Westphalia From Below by Thomas Peak;

Author:Thomas Peak;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2021-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

When we speak about human experience, we refer to the endeavour to become oneself. Neither the world this unavoidable effort occurs in, nor the self-conscious individual within it, are given. Dignity, as made clear in Chapter 2, is both pre-condition and outcome. As a process to be enabled, this chapter has shown how the existential crisis, manifesting itself in dislocation and dehumanisation, diminished dignity during the Thirty Years War:

‘Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are’ … Man’s situation permits him to be more or less inattentive to what is going on outside in the landscape, in the world of things, and at times to turn the focus of his attention inward and direct it toward himself. This capacity, which seems so simple, is what makes man as such possible. Thanks to it, he can turn his back on the outside, which is the landscape, get out of it, and go inside himself. The animal is always outside; the animal is perpetually the other—he is landscape.74

Kateb’s expression of the partial non-naturalness of man resonates with Ortega y Gasset’s depiction. (‘Every species is by definition unique, but only the human species achieves a partial break with nature; that is the reason that I call the human species the highest of all.’)75 Seen this way, the crisis of these years was not simply a crisis of order, no. It was a crisis of dignity: ‘Through the loss of our dignity we are deprived of something without which life no longer seems worth living.’76 Well, this sentence should end ‘human life no longer seems possible’.

And this was a loss directly felt. ‘The reversal with the most severe consequences [in Grimmelshausen] is the change from man to beast, from soldier to bandit … [Which] destroys what distinguishes man from other living creatures: his likeness to God. Man degenerates to a hybrid, half man/half animal.’77 But it was more than simple brutality which achieved this. It was the reduction of space for dignity to fully enact itself in human life. The next chapter explores the critical response to the challenge of submerged dignity, a response which sets the boundaries of meaning for 1648, and which disallows the distorted reading of this important moment. This reading continues to ‘order the thinking’ of international politics in theory and practice.

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