Metaphysics of War
What is the profound flaw in the plans for a peaceful settlement in the Middle East and in the “European East”? It is the same in both cases and consists in the desire to ignore the question of the causes of the war.
Any war and any illness, and indeed any crisis situation in our life, has two levels of causes: a material, “physical” one and an immaterial, “metaphysical” one.
The material level
At the material level, in the case of illness this means, for example, questions such as “what triggered the allergy?”, “which virus infected the patient?”, and so on; in the case of war, it is “what motives guided those who started the war?”, “where, in fact, should the border run?”, and the like.
If we speak about ignoring causes at this level, then of course, as a classic example, we must recall Chamberlain and Daladier, who at one time were guided by exactly the same logic as Donald Trump today. But with an essential difference: what is being proposed now is even worse – it is Munich after Poland.
There is probably no need to spell out that the peace plan for the Middle East likewise rests on the assumption that there is no need to clarify the causes of the war.
We are not analysing these causes here; they are the subject of separate, extensive examinations. What we are talking about is that the “peace plans” being proposed today are constructed as if the question of the causes of the war and, as a consequence, the question of who in this war is right and who is guilty, not only can but even ought to be left outside the discussion.
The metaphysical level
The metaphysical level of causes is the question of why the Almighty (you may call it the “Universe”, “the world”, “life”) allows this to happen to us – to an individual in the case of illness, to a nation in the case of war; for what this war or illness has been sent to us and, most importantly, what we must become aware of and change in ourselves.
Assessments and conclusions
The current plans for a peaceful settlement, both in the Middle East and in the European East, are built on an explicit ignoring of the causes at the “material” level and on an implicit denial of the very existence of a metaphysical level of causes.
Of course, the approach “for now the main thing is a truce, and afterwards we will see” is understandable. But if we look from the viewpoint of metaphysical causes, then the war came to these peoples precisely because they did not want to see these causes without a war.
Or, in other words, if one ignores both the material and the metaphysical causes, war will not simply “be able to return”; it will most likely return in a more severe form and on a larger scale.
This is not a pessimistic scenario; on the contrary, there is a ray of hope in it, which stems from the fact that we matter to the Almighty (“the Universe”, “the world”, “life”) and that what happens in the world depends on us – on what is within us, on what we understand. “Us”, “we” here refers both to the individual person and to peoples/nations. We are not hostages of chains of accidents, forced only to extinguish their consequences; we are the cause of what happens in the world and of how it happens.
In the photograph: our fighters have completed a night forced march. Together with them we meet the dawn. The sun is rising over Jerusalem.
