The nature of conflict: ontological paradox and existential effort of acceptance

Undoubtedly, not everyone is easily swayed by mass media, since the “reality” presented by mass media turns out to be absurd and contradictory, therefore to eventually lead precisely nowhere. When we hesitate and feel the lack of resolute desire, beginning to doubt in the fitness of such a picture of reality, we have an opportunity to hover over this situation of the insolvability of what comprises a “good” reference point. This is also certain to be the case of the conflict situations, which are infixed into us and surround us: Which religion provides a reliable ground for my acts? Which nation is right in the civil war? Which party should I choose? Who is just among my colleagues? Are my relatives and friends right in this or that question? Supposedly, without being in a hurry to resolve the conflict, the attentive scrutinising is expected to allow us a resolute desire of another kind. This alternative resolute desire is to declare ourselves to be ignorant of what “actually” comprises good and evil. From whence could this knowledge be made available to us finite limited creatures? However, here we are not dealing with the hopeless existential situation; on the contrary, we are dealing with the moment, within which we get an only chance to act in a productive way and to understand something for ourselves.

Thus, representing unreadