A Thesis On Verbal Violence

This thesis consists of seven chapters:Introduction,Verbal Violence, Verbal Violence and the Philosophy of Struggle, Public will and the Paradox of Public will, Verbal Violence and Primitive Thought,Verbal Violence and Group Psychology and Conclusions.The Introduction offers a definition of verbal violence and elaborates upon the importance of the topic. The methodology will also be detailed:we will approach this topic through research into discrete periods of history, with a focus on the latter half of the 20th century, i.e.1950 to date, in our study of verbal violence.The first chapter will discuss the relationship between verbal violence and the possible world. One of the major theses of the philosophy of language is that language not only reflects the world but also constructs it -- that is, that the world is not reflected by, but is rather constructed by, language; that language functions not to reflect the world, but to construct it. In metaphor and symbolism, we see an intimate relationship between language and the world:the physical realization of metaphor and symbol is the possible world. The replacement of transcendent worldviews and cyclical time by evidentiary worldviews and the concept of linear time in offering a reason for the world's existence has also placed revolutionaries in a "prophetic" position according to linear views of social progress, giving rise to the emergence of spokesfigures. Language has already become a revolutionary weapon in this process, making verbal violence an inevitable eventuality.The second chapter concentrates on the relationship between verbal violence and the philosophy of struggle. The replacement of transcendent worldviews with evidentiary ones has caused movements, oppositions, conflicts, and struccles to be viewed as universal principles. Beginning in the 1950s, an overemphasis on struggle gave rise to the concept of socialist revolution "on both political and ideological fronts," leading directly to the discourse of "continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat" that preceded the Cultural Revolusion. The fallacies in this discourse were the result of conflict between the actual world and the possible world. We give here a thorough and vivid recounting of the forms of verbal violence during this period.The third chapter examines public will and the paradoxes of public will. The process of supplantation both granted "spokesfigures" the role of prophets according to a linear view of time and gave their acts of vengeance a veneer of righteousness, being that they acted as representatives of an implied social public will. This public will (social contract) is a term proposed by Rousseau, who believed in a universal desire for a transparent moral unity-and yet there exist irreconcilable conflicts between public and private, personal and plural expression.The fourth chapter discusses the relationship between verbal violence and primitive thinking. In the verbal violence of the latter half of the 20th century, there emerged strains of primitive thought bordering on the Manichaean in some cases. This was an example of cultural atavism. This chapter examines verbal violence and primitive thinking, and will attempt to analyze the ways in which primitive thinking was transmitted and channeled in modern thought.The fifth chapter examines the relationship between verbal violence and colletive psychology. Whether or not a pure and transparent public will exists, there is always a powerful utopian desire to pursue public will and cement the position of future spokesfigures, leading to a colletive psychology. It is through this colletive psychology that verbal violence can come to exist.Conclusions re-examines the relationships between word and object, between language and the world, and between the actual world and the possible world. It argues that the real and the possible worlds can co-exist, and that while they may exist in opposition to one another, the relationship need not be hostile. Language, too, need not be reduced to a weapon used by the possible world against the actual world. Language should be left free to be language:as Chen Jiaying says, "The nature of language is to allow a finite number of words to express an infinite number of possibilities.'...