“To them. I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. That is certain.” -Plato, The Republic
Plato’s Cave and its “Shadows”
At a moment when an American president openly threatens the death of an entire civilization[1] [Iranian/Persian], world politics becomes the issue of absolute primacy. Most worrisome regarding this issue are steadily growing risks of a nuclear war. Not just Donald Trump, but national leaders in general, seem unable or unwilling to understand the vital difference between causes and “shadows.” To help clarify and correct this disjunction, scholars should examine the insights of a classical Greek philosopher and his metaphorical “cave.”
In essence, Trump et al are frozen in time, and time is always unforgiving. Looking back at Plato’s Republic, the ancient philosopher explains that decipherable political activity is ultimately mere “shadow.”[2] This classic explanation is significant not only for national decision-makers, political philosophers and military thinkers, but for anyone trying to make coherent and predictive sense of war and peace.[3]Accordingly, it is significant for anyone who wishes to survive on planet earth.
But how shall still-capable leaders and thinkers proceed with all necessary understandings? First, such persons will need to acknowledge that individual human needs and preferences are never discoverable “at the surface.” What will matter most to pertinent assessments are outcomes they might never have even been expected. Though many of us can understand why we value personal religious attachments, few would be able to connect these preferences to promises of “power over death.”.
For the most part, “world legal order” particulars lie beyond Platonic “shadow.” As such originating particulars are vague or “opaque” ipso facto, they represent inherently complex investigations. For the United States, a society unaccustomed to bothering with history, law or seriously challenging ideas (Donald Trump assures his followers that “attitude is more important than preparation”),[4] there is not much reason to expect knowledge-based inquiries. Still, whatever the expansively anti-intellectual orientation of American “mass”[5] – an amalgam that displays intentional disrespect for most considerations of “mind” – meaningful explanations of American foreign policies always require concept-based investigations.
There is substantial detail. Even more than fully-fashioned theories, concepts are fundamental. In specific reference to ascertaining threats on matters of war and peace, three basic concepts deserve pride of place. Intersecting and subtle, these notations are shadow, time and truth. Nonetheless, the discovery of relevant meanings will represent a daunting intellectual task, a job of the highest possible order.
There is more. Intellectual beginnings will be critically important. At the outset, all political phenomena should be examined at rudimentarylevels. This is because concepts represent the “building blocks” of comprehensive theory and because well-fashioned theory represents the starting point of all true science. In turn, science expresses the optimal method of reaching correct conclusions on peace and war, one involving the stipulation, examination and subsequent confirmation or disconfirmation of alternative hypotheses.
A “next question” dawns: How shall Americans and others proceed if national governance is to be improved in a corrosive world legal system shaped by wars of aggression, jihadist terrorism and nuclear weapons?[6] What can shadow, time and truth teach America’s leaders about the global present and future?[7] How shall the United States advance beyond the persistently gratuitous rancor of current policy-making?
To answer thoughtfully, we must begin with the individual human microcosm. In this connection, though generally disregarded and de facto invisible, “power over death” represents the ultimate reward for dutiful political and religious compliance. On its face, there can be no greater power to confer than a promise of immortality. This is the case whether the promise is open and unhidden or is expressed only in whispers, sotto voce.
Personal Faith and the “Hunger of Immortality[8]
“I believe,” says Oswald Spengler in his 20th century classic, The Decline of the West” (1918-1923), “is the one great word against metaphysical fear.” In this bewilderingly abstract connection, we may still learn from Emmanuel Levinas something of head spinning import: “It is through death,” says the twentieth-century philosopher, “that there is time….”[9] This means, among other things, that a nation that can seemingly enhance the incomparable promise of personal immortality can also heighten certain “force-multiplying” promises of time.[10]
But what can such dense abstraction have to do with explaining war and peace? To be sure, these are not easy concepts to understand, especially in the context of Donald Trump’s law-defiling preoccupation with “shadows.” No nation so incessantly willing to subordinate truth to “anti-reason”[11] should reasonably expect to improve its survival prospects.
These are not easy ideas for scholars or political leaders to unravel. Still, such ideas are more clearly explanatory of America’s glaring existential challenges than political personalities. If temporality is contingent on death – because human mortality puts a “stop” to each individual’s time[12] on earth – an antecedent question will need to be posed: “How does one gain power over death,[13] and what does such gain have to do with the tangible fate of any particular state or nation?”
Before venturing a proper answer, scholars and leaders should first distinguish between actual or tangible power and the power that lies latent in purported ties to God. From the start, humans have sought variously reassuring ties to the sacred. There is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with such a search (quite the contrary), but it becomes lethal whenever organized violence becomes necessary.
In world politics, powerful promises always come with assorted contingencies. In the main, whatever the specific nuances of differentiation involved, a “bargain” is offered to “faithful” adherents who hope fervidly not to die. On the surface, it is a gainful pact, one whereby a loyal individual commits to affirmations of true piety, i.e., “I believe,”[14] and prioritizes this sacred affirmation above all others.
Immortality and Martyrdom
Additional particularities will need to be understood. On occasion, the doctrinal priority “I believe” can demand a faith-confirming end to an individual person’s life on earth, that is, an act of “martyrdom.” At times, high-minded doctrines of charity, caring and compassion notwithstanding, this prioritizing can require the torture and/or killing of designated “others” – “unbelievers,” “heathen,” “apostates,” etc.
The point is to safeguard “the one true faith.”[15] In specifically moral and legal terms, these requirements reveal criminal intent or mens rea. Historically, they are not in any way collateral to otherwise lawful military actions.
Jihadist terror is a form of religious sacrifice. Whatever special circumstances of “sacrifice” are involved in considered acts of terror,[16] perpetrator wrongdoing is no less savage in the Age of Science than it was in the Age of Belief.[17] Regarding this counter-intuitive observation, the daily news offers seemingly endless corroborative “evidence.”Above all, the Islamist “martyr” or shahid kills himself or herself in order not to die.
Often, in world politics, truth emerges through paradox. Presently, several core truths are being revealed in the US-Israel war against Iran. Here, especially, any cumulative hopes that individual human beings (the “microcosm”) can rise “above mortality” could have critical consequences for the “macrocosm.”[18]
At his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observes: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opines in Philosophy of Right (1820) that states represent “the march of God in the world.” In the current war against Iran, belligerents on all sides – not just jihadists – are anxious to “team up” with God.
So, certain widely-cited philosophic views tie loyalty to the state (usually, an unquestioned loyalty) with a promise of “power over death.” By definition, of course, this is a monumental promise, one generally recognized only in the vague “shadows” of military activity. Whenever the capable historian looks beyond such deflecting shadows, he or she discovers no plausible evidence of such a promise being kept. But how could it be otherwise?
Immortality represents an extraordinary and unfulfillable promise, but one that still remains alluringly special.[19] During this continuously dissembling “Trump Era,” an American president’s personal “brand” of belligerent nationalism[20] (“America First”[21]) offers deserving “patriots” this preposterous promise. In the end, because it is founded on doctrinal anti-reason, “America First” embraces a vision of time that hastens death at intersecting microcosmic and macrocosmic levels.
Additional nuances warrant competent examination. In all relevant matters, faith and science overlap further with variously coinciding considerations of law. The fearful “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation of ideology from abstract principle of action to sacred end in itself, drew germinal strength from the doctrine of “sovereignty.”[22]
First conceived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a juridical principle of internal order, this doctrine subsequently underwent far-reaching metamorphoses. Incrementally, it became the justifying legal rationale for corrosive “self-help” remedies amid uncontrollable international anarchy. To wit, this is precisely US President Donald Trump’s justification for America’s ongoing war against Iran. Significantly, Trump has extended this implicit justification from issues of jus ad bellum (“justice of war”) to ones of jus in bello (“justice in war”). A clear result of this law-violating extension has been open indifference to humanitarian international law or the law of war.[23]
Sovereignty and “Power Over Death”
To understand complex policy intersections, we must better understand “sovereignty.” Established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty quickly came to be regarded as the supreme power, absolute and above all other forms of law.[24] In the oft-recited and oft-studied words of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Where there is no common Power, there is no law.”
As to correspondences withtime, Hobbes explains why this lawless condition should be called “war” even when there is no “actual fighting.” Because “war consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of Time….,“[25] scholars and policy-makers will need to broaden their most fundamental ideas of “war.” Though this would first appear an arcane or esoteric requirement, one without links to “real world” policy-making, the opposite is true.
There is more. When it is understood in terms of modern world politics, the doctrine of sovereignty encourages the refractory notion that states (1) lie above and beyond any legal regulation in their interactions with each other, and (2) act rationally whenever they seek tangible benefits at the expense of other states or the global system as a whole.[26] Still, amid increasing bitter Trump derangements,[27] this doctrine now threatens a wholesale collapse of world legal order.
Credo quia absurdum, opine Roman philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”
Time and the Hobbesian “State of War”
Without suitable changes in the Hobbesian “tract of time,” the global State of War nurtured by manipulated ideas about sovereignty[28] points not only to an immutable human mortality, but also toward death on unprecedented levels. One theme other than war and peace is climate change denial, a witting posture of doctrinal anti-reason. Left unaffected by proper considerations of scientific analysis and refined intellect, such denial could eventually produce another mass extinction event on planet earth.[29] At that point, by definition, time will have lost all its potentially remediating meanings and death will “inherit” all that still is.
By itself, immortality remains an unworthy and unseemly human goal, both because it is scientific nonsense[30] (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms”[31]) and because it fosters such endlessly injurious human behaviors as war, terrorism and genocide. The dignified task, therefore, is not to try to remove individual human hopes to “soar above death” (that is, to achieve some tangible sort of immortality),[32] but to “de-link” this vainglorious search from grievously destructive human behaviors.[33]
How best to proceed with such a multi-faceted task? This is not an easy question, and one that can never be answered solely in terms of Platonic “shadows.” There are available no science-based guidelines. And even if there were such availability, this is not just an ordinary problem that can yield ipso facto to rationality-based solutions. The wish to immortality is so deeply compelling and universal that it can never be dispelled by scientific or logical argument.
A Perilous Lure: “Whisperings of the Irrational”
Aware of this dilemma, philosopher Karl Jaspers says in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952): “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” Always, the most seductive of these irrational whisperings are those that offer to confer a selective “power over death.”[34] It is in the express criteria of such “selection” that manifestly far-reaching evils can be born. This is because the promised power requires “sacrifice” of conveniently-despised “others.”
For science, death is a matter of biology. Moreover, because it “presents” together with decomposition and decay – and calls for human comprehension of “nothingness” within a “flow of time” – there exist no plausible ways of replacing mystery with rationality. By its very nature, one which inevitably brings forth inconsolable fears and unmanageable anxieties, death fear can never submit to intellectual management.
There is more. In principle, at least, some measure of existential relief can be discovered in “transience,” that is, in the unassailable awareness that nothing is forever and that everything is impermanent. What is required at this late stage is the conceptual reciprocal of human decomposition. More tangibly, this means deliberately cultivating an imagery of expanded human significance stemming from all life’s limited duration.
In scientific terms, one might usefully describe this durational dilemma as a “scarcity value.”[35] Though seemingly paradoxical, any such gainful cultivation could represent the optimal human strategy of “achieving immortality.”
How did we arrive at such an intellectually complex and bewildering conclusion? We began with the view that daily news reports and “assessments” are just “shadows” of deeper human “pathologies.” In order to deal more satisfactorily with the incessant horrors of any world politics, we will first have to understand the true sources of pertinent reflections.[36] In brief, these underpinnings of world political events are rooted in conceptual intersections of death, time and immortality. Therefore, it is only with a more determined understanding of these many-sided intersections that humankind (microcosm and macrocosm) could reasonably hope “not to die.”
The Barbarism of Specialization
In the end, world politics should be understood as much more than a second-order activity, i.e., as a simple reflection of what is truly important. For now, a constituent American politics continues to draw its own “life” from a vast common emptiness, a collective infirmity that represents the defiling reciprocal of personal fulfillment. “Conscious of his emptiness,” warns the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), “man (human) tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In vain.”
Even in a true American democracy, only “The Few” could ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider world. Inter alia, these self-effacing “souls” would almost certainly remain hidden and silent. Plausibly, in a democracy where education has been increasingly oriented toward narrowly-vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward Ortega y’ Gassett’s “barbarous specialization,” these residual Few should expect “suffocation by the Mass.”
