Massimo Lollini

Heraclitus and current ideas of war and peace

In a recent post on this blog, I reflected on the similarities between the international situation created by the current war in Ukraine and the one that gave rise to the First World War at the beginning of the last century. After one year, the more recent events in the Middle East, with the dramatic resurgence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, only confirm what I wrote in that post. Following Christopher Clark’s insights on how Europe went to war in 1914, I suggested the possibility that the escalation in ongoing conflicts and violent territorial controversies has the potential to give rise to a new world conflict, which, according to some, like Pope Francis, has already begun.

In a 2022 interview, Clark rejected the parallel between World War I and the war in Ukraine by emphasizing how differently the two wars began. However, the new conflict in the Middle East and its possible expansion suggest a progressive deterioration of the international situation characterized by an increasingly widespread, even if dispersed, war. As I write in November 2023, conflicts and wars are rising in Myanmar, Sudan, Niger, Gabon, and Azerbaijan. The point is that current politicians and the powers they represent behave like those Clark in his book defined as “sleepwalkers” at the dawn of the First World War, irresponsibly unaware of the possible catastrophic consequences of their choices and local conflicts. Clark himself, concluding his book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, draws a parallel between the 1914 political situation and the 2011-12 Eurozone financial crisis when “the political actors in the Eurozone crisis exploited the possibility of general catastrophe as leverage in securing their own specific advantages.” In this sense, he concludes, “The men of 1914 are our contemporaries” (555). And, I add, the new idea of war and peace that emerged during WW1 is impinging on us even if our historical context in some respects is different from the one that caused humanity to experience the brutality of the First World conflict.

How can we talk about peace in an international context like ours in which no national or supranational political authority has enough force and recognition for being legitimized and capable of inserting the war into a political-juridical context? To understand the new meaning and practicality of “peace,” one needs to consider it with the interpretation of war, as the two concepts are strictly intertwined and depend on each other. We are transformed into global citizens by the proliferation of media and witness wars and conflicts worldwide. There is the clear impression of living in one of those crucial historical moments when war’s dramatic gravity and ubiquity lead to inquiries into the deep meaning of words like “peace” and “war” as they seem to have lost their most acknowledged meaning. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (ca 535-475 BC) is a point of reference for what concerns the original meaning of such words that still have implications for us.

The philosopher Massimo Cacciari, in his 2016 essay “Il tramonto di padre Polemos” (The Twilight of Father Polemos), suggests going back to the root of war that he sees in the Greek word polemos, which Heraclitus connected to the Logos. The ancient philosopher understood Logos as reason, the discourse recognizing the profound true reality of things, their balance, proportion, and harmony. But for Heraclitus, the harmony identified by the Logos surpasses the doxa of shared or polar opinions and appears possible only in the unity of opposites brought about by polemos. In the deep, necessary, and rightful unity of distinctions and opposites that characterizes Logos, the war-polemos comes into play as the ordering and creative principle of Law, the Nomos, which, in a certain sense, opens the possibility of the peace discourse. But in this way, polemos, as a principle of peace, is inextricably tied to war, depends on it, and always expresses the presence of antitheses and contradictions. 

From this perspective, peace is not the removal or denial of conflict but the precarious harmony of opposites, something that happens within the conflict, which can continually degenerate into unilateral or reciprocal hubris, menacing the fruition of any form of equilibrium. This degenerative possibility is especially true in the wars we are witnessing today. These wars have set aside or entirely lost their political character; today, the polemos no longer has the rightful harmony of opposites as its horizon and appears irreducible to any form of economic and pragmatic rationality (Cacciari 120-123).

Let’s have a closer look at Heraclitus’s fragments on war. As we read in fragment 53, for him, the war was the “father of all and king of all (Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς), and some he (polemos-war) shows as gods, others as men; some makes slave and other free” (Heraclitus 245). In other words, Heraclitus considers polemos the necessary and legitimate origins of humans and gods alike in the continuous struggle that gives birth to them and which they develop in an ever-changing world dominated by strife. In fragment 80, Heraclitus develops his idea of war-polemos into a cosmic vision: “One must know that war is common and right is strife and that all things are happening by strife and necessity” (Heraclitus 238). Heraclitus asserts here that war is common to all human beings and all things. The keywords associated with war in this fragment are “strife,” “necessity,” and “right.” They show how, for Heraclitus, polemos was a universal principle to be recognized as necessary in its association with strife and right. It is precisely this “positive” role of polemos, as “father” capable of finding the whole in the continuous play of opposites, that is ending in the present historical situation as an effective vehicle for political solutions leading to a viable if not durable equilibrium or peace if the use of this word still makes sense.

