I once said, “Violent revolution is unreasonable”—because “violence” is always non-rational, and revolution is always illegal. Yet this gives rise to a still more severe problem: if violence may be lawful, then how is the rationality of law possible?
We know that laws are made by the government (whether that so-called government represents God, the emperor, or all citizens), and the implementation of law often has to appeal to violence. It is hard to imagine a rule-of-law society maintained without violent institutions such as police and prisons. Even if a social order established without bodily violent sanctions is at least conceivable in theory, once a public “law” is instituted, it must rely on irrational coercive force—such as bodily violence or disguised forms of violence—in order to be maintained.
What is meant here by “public law” includes not only the laws of an entire community, but even a mere “three articles of agreement” between two people. As long as one hopes to give “law” some sort of “enforceability,” one must appeal to force.
Opposed to “public” law is private law, or rather one’s own law: the “law” in “giving oneself law” and “human beings giving law to nature.” The concept of such “law” is contiguous with reason. When we inquire into the “rationality” of something, we often invoke a system of rules as a reference, thereby transforming the question of rationality into one of conformity to rules, that is, legality. The system of rules invoked here may be public ethics or axioms, or it may be new principles sorted out and revised by oneself. Yet reason is, after all, free. Even when we are citing and thinking, we always use public language, but the one who finally “judges” is still the free individual. The public platform merely provides a context and background for discussion; it does not provide an ultimate, absolute verdict. That is to say, as far as the use of reason is concerned, the “final right of interpretation” belongs to every free individual; there is no public standard of judgment.
The traditional conflation of reason and law has led “reason” to be deeply politicized. People always shy away from freedom, always imagining that the question of rationality has a conclusion unrelated to themselves, completely objective, and one that can and should be recognized by everyone. But how is a public standard of judgment to be confirmed? In other words, where does the authority of reason come from? Is it the classics? Revelation? The emperor? A privileged class? Or the “majority”? In sum, a certain specific “reason” acquires authority with the help of a particular power bloc, while that particular power bloc, together with the entire social order, in turn acquires rationality in the name of “reason.”
No wonder postmodernism wants to rebel against reason and to extol “anarchism.” Yet unlike postmodernism, which rejects both reason and the rule of law, I want to preserve both reason and law, though it is imperative to limit the usurpation of reason—to its attempt to seek the authority of reason outside itself.
Since reason can ultimately only depend on itself, once an agreement by law involves another rational individual outside oneself, then reason is no longer sufficient to solve the problem. For example, A and B agree that when A occurs, B must be done. But exactly when can one clearly judge and say, “A has occurred”? And how is one to judge when “B has been completed”? All of this requires “understanding,” all of this requires discrimination. But what sort of understanding is correct? Once A and B’s understandings diverge—one says he is abiding by the agreement, the other says he has violated it—how can one determine who is right and who is wrong? Zhuangzi’s “debate without victory” has long since made this clear: one cannot find an objective judgment independent of all participants.
If disputes were merely about discussing abstruse principles and talking philosophy, that would be one thing; each side could hold its own view and simply respect the other. Yet very often disputes are intimately bound up with the vital interests of all sides. After all, human beings can hardly survive detached from others; to live on, one must inevitably become entangled with other people’s lives, and disagreements are unavoidable. The uniqueness of human beings as rational creatures lies in the fact that they are actually capable of resolving conflicts of interest through speech (at the cost, however, that speech can likewise provoke bodily struggle); animals, by contrast, always rely on force to end conflict. Regrettably, the efficacy of reason is, after all, extremely limited. As noted above, unless one participant is “convinced,” so that reconciliation is achieved with full conviction, neither argument nor agreement by law is sufficient to ultimately resolve the disagreement.