America’s Trump-accelerated detachment from intellectual life did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing. Rather, it was the inevitable result of a society that had abandoned most forms of serious thought. When such a society no longer asked the “big philosophical questions” – for example, “What is the “good” in government and politics”? or “How do I lead a good life as person and citizen”? or “How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings”? – the deleterious outcome for both national and world politics became almost unstoppable. [37]
To survive in world politics, all states must finally acknowledge the interrelatedness of all peoples and the universality of authoritative international law.[38] In part, more Americans will need to become seriously educated, not as well-trained cogs in a reconfiguring industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens of the world. “Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself,” cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932),[39] but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. It is in this overarching failure of empathic “operationalization” that human civilization has most plainly inscribed its collective fate.
How shall we change all this? Recalling Plato’s wisdom in The Republic, how shall we”learn to make the souls of the citizens better?” This is not a question that anyone can answer with catch phrases or empty witticisms. But it is a question that ought still to be put before the American polity.[40]
There is more. The fates of American politics and world politics are deeply intertwined. Both spheres face reinforcing hazards, including Ortega y’ Gasset’s “barbarism of specialization.” To be rescued in time, each hazard will have to be tackled carefully, both by itself and in tandem with other identifiable perils. Overall, the task will be overwhelming, but the alternative is literally not tolerable.
What is “Drawing Near”?
“Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.” A meaningful answer, which lies beyond the measuring hands of clocks,[41] is by no means self-evident. Determining this meaningful answer is now a sine qua non of both American and global survival.
Americans in particular will need to get beyond the demeaning banalities of partisan politics, beyond the distracting and murderous “shadows” of what is most genuinely important. Immutably, but often invisibly, most residents of planet earth regard “power over death” as the highest conceivable form of power. Still, it remains unclear just how such ultimate power (a power based on what Freud calls “wish fulfillment”) could be linked purposefully to any nation’s politics and foreign policies.
To finally look “beyond shadows,” Americans and all others must first discover two complementary forces of world politics. These forces concern “Meaning” and “Belonging.” Together with already-discussed images of immortality or “power over death,” they can bestow tangible feelings of self-worth. In essence, such mutually-reinforcing images could coalesce around activities that confer the vastly pleasing emotions of “membership.” The underlying problem, however, is that such activities are not necessarily benign and could readily include war, terrorism and genocide.
In his modern classic, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls (in German) das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon certain earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can quickly suffocate intellectual growth. For Heidegger’s ubiquitous “The They,” the crowning human untruth lies in “herd” acceptance of immortality at both institutional and personal levels and in herd encouragements of the notion that personal power over death is somehow derivative from membership in states.
History reveals that this encouragement can become a uniquely insidious notion. In a proliferating nuclear world, its harms could be existential andthus sui generis.
There is more. Any reassuring notion about potential for personal immortality is contingent on the particular state’s “sacredness.”Only membership in a presumptively “sacred” group can serve to confer life-everlasting. Ominously, such sacredness could be extended to different sub-state or terror-group settings.
It’s time for summation. To best ensure that world politics are dignified, decent and (above all) survivable, states must first learn to distinguish true human feelings and behaviors from mere “shadows.” Once we can begin to understand world politics at their most irreducible points of origin, we could finally act to free an imperiled system of states from the lethal grip of belligerent nationalism. In this connection, Donald Trump’s April 7, 2026 threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight” is not “only” genocidal. It is authentically “omnicidal.”
[1] Said Donald Trump on April 7, 2026: “A whole civilization will die tonight. “There could be no clearer or more comprehensive declaration of mens rea (“criminal intent”). Conspicuous crimes of this American president are Nuremberg-level “crimes of war,” “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” (including genocide).
[2] Such “epiphenomenal” understanding was central to Plato’s The Republic. In his still-famous parable of the cave, the early Greek philosopher clarifies the distinction between “truth and shadow.” See, by this author, Louis René Beres, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/09/08/truth-and-shadow-to-understan See also, at Oxford University Press, Louis René Beres: https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/
[3] In the 17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind or intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – defines an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[4] This assurance resembles the official Joseph Goebbels party line that “Germany needs leaders with instinct, not intellect.” Said Goebbels at a Nuremberg party rally in 1934: “Intellect rots the brain.” Declared US presidential candidate Donald Trump back in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.” Later, still in “Trump 1,” he claimed Covid19 “will disappear on its own,” ingestion of household disinfectants could help protect Americans from Covid19, that the 18th-century American revolutionary army “quickly took control of all United States airports” and that America should consider using nuclear weapons against hurricanes.