What is emerging today is the paradox of never-ending, widespread, multipolar wars, even in the presence of international agreements and temporary cease-fires. In our present world set of circumstances, we can see how Heraclitus’ idea of polemos loses the possibility of absorbing the opposites and finding an even momentary unity or “peace.” Today, Heraclitus’ vision is not a philosophical abstraction but an actual political scenario following the end of the international liberal order that was implemented at the end of WW2 in a system of alliances and institutions that became increasingly precarious, ineffective, and untenable. But for some philosophers and historians, WWI was the event that radically changed the perception of war and peace, along with their comprehension and definition. The unprecedented, widespread, pervasive, and cruel nature of the First World conflict led to a new interpretation of war as something that could not be viewed from the point of view of peace, developing a perspective in which war was not only a historical but also a “cosmic” phenomenon. When the approximately 20 million military and civilian war deaths began to be counted, no hyperbole seemed too exaggerated.

Jan Patočka and the Twentieth Century as war

Jan Patočka (1907-1977), the Czech philosopher and author of critical essays on the philosophy of history from the point of view of existential phenomenology, was one the most vocal intellectuals in underlying the epochal nature of the First World Conflict. In one of his last articles entitled “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War” (1976), he criticized all the explanations of the origin of WWI given from a historical point of view conditioned by the idea of “peace”:

“All of them –whether they view the war as a battle between the Germanic and the Slavic elements, as an imperialist conflict engendered by the last stage of capitalism, as a consequence of exaggerated modern subjectivism which the war violently objectified, or as a struggle between democracy and theocracy – have one thing in common: they all view war from the perspective of peace, of day, and of life, excluding the dark side of night” (116).

In other words, Patočka was convinced that WWI has always been interpreted based on nineteenth-century anthropocentric ideas, as an interruption of the continuum of history characterized by peace, progress, and the conviction that there exists no factual, objective sense of the world but that humans can impose such a sense with power and force (117). To the humans who entered the conflict (and to the interpreters of such conflict) was extraneous the idea that war itself might have the power to interpret and confer meaning. This anthropocentrism is yet another example of their sleepwalking.

The politicians and nations who started the conflict were convinced to control the war and have the power to end it quickly. The events unexpectedly and dramatically contradicted this presumption. The war lasted a few years and had repercussions, leading to new conflicts throughout the century and beyond. In Patočka’s analysis, war appears under the dominion of the “Force,” an extraordinary complex of accumulation of energies that lasted since immemorial time and finally found a way to explode in historical time in the First World conflict. Humans and nations in this extraordinary event are mere transmitters of signals coming from the “Force.” On the one hand, the embodiments of this overwhelming force and icons of such a war are the techno-scientific apparatus of the total mobilization incarnated above all by Germany. On the other, the frontline where the soldiers of every nation at war were confined for years.

The idea of total mobilization, which Patočka articulates in dialogue with Ernst Jünger (1885-1998), is the main characteristic of war as the historical essence of the twentieth century. It does point neither to an organization –something that individuals, nations, or states govern– nor to a measure to be carried out by humans. It is something that is accomplished by itself; it is, in war as in peace, the expression of the mysterious and inexorable law to which the techno-scientific age of the masses and machines delivers the individuals and the nations. On the other hand, the experience of the front, which Patočka describes in dialogue with Teilhard de Chardin, does not represent a momentary trauma but a fundamental and permanent mutation of human existence. Paradoxically, to be on the frontline and trenches of WWI, even for a few days, however terrible and dramatic, was a “profoundly and mysteriously positive experience,” consisting of a feeling of meaningfulness and the attempt at articulating it in words. This feeling has different phases and depths which play an important role in subsequent years:

“The first phase is the experience of senselessness and of intolerable dread. The front is absurdity par excellence. That which had been only suspected has materialized: what is most precious is mercilessly torn to shreds. War proves ad oculos that the world is perfectly ripe for destruction.”
(120)