Some people take the force that resolves disagreements to be “(political) power.” They discover that reason often plays the role of eliminating disagreement, and also discover that those in power often use reason to legitimize their own power, and so they equate reason with power. In fact, this is inappropriate. If power is defined as the force by which one side makes another submit, then reason is indeed a certain form of power; nevertheless, power is by no means identical with reason. Rather, the use of force arises out of the necessity of confronting the limits of the power of reason, while common life nonetheless must continue and this real situation must be maintained. When disagreements among the parties are still difficult to clarify by reason, and those disagreements obstruct the continuation of an orderly common life, one has no choice but to resort to irrational force to bring things to an end. Metaphysical disputation can go on endlessly, yet the dispute over what we should do tomorrow must be resolved today. The world of ideas allows all kinds of possibilities, whereas the real world has only one. As for whether tomorrow we do something or do not do it—even if the dispute over this issue cannot cease until next year, the outcome of the matter will in any case be decided tomorrow, and after that, whether one accepts it in reason or not, one will have no choice but to bear the established fact. The force that compels those who cannot accept this truth to nevertheless bear this result is force (power, violence).
A good social system should encourage people, first and foremost, to use reason to resolve disagreements, and at no time should it use force to prohibit rational speculation (why is this more rational? If you raise the question in speech, then you are already asking for disagreement to be resolved by reason; if you do not ask for disagreement to be resolved by reason, then do not ask why). But no matter how good a society may be, it cannot escape the real limits of human reason. And what makes up for the limits of reason so as to preserve the order of intercourse is all kinds of force. In a democratic society, law and its related institutions are the principal source of this force.
Should we simply renounce any public institutions of force altogether? Such a society is by no means wholly unimaginable. However, if such an anarchic system can still maintain good order, then it requires people to be sufficiently respectful of reason—that is to say, more people must be willing to resolve disagreements through rational persuasion rather than violent suppression, and reason must also often be able to function effectively. But many anarchists also despise reason; in such a society, lacking both reason and force, by what means are disagreements to be resolved? You may ask: why is order needed? Why must disagreements be resolved? The answer is that this is a practical necessity of human survival. Whether this is reasonable or not, people still need to live together harmoniously with others; yet the widespread existence of disagreement is also an unavoidable reality of human survival. Therefore people always need to resort to force; this is not because it is reasonable, but merely because it is an inescapable necessity. Once public order is dismantled, it will not lead to a reduction in violence. People may resort to even more violence, and the sources of violence will be entirely out of control,
Which system is better? Imperial autocracy? Democratic rule of law? Anarchy? This too is probably a dispute with “no victory through debate.” What I want to emphasize is this: first, when I am defending the rationality of a society governed by law, I am not saying that such rationality is absolute. You may likewise defend autocracy or other systems such as anarchy, and if neither side can extricate itself from contradiction or if no one is won over by conviction, then it is impossible to find some absolutely objective and neutral standard of judgment to decide which society is more rational. If the transition from one society to another is to rely on a sudden revolution, then that revolution must be “violent”; second, when I am defending the rationality of a society governed by law, this does not mean that I believe all the means used in the operation of such a society are also “rational”; third, when I say that violent sanctions, as one of the means used for a society governed by law to function, are not rational, I do not mean that “using violence as a means” is irrational (just as a computer, as a tool, is without wisdom, whereas choosing to use the computer as a tool at the appropriate moment is wise (supplementary note: this analogy is not very apt; the distinction here is quite subtle: to appeal to violence is precisely to temporarily abandon reason, and so violence is irrational; but exactly when and in what manner one must abandon reason is a question that can be argued about. Some things, through rational self-reflection, are confirmed to lie outside reason’s capacity, and yet must be done for the sake of some purpose; then, in the absence of any further appeal to reason, resorting to violence—the only feasible means—is rational, but this rationality is heteronomous, unlike the rationality of reason itself, which is autonomous: that is to say, violence must here be regarded as the means of achieving some end that reason cannot achieve before one can speak of rationality at all. In the final analysis, this kind of rationality is a defense of utilitarian efficacy))), but rather that violence itself does not contain rationality; that is to say, the consistency achieved with the help of violence does not thereby acquire rationality. Finally, reason cannot legitimize violence; on the contrary, it is precisely when reason fails that one resorts to violence.
