It peaces

Ever since Aristotle’s Organon, all European languages ascribe those notions that allow the evaluation of a statement as correct or incorrect exclusively to the noun. Verbs, words that describe deeds, actions and proceedings, accordingly do not name things. They gain meaning only in relation to substantives, which are therefore the main element of a sentence. The urge of the subject for the substantive would stem from there.

Along with – by no means universal – grammatical instruments like definite articles and personal pronouns, this structures the linguistic frame that drafted the peace as a heavenly concept. For people on Earth it is no essence. It is only the absence of its presumed opposition – violence. As seen from such a transcendental perspective the metaphysical peace (of God) as an imagination is a subtle tool of physical domination.  

European Enlightenment did not do away with this metaphysical figure of speaking and thinking. The opposite is true. It became identified as an instrument of truth and therefore, of power for the subjugation of extra-European cultures. Already in the historic year 1492, Antonio de Nebrija pitched his shortly before constructed grammar of the Castilian Spanish, the first of its kind in modern Europe, to his Catholic queen Isabel as a weapon for the subjugation of the peoples in the Americas. According to him, people cannot think beyond the rules and limitations of their speech. Rulers can benefit from that. The peace remained in all languages of European modernity a singular tantum. Although this actually contradicts the Enlightenment’s turn towards an immanent view of the world it remained a metaphysical instrument of domination,

Only system theories, postmodern philosophy, interpretive ethnology and humanistic psychology of the 20^th century enabled peace research to define the peaces as a plural in the frame of an enlightened-immanent worldview. The peaces are thus conceived as situational, relational and dynamic perception. They are a culturally open and emancipatory concept, always limited in time and space. This plural rebels against the transcendental tradition of the peace. However, it also contradicts the ethical universalism, which has been derived from this tradition as the guiding principle of international law, human rights and neoliberal globalization of the world economy. Therefore, the peaces are often not welcome, not even within peace research.

The plural untightens the stays of subject-oriented speech by allowing a plurality of contexts, in which people can independently and commonly shape their particular peaces without being subject to any normative intendance. But that alone does not yet liberate us from the boundaries of subject-oriented grammar.

Peacing therefore, proposes the shift to activity- and proceeding-oriented speech. This is very normal in many languages and cultures outside of Europe and European colonialism. It holds the focus on qualities, processes and dynamics in human relations and existence as a whole. It asks first, what happens, not who does it, who is responsible, who deserves it or who is guilty.   

Activity- and proceeding-oriented grammar opens new doors of perception and softens epistemic constraints of subject-oriented grammar. Its foremost point is whether it peaces. The presumed absence of physical violence or who the pacifier behind the metaphysical peace might be, is not asked first. It is just like the attention for the proceedings when it rains. Not the rain as a subject or the rainer who would make the rain are then priority.

In real life, it is only crucial that it peaces.   

For further reading: Dietrich, Wolfgang: Der die das Frieden. Nachbemerkung zur Trilogie über die vielen Frieden; Wiesbaden, 2021.