[5] Says Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952): “The masses have followed the magicians again and again…Socrates and Plato were the first to take up the struggle against them in a clear awareness of what was at stake.”
[6] See by this author, Louis René Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/10/24/to-prevent-a-nuclear-war-americas-overriding-policy-imperative/
[7] A common aspect to these three core concepts is the inherently vague idea of “soul.” Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provided a precise definition of the term, but it was not intended by either in an ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by express references to “soul.” Inter alia, he was disgusted by a civilization so tangibly unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., an awareness of intellect and literature). Freud even thought that a crude American commitment to shallow optimism and material advancement would occasion sweeping psychological misery. Judging, among many other things, by the extent of America’s opiate crisis, this prediction was on-the-mark.
[8] This succinct phrase, the “hunger of immortality,” is central to Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (1921). During my more than fifty years as a Purdue University professor, I often identified this seminal work as the single most important book I had ever read. Interestingly, it was another great Spanish existentialist, Jose Ortega y’Gasset, who came in as a close second.
[9] See Emmanuel Levinas, “Time Considered on the Basis of Death” (1976). In another essay, Levinas says: “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.” Though seemingly obvious, it runs counter to core promises of the world’s principal religions.
[10] For an early examination of time’s impact on foreign policy decision-making, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.
[11] For the most probing assessment of this concept, see: Karl Jaspers, Reason and anti-Reason in our Time (1952). The German philosopher clarifies the “fog of the irrational” that bedeviled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and later the United States during the still-ongoing “Trump Era.” In a distillation of his grand thought, Jaspers proclaims: “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no logical argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition….”
[12] The charming idea that time can somehow “have a stop” is raised by Indiana writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Slaughterhouse Five (1969).
[13] Insightfully, observes Spanish existentialist philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958): “History is an illustrious war against death.”
[14] Famously, says Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, “‘I believe’ is the one great word (sic.) against metaphysical fear.” Such “fear” is essentially a euphemistic or sanitizing reference to death.
[15] But killing need not always be linked to promises of power over death. Sometimes, per Eugene Ionesco, “People kill and are killed in order to prove to themselves that life exists.” See the Romanian playwright’s only novel, The Hermit, 102 (1973).
[16] Already aware that blind fanaticism is the ultimate scourge of all decent politics, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recognized that there are already too many individuals, not too few, who take it as their sacred duty to sacrifice others on blood-stained altars of personal immortality.
[17] See, for example, by this author: Louis René Beres, https://besacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1053-Terrorism-as-Power-over-Death-Beres-final.pdf
[18] It ought also to be kept in mind that the incremental destruction of biodiversity on Planet Earth is producing a continuous natural climate catastrophe, one that naturalist David Attenborough suggests will likely end in another mass extinction. This means, inter alia, more-or-less predictable synergies between growing catastrophes of the natural world and catastrophes of specifically human misunderstanding. In synergistic interactions, by definition, the cumulative harm (the “whole”) is greater than the sum of component sufferings (the “parts”).
[19] Still, we must consider the contra view of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1932). Here, Ortega identifies the state not as a convenient source of immortality, but as the very opposite. For him, the state is “the greatest danger,” mustering its immense and irresistible resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority that disturbs it….” Earlier, in his chapter “On the New Idol” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters…All-too-many are born – for the superfluous the state was invented.” Later, in the same chapter: “A hellish artifice was invented there (the state), a horse of death…Indeed, a dying for many was invented there; verily, a great service to all preachers of death!”
[20] The belligerent nationalismof US president Donald Trump stands in marked contrast to authoritative legal assumptions concerning solidarity between states. These jurisprudential assumptions concern a presumptively common legal struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, had already been mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[21] See, for example, by this author, at JURIST, Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-first-2/; and https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2019/06/louis-beres-america-first/
[22] See, on this doctrine, by this author: Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984).
[23] In Trump’s own words: “I don’t need no international law.”
[24] We may recall here Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Augustine: “St. Augustine says: `There is no law unless it be just.’ So the validity of law depends upon its justice. But in human affairs, a thing is said to be just when it accords aright with the rule of reason; and as we have already seen, the first rule of reason is the Natural Law. Thus, all humanly enacted laws are in accord with reason to the extent that they derive from the Natural Law. And if a human law is at variance in any particular with the Natural Law, it is no longer legal, but rather a corruption of law.” See: SUMMA THEOLOGICA, 1a, 2ae, 95, 2; cited by A.P. D’Entreves, NATURAL LAW: AN INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL PHILOSOPPHY (1951), pp. 42-43.