September 9, 2008
Latest comments
- Gu Du
2008-09-10 14:34:06
A note on the note on the note: what exactly do “heteronomous rationality” and “autonomous rationality” mean? Let me give another example. Suppose I want to kill someone, and I have a stone and a pillow at hand. Then the action of raising the stone in my hand and throwing it at the other person is, relative to the end of killing, rational and intelligible; whereas if, in order to kill, I instead pick up the pillow and throw it at the other person, that would be irrational. And this sort of rationality is only limited to whether a given action is appropriate as a means to the end of killing; but being rational as a means of killing certainly does not mean that smashing someone with a stone is rational in itself, and still less does it mean that the end of killing is rational. Such rationality needs to be justified by invoking an external rule (for example, an end), whereas the rational justification of that external rule (or end) itself is here temporarily suspended; that is to say, the rationality of the invoked rule itself is irrelevant to the judgment of this kind of rationality of the action. Hence one says that the invoked rule lies “outside” this discourse on rationality, and thus such rationality is called “heteronomous.” Correspondingly, “autonomous” rationality means that out of rational self-reflection, when one discusses autonomous rationality, the rules and ends invoked must also submit to rational reflection.
2008年9月10日 - Zhong Yan
2008-09-11 16:08:18 http://gumaojiang.ycool.com/
“Rather, violence itself does not contain rationality”—what kind of rationality is this rationality?
If it means conformity to the principles of animal nature, then I think violence is rational (on the premise that human beings are animals, though even if one does not regard human beings as ordinary animals, it can still be demonstrated).
The violence of animals is necessary to their survival, because no individual animal ever manifests no tendency or action toward violence; suppose an individual animal were in fact to lose this characteristic of violence—how could it cope with the threats posed by the various trophic levels above it? Negotiation? Imagine the “gentle” rabbit falling into the wolf’s mouth: does it choose violence, or negotiation and endurance?
In human society, regardless of period or type of society, violence has never existed apart from being a human characteristic. Even today, some human beings who are regarded as highly civilized still cannot do without disguised forms of violence—sports—and precisely because this form satisfies the human need for the release of hormones, violence happens to be the ancestor of sports and can satisfy the instinct for hormonal release. - Gu Du
2008-09-11 17:13:18
Actually, no matter how I put it, the key issue is what “rationality” means. The most basic meaning of “rationality,” in my view, is “makes sense,” but when one distinguishes it in detail, it becomes rather complicated.
Since you saw me say “violence itself does not contain rationality,” you should also have seen the context before that sentence, including my note and the note on the note; all of these can be said to be advance responses to arguments like yours. When I say that it does not “contain” rationality, I also mean that if violence can be called rational at all, then it certainly is not so “within” itself, but only “outside” itself, and this is the same as the distinction between “autonomous” and “heteronomous.”
The sentence immediately preceding my “rather, violence itself does not contain rationality” (skipping the parentheses) is precisely: “…does not mean that ‘using violence as a means’ is irrational,” and what you raised above is exactly this situation: you are defending violence as the necessary means of animal survival. Such a defense is of course possible; in fact, this article of mine is precisely hinting at defending the violent institutions of a rule-of-law society in a similar way. The key is to note the limits of this defense: since violence is justified as a necessary means of survival, once you can choose other means and achieve the goal of survival while avoiding violence as much as possible, then that additional violent behavior loses its support. - Gu Du
2008-09-11 17:25:43
Also, what I am discussing here is obviously ethical rationality, aimed at the “choice” behavior of rational beings, rather than natural events in a non-rational sense. With respect to natural events, one can of course discuss their conformity to laws and their rationality, but this is obviously different from discussion in the ethical sense.
For example, we know that an airplane dropped an atomic bomb, and based on its position and velocity, we calculate that it will explode over Hiroshima one minute later. If it does indeed explode over Hiroshima, then this event is “rational”; if it does not fall on Hiroshima but instead lands thousands of miles away, and if no error can be found anywhere, then the matter is irrational and does not make sense. But the “rationality” here of the atomic bomb exploding at some time and place is obviously an explanation in the sense of natural regularity, and it would by no means follow from this that the act of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is rational in the ethical sense. The boundary between these two kinds of discussion is very clear.
If one only considers the animality and natural nature of human beings, then one may also discuss the rationality of certain behaviors and the like, but such discussion does not directly lead to rationality in the ethical sense. This point should be made clear.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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