In the WWI trenches, the individuals had to face the shattered world. In the following years, upon returning home, the same individuals are re-captured by the same forces of that broken world and mobilized for a new struggle: the war against wars. In this way, the senselessness of life and war experienced in the trenches ends, and humans look for meaning in a new war, a war against wars. As H.R. Wells (1866-1946) writes in his The War That Will End War (1914), the First World Conflict was conceptualized early as the “War to end War” from the point of view of a peace eventually possible only with the defeat of the Central Powers and German militarism. For Patočka, this idea of peace is not credible or sustainable, even when, in 1917, the Russian Revolution introduced the idea of a revolutionary war to end the war. From that time, the war was waged by waiting and counting on the mutual weakening or even destruction of the opponents, who were condemned to a struggle for life and death. The exhaustion of one and the victory of the other would become a mere tactical moment of another battle; the victory will only be an appearance that eventually will lead to future defeat, which will be the incubator of new struggles. For Patočka, and this is a crucial point, a victorious peace is a pure “illusion.” In such a “peace,” the victor morally decays; what really triumphs in this war for reciprocal destruction is “Force,” which imposes its yoke on both victors and defeated, and peace becomes a part of the continuous war. (121)

For Patočka, “peace” can become the will and instrument of war only when the protagonists live under the “rule of day” and remain attached to their career, family, and all the values and ideals that are considered essential in ordinary life. In this way, they reify and alienate themselves in the name of the possibilities they fear losing. This circumstance differs significantly from the soldiers who fought in the trenches and the front of WWI, experiencing what Patočka calls the “night” of life. Having lost everything that pertains to normal life, they become “free” from all interests of life and peace: what Patočka calls the interests ruled by the day. Their experience of loss is as absolute as the “freedom” they experience. In this context, “the sacrifice of lives loses its meaning as an avenue toward programs of construction, progress, enhanced and expanded life possibilities and instead acquires a meaning exclusively in and of itself” (122). In other words, the war starts to be perceived for what it is, an absolute experience whose meaning cannot be depended on anything else, so much so on peace.

Patočka argues that, unfortunately, this extraordinary experience –which can end the fascination with war so prevalent in the twentieth century and open the road to an authentic discussion on the meaning of peace– did not have any impact on the history of last century, which continues to be a prisoner of the reification of the “day” and consequently the obsession and compulsion toward war. In this context, it is hard to understand and admit that war incorporates “peace” within itself through various attempts of demobilization. For Patočka, the rule of the day makes it difficult to discern whether these attempts to find agreements in reducing the military expenses are genuine or, on the contrary, result in nothing more than leading to a permanent war, which is establishing itself through “peaceful” means.

The stalemate of the peace discourse can be challenged and modified only by bringing the “experience of the front” to bear history, becoming a historical factor. Only the “solidarity of the shattered“, the consensus of those who experienced the front and know about the meaning of life and death, can see that “there is a limit to everyday, to its life and its ‘peace'” (125). The day and the life cannot exist without releasing “Force.” On the contrary, “The solidarity of the shattered can say ‘No’ to mobilizations which eternalize the state of war. It will not offer positive programs but will, as Socrates’ daimonion, speak in warnings. It shall create a spiritual atmosphere and become a spiritual power that will impose certain limitations on the warring world” (ibi).

Patočka concludes his essay with a significant reference to Heraclitus’s vision of war, which he connects with the vision that emerged from Teilhard’s and Jünger’s experience of the WW1 front. He underlines that Heraclitus “formulated the idea of war as the divine law which nourishes all that is human” (126). The divine aspect of war did not simply consist of the heroes engaged in it trying to push the limits of human capacities to conquer everlasting fame among mortal men. The divine element brought about by polemos was the comprehension that war ” is nothing one-sided” and, on the contrary, “it unites rather than divides the mutual enemies.” In this perspective, the opposing enemies, in the end, find unity; they become “wholes” in the shattering of everyday interests and touching upon something primordial that escapes ordinary human life, “what is eternal in everything, upon the source of all being, upon what thus is divine.” (ibi) This realization, Patočka concludes, was also the outcome of the experience of the front for Teilhard and Jünger.

