Abstract
This paper describes a class of social acts called “violent acts” and distinguishes them from damaging acts. The former are successfully performed if they are apprehended by the victim, while the latter, being not social, are successful only as long as the intended damage is realized. It is argued that violent acts, if successful, generate a social relation which include the aggressor, the victim and, if the concomitant damaging act is satisfied, the damage itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is difficult to avoid the use of gendered language in discussions of this sort, in which examples include one person’s actions toward another. Masculine personal pronouns have been chosen for this paper for the sake of consistency but should not be read as referring to anything beyond individual, hypothetical entities, or as having gender-related implications.
Positive law makes a distinction between “complete, but imperfect” and “impossible” attempts. Cf. “A complete, but imperfect, attempt occurs when an individual takes every act required to commit a crime and yet fails to succeed. An example is an individual firing a weapon and missing the intended victim. […] An impossible attempt […] arises where the perpetrator makes a mistake” Lippman 2010: p. 179. Cases of impossible or “inapt” attempts are: firing a gun which is not loaded, putting sugar in an enemy’s coffee (thinking that it is cyanide), administering a harmless substance to a pregnant woman (thinking that it is an abortifacient), etc. (cf. Fletcher 1998: p. 176f). Looking at our examples, if one takes the apprehension of the aggressor’s intentions by the victim to be the essential trait of the action at stake, the first attempt can be described as a complete attempt, but imperfect (the victim apprehends the criminal intention, but the aimed effect is missed because of an unexpected cause: unexpectedly the victim notices that the gun is fake). The last attempt is imperfect as the action is mistaken—the instruments employed are something like an “unloaded gun.”
Cf. “Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defense, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate.” Arendt 1970: p. 52.
In the following I reserve the locution “speech act” to those social acts which are linguistic (i.e., which make use of syntactical and semantic devices). This is not a conceptual distinction as social acts of one and the same kind can be realized either linguistically or not.
The type of a social act’s token can be characterized either as illocutionary force or as quality (cf. Husserl Husserl 1901–01: A399/B1426f, or “mode”), according to the different conceptions concerning the ontological status of these acts. Although I do not intend here to explicitly defend this view, my conception of social acts is a phenomenological one in the very same line of Reinach’s conception of these acts (cf. Reinach 1913): I consider them to be intentional experiences, rather than conventional actions. However, in order to avoid the equivocity of the term “quality” (which can be wrongly understood as a synonym of “property”), the term “mode” is preferred in following.
As Searle points out, apparently not all social acts have a content (Searle 1969: p. 30; Searle 1983: p. 7) and, among those which have a content, not all bear a direction of fit (in particular, so-called “expressives” do not, cf. Searle 1975: p. 357) or, rather, they bear only a “Presup Fit” (Searle 2010: p. 69).
Like other “socially mediated acts” (e.g. to scandalize somebody or to caress somebody, s. Tummolini and Castelfranchi 2006), acts of violence thus request a “specific cognitive and behavioral mediation [as] necessary for their success” (Tummolini and Castelfranchi 2006: p. 311). Furthermore, by means of this descriptive element one can analyze acts of violence in terms of sui generis communicative acts, the existence of which challenges the basic assumption that communication is a form of cooperation (very much in line with Castelfranchi 1992).
The expression “acts of damaging” is used for the sake of simplicity, and it should not suggest the idea that it refers to a class of acts with their own intrinsic mode. Acts of very different kinds can be performed in order to produce (psychical or physical) harm.
This claim does, however, show some complications: suppose that A harms V in t with the concomitant intention (in t) of reporting his action to V in a future time t’. Does A’s action in t become an act of violence in t’ due to the fact that A has the intention of reporting his action to V in t’? To answer this question we have to distinguish two different situations. According to the first, the action realized in t does not request to be apprehended: in itself, the act performed in t is a mere damaging act and not an act of violence (and does not become such an act in t’). If the intention in t of reporting the aggressor’s action in t’ includes the intention of damaging V in t’ (together with the other conditions stated in §3 and §4), then this is the intention to accomplish an act of violence in t’. A’s report to V in t’ constitutes (in t’) an equally present damage of V. Here the damaging act in t represents a precondition for the execution of the violent act in t’. In other words, apprehending the action in t causes a second – different – damage in t’ upon which violence is erected (I briefly come back to such relationships at the end of §3). According to a second situation, the act in t requests that the victim recognizes both its content and mode, but such recognition can succeed only in t’. In this case the agent does perform an act of violence in t, but the action is constructed in such a way that its apprehension can happen only in t’. In contrast to the previous case, here there is no duplicity of damage. Odysseus’ action may illustrate both scenarios: if he blinded Polyphemus with the intention to hereafter accomplish an act of hybris (i.e., to humiliate Polyphemus), then we have a damaging act which functions as precondition for a further act of violence. If Odysseus intended to avenge himself, then blinding Polyphemus in t was the initial event of a (planned) causal chain that—only after Odysseus’ liberation—led him to reveal his name in t’ and Polyphemus to recognize his aggressor. Had he remained under Polyphemus’ thumb, Odysseus could not have avenged himself by simply revealing his identity.
Nonetheless, the nature of the inflicted damage cannot be overlooked: in cases in which the disproportion between the means employed and the intended purpose is particularly extreme, the whole situation is to be judged as violent (although it does not fulfill the conditions set for the kind of violence at issue here) shifting the attention towards the damaging act.
