: Reflections on a Christian Perspective, p. 73-74, J. Ellul
“Patience in Expectancy - Luke 2:33-40 (The Sunday After Christmas)”, from Two Upbuilding Discourses, 1844 in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 219, S. Kierkegaard