The sources for a comprehensive re-examination of the meaning of “war” and “peace” that we have considered so far are mainly philosophical. But it is essential to see that historians themselves are re-examining the meaning and lengths of the Twentieth-century wars and realizing how the idea of peace as separated from war is untenable in our time. From this point of view, the Versailles “peace” that was supposed to end the First World War imposing too harsh conditions on Germany set the stage for World War Two. In this regard, the volumes 1914 -1945. L’Italia nella guerra europea dei trent’anni, (1914-1915 Italy in the Thirty Years European War) curated by Simone Neri Serneri, and, in a broader viewpoint, El mundo en llamas: La larga guerra 1914-1945 (The World in Flames: The Long War 1914-1945) by Marina Amaral and Dan Jones, consider the period that goes from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, a “long war” that not only included the First and the Second World War but all the conflicts that spotted the interwar period, such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

The historical approach, attentive to the intersection of war and peace in the Twentieth century, sheds light on what we are experiencing today and helps us understand why Pope Francis says we are already living through the Third World War. Furthermore, the new vision of the wars of the last century and their connection with the wars we are experiencing today is reinforced by geopolitical scholars such as Lucio Caracciolo, who considers the actual conflicts as the result of questions left unsolved by the First World conflict. He writes, “The actual geopolitical antagonisms can be configured as wars of succession for hegemony in the territories evacuated by the four European empires that collapsed in World War One” (47). He concludes, “The scars provoked by World War One were never sutured … The First World War continues to irradiate into contemporary Europe” (58).

The witness and the night of the war

The question at the center of this post (How can we talk about peace?) remains open. For sure, there are different ways of talking about peace. In dialogue with ancient philosopher Heraclitus and contemporary philosophers Cacciari and Patočka, I have introduced so far two different and opposite points of view. On the one hand, for those who consider peace in antagonism with war, peace is the goal from which to interpret war. This perspective on peace is prevalent in world culture and politics today. Still, it is ineffective in grasping the true nature of current wars and ultimately works in the direction of the existing conflicts, preparing for new ones, eventually in the form of a “war to end wars.” On the other hand, the second view on peace does not consider it as separate from war. In this light, war and conflicts are part of the human condition and have to be evaluated and presented for what they are: as something extremely dangerous and destructive that is not in complete human control, rather than a reality simply governable by humans, as an interruption of the historical continuum characterized by peace. The second view is not interested in finding the “causes” of the wars, taking sides, and perpetuating the cycle of war. If we want to consider the war in itself for what it really is, it is necessary to listen to the voices of those who fought in the war and touched the bottom in the trenches and the frontline.

The question of how we can talk about peace then gives way to another crucial question: How can we have the witnesses who experienced the night of the war bear on history? I have tried to address this question in my 2001 book Il Vuoto della Forma: Scrittura, Testimonianza e Verità (The Emptiness of Form: Writing, Testimony and Truth). In closing this post, I would like to mention an Italian witness of WWI I have studied in that publication, Renato Serra (1884-1915). He was an important Italian writer and literary critic in the early twentieth century who died in the trenches of WWI. Enlisted, with the rank of lieutenant, in the 11th Infantry Regiment of the “Casale” Brigade, he fought with his unit in the Podgora sector, near Gorizia, Italy, participating in the Second and Third Battles of the Isonzo. During the latter, on July 20, 1915, he was killed in combat on Mount Podgora in Gorizia, aged only 31.

He started his groundbreaking reflection on how to represent war in a short note, Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia (1912; On the Departure of a Group of Soldiers for Libya), he wrote commenting on the departure of a group of Italian soldiers going to fight in Libya in the name of Italian colonialism. Serra is skeptical precisely about the possibility of describing a war with all the violence implied in it through ordinary discourses, nationalist propaganda, and the ordinary rhetoric of history and literature. The truth about war, he holds, cannot be found in the news, literary writings, or history books: it can only be witnessed by those who died in the war, by those who do not return home to recount the dramatic events in which they were participating. He writes, “No one can tell. No one knows. Those who return alive, ruined and stunned by the long months of war, will know less than those who do not return, lying in the sand” (523).

In this brief writing on the Departure of a group of soldiers to Libya, Serra’s speculative aptitude presents one of its most lucid and penetrating insights. His discussion of the testimony anticipates in an exemplary fashion what other witnesses will see more clearly at the height of the great historical tragedies of the twentieth century. It is appropriate to recall in this context how, in his statement, Serra significantly foresees the discourse on the testimony carried out by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved (1985) when he writes that the real witnesses of the Shoah are the “submerged,” those who did not return to recount the horror that buried them. Likewise, when he writes that every testimony bears witness only to itself, “Every testimony bears witness only to itself; to its own moment, its own origin, its own end, and nothing else” (Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia, 532), Serra foretells the words of another great poet and witness to the Shoah, Paul Celan, when he writes, “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen” (62; No one bears witness for the witness). A revealing and revering silence surrounds these witnesses’ noble and unique voices; their words should be taken for what they are, fully condemning any rhetorical or political appropriation of events such as wars or “catastrophes” such as the Sohah.

Serra communicates his decision to participate in WWI in one of the twentieth century’s most original and fascinating essays, Esame di coscienza di un letterato (1915; Examination of conscience of a man of letters). His choice has deep ethical motivation and focuses on detachment from action and its fruits and ends up criticizing the root of the political discourse, which remains unable to disengage itself from words such as “fatherland,” “democracy,” and “freedom,” words that for Serra become abstract entities devoid of foundation in front of the event and the true nature of the war. Serra’s analysis reveals the existential emptiness within himself in front of what he perceives as an absolute event; the emptiness for him becomes an ethical choice rather than a sign of pure passivity or nihilism. It goes hand in hand with emptying the meaning of any validation of the war. In his choice, war acquires a value in itself, losing all historical-rational motivations. War becomes an event outside of time as an expression of the Heraclitean flow that is frightening and unescapable, in front of which the human subject feels all his own precariousness. Serra speaks of his fear of this Heraclitean flow at the end of Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia (534). In this perspective, at the end of the Esame di coscienza di un letterato, he connects war to the eternal and conflictual unity of the universe, finding a concrete expression in his will to live and choice to participate in the war. Concentrating on life’s essential and bodily dimensions in Serra’s examination of conscience leads to recognizing the fundamental Force dominating the universe conveyed by the body’s vital passion. In Serra’s vocabulary, “Force” takes the name of Schopenhauer’s “Will.”

In words that directly recall Schopenhauer’s will to life, Serra writes: “To live we want and not to die, even if we are touched by what which cannot be escaped with the body, and which is always life when we meet it while walking on our way” (142). Ultimately, these words confirm the appreciation of what the witnesses evoked by Patočka perceived as a more-than-human reality, entitling the realization of war as an elemental dimension of human life. The Schopenhauerian idea of the universe as an ordered conflictual unity we see at play here goes along with Heraclitus’ thesis that agonistic relations universally inhere. For Serra, both the victors and the defeated are subjected to this Force, and the war will not change anything in human history. In this perspective he decides to walk along with the other human beings going to fight in the war even if they do not know why (144-145). In the letters from the front and in the Trench Diary, Serra wants to appreciate the “bare and mute reality” of the war. Private Serra quickly gets used to the noises of the war and willingly loses himself in landscape impressions, which absorb him in a provisional and superficial manner. However, an impressive state of mind that cannot be eluded or even described breaks out of these fleeting moments. It is a sensation
of “something deeper, which irresistibly transports everyone…” (Letter to Giovanni Lazzarini, July 14 1915, p.600).

There is no writing for these moments and these sensations that cannot reach the consistency of the “fact.” Not even Tolstoi was able to give a complete representation of these instants in which reality appears to Serra “naked and silent” and in which the war seems dominated by “something
deeper,” a “force” that takes hold of all combatants. There are no names for this Force and no works of art or literary masterpieces in which it has found adequate expression, except for the oriental epic, the Iliad, the tragedies of Aeschylus, and a few others, as Simone Weil wrote. These works express in an unsurpassed manner “the subordination of the human soul to Force,” the “danger of destruction” continually suspended on human life, the profound meaning of “human misery” which can only shine through in extreme moments emerging from the armor of lies and recognizing the “rule of
Force” (Weil, 32 and ff.).

If, in closing, I were to summarize the notion of peace and war that emerges from the voices of those who, in different ways and historical moments, touched the bottom of the violence of the twentieth century, I should write that their testimony bears witness to the “night of the war,” to use Patočka words, and in so doing their testimony opens the road to an authentic peace discourse. In the next post on Homer and the Axial Age sages, I will further reflect on the idea of Force that emerges in Heraclitus as an expression of polemos and on its ancient and modern re-articulations. The overarching question of the new post will still be, “How can we talk about peace?”

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—.”Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia.” Scritti di Renato Serra. G. De Robertis and A.Grilli Editors. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1958. pp.521-534.

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