This last condition is the result of an intense discussion I had with Kirk Ludwig. I am grateful for his valuable suggestions.
This paper’s exclusive topic is to clarify some aspects of violence as well as its ontological status in relation to a particular class of social acts. Here, we can deal only marginally with the problem of how violence ceases to exist. Indeed, much depends on the structure of the act of violence that has been performed, and its forms of termination are as variegated as its forms of substantiation. Usually violence is “predestined” to come to an end by itself with the end of the act of violence (this can especially be the case when the performance of an act of violence relies mainly on physical damage). But this is not the only way. The aggressor is able to perform acts that can obliterate violence and the victim, too, may have this ability: acts of liberation (from the side of the victim) or acts of reprieval (from the side of the aggressor), etc., here play an eminent role.
Note that, since claims and obligations extinguish after the realization of the content, this ontological position is committed to the idea that contingent states of affairs are temporal in nature (this position can again be found in Reinach, cf. Salice 2009: 291ff).
References
Arendt, H. (1970). On violence. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things with Words. J. O. Urmson (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press
Austin, J. L. (1970). Truth. In J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnoch (Eds.), Philosophical papers (pp. 117–133). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, J. (1988). Events and their names. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Castelfranchi, C. (1992). No more cooperation, please! In search of the social structure of verbal interaction. In A. Ortony, J. Slack, & O. Stock (Eds.), Communication from an artificial intelligence perspective (pp. 205–227). Berlin: Springer.
Fletcher, G. P. (1998). Basic concepts of criminal law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and the power. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–228). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gallinger, A. (1912). Das Problem der objektiven Möglichkeit. Eine Bedeutungsanalyse. Leipzig: Barth.
Habermas, Jürgen. (1978). Hannah Arendts Begriff der Macht. In: Politik, Kunst, Religion. Essays über zeitgenössische Philosophien (pp. 103–126). Stuttgart: Reclam.
Husserl, E. (1901). [11901, 21913/1921] 1984. Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. In 2 Bänden (pp. 1–783). In U. Panzer (Ed.), Husserliana XIX/1, 2. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (2009). Untersuchungen zur Urteilstheorie. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1918). In R. Rollinger (Ed.), Husserliana XL. Dordrecht: Springer.
Lippman, M. (2010). Contemporary criminal law. Los Angeles: Sage.
Malcolm, N. (1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mellor, D. H. (1980). Things and causes in spacetime. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 31, 282–288.
Reinach, Adolf. (11911). Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils. In: K. Schuhmann, B. Smith (eds.): 1989. Adolf Reinach. Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 Bänden. München/Hamden/Wien: Philosophia, 95–140.
Reinach, Adolf. (11913). Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes. In: K. Schuhmann, B. Smith (eds.): 1989. Adolf Reinach. Sämtliche Werke. Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 Bänden. München/Hamden/Wien: Philosophia, 141–278.
Reinhardt, Karl. (1948). Die Abenteur der Odyssee. In: Von Werken und Formen. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Godesberg: H. Küpper, 52–162.
Salice, A. (2009). Urteile und Sachverhalte. Ein Vergleich zwischen Alexius Meinong und Adolf Reinach. München: Philosophia Verlag.
Salice, Alessandro. (2004). Gewalt als soziale Tatsache. In: J.C. Marek, M.E. Reicher (Eds.): Experience and analysis. Proceedings of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Kirchberg/Wechsel: Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft, 318–320.
Salice, Alessandro. (2008). Obbligazione e pretesa in Adolf Reinach: due relazioni sociali. Rivista di Estetica n.s. 39 3/2008: 225–240.
Schapp, W. (1930). Die neue Wissenschaft vom Recht. Band I. Eine phänomenologische Untersuchung. Berlin: Rothschild.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1975). A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In K. Gunderson (Ed.), Language, mind and knowledge. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (pp. 344–369). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. vol. VII.
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: an essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the social world. The structure of human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Staudigl, M. (2007). Towards a phenomenological theory of violence: reflections following Merleau-Ponty and Schutz. Husserl Studies, 30, 233–253.
Tummolini, L., & Castelfranchi, C. (2006). The cognitive and behavioral mediation of institutions: towards an account of institutional actions. Cognitive Systems Research, 7, 307–323.
Vendler, Z. (1974a). Facts and events. In Linguistics in philosophy (pp. 122–146). London: Cornell University Press.
Vendler, Z. (1974b). Effects, results and consequences. In Linguistics in philosophy (pp. 147–171). London: Cornell University Press.
von Hildebrand, Dietrich. (21955). Die Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft. Untersuchungen über Wesen und Wert der Gemeinschaft. Regensburg: Josef Habbel.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Previous versions of this article were presented at the 27th Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria, in August 2004 (for the text of this talk, cf. Salice 2004), at the VI Congress on Collective Intentionality at the University of California, Berkeley, in July 2008 and at the Doktorandenkolloquium of Hans Bernhard Schmid at the University of Vienna in January 2012. I am deeply indebted to Georg Meggle, Hans Bernhard Schmid and, in particular, to Kirk Ludwig for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments: David Schweikard, Luca Tummolini, Genki Uemura and Toru Yaegashi. I also have to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. It goes without saying that I take full responsibility for any mistake that may be reported here.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Salice, A. Violence as a social fact. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 161–177 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9294-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9294-7