[25] Thomas Hobbes argues convincingly that the international state of nature is “less intolerable” than that condition among individuals in nature because, only in the latter, the “weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” With the spread of nuclear weapons, this difference is plainly disappearing. Interestingly, perhaps, in the pre-nuclear age, Samuel Pufendorf, like Hobbes, was persuaded that the state of nations “…lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature….” Similarly, Spinoza suggested that “…a commonwealth can guard itself against being subjugated by another, as a man in the state of nature cannot do.” (See: Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10, No.3., 1972-73, p. 65.)
[26] In studies of world politics, rationality and irrationality have now taken on very specific meanings. More precisely, a state or sub-state actor is presumed to be determinedly rational to the extent that its leadership always values national survival more highly than any other conceivable preference or combination of preferences. Conversely, an irrational actor might not always display such a determinable preference ordering.
[27]One such derangement is Trump’s continuing movement away from cooperative world politics to an exaggerated “everyone for himself” ethos. Says French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955): “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.”
[28] In this connection, notes Sigmund Freud: “Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless.” (See: Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, cited in Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10 (1973-73), p, 27.) Interestingly, Albert Einstein held very similar views. See, for example: Otto Nathan et al. eds., Einstein on Peace (New York, 1960).
[29] See, in this regard, BBC film productions on Nature by Richard Attenborough.
[30] Just having been born augurs badly for immortality. In their desperation to live perpetually, human societies and civilizations have always embraced a broad panoply of faiths that promise life everlasting in exchange for “undying” loyalty. In the end, such loyalty is transferred from the Faith to the State, which then battles with other States in what is generally taken to be a “struggle for power” but which is often, in reality, a perceived Final Conflict between “Us” and “Them,” between Good and Evil. The advantage to being on the side of “Good” in any such contest is nothing less than the promise of eternal life.
[31] See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time (1993); originally in French as Dieu, la mort et le temps (1993).
[32] The philosopher George Santayana reveals: “In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation. The truth of mortality…. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.” (See: George Santayana, REASON IN RELIGION, 260 (1982). This Dover edition is an unabridged republication of Volume III of THE LIFE OF REASON, published originally by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1905.
[33] How does killing in war and terrorism hold out a promise of immortality? According to Eugene Ionesco, “I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.” This comment from Ionesco’s JOURNAL appeared in the British magazine, ENCOUNTER, May 1966. See also: Eugene Ionesco, FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL (Grove Press, 1968).
[34] The idea of death as a zero-sum commodity is captured playfully by Ernest Becker’s paraphrase of Elias Canetti: “Each organism raises it head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” (See Ernest Becker, ESCAPE FROM EVIL 2 (1975). Similarly, according to Otto Rank: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.” (See: Otto Rank, WILL THERAPY AND REALITY 130 (Knopf, 1945) (1936).
[35] This term is drawn here from a lesser-known 1913 essay by Sigmund Freud “On Transience.”
[36]In the language of formal philosophy, this brings to mind Plato’s doctrine of Forms. As explained in dialogues Philebus, Phaedo and Republic, the Forms are always immaterial, uniform and immutable. To be useful to humankind, by definition, they must express not the concrete or physical events of any specific moment in time, but rather an idea that soars above such tangible particularities.
[37] See by this writer, Louis Rene Beres, at Princeton Political Review: https://www.princetonpoliticalreview.org/opinion-1/the-temple-of-intellect-higher-meanings-for-american-universities
[38] Apropos of this universality, international law is generally part of the law of the United States. These legal systems are always interpenetrating. Declared Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”
[39] See also the words of French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.”
[40] “Sometimes,” says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, “the worst does happen.”
[41] Chronology is not the same thing as temporality. To acknowledge a useful metaphysics of time, one that can assist us in a better understanding of world and national politics, we may recall William Faulkner’s novel view in The Sound and the Fury that “clocks slay time…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” Real time, the celebrated American author is telling us, eludes any measurement by clocks. Real time, in essence, is always “felt time,” an inner stream of duration It is precisely this durée suggested by Plato’s cave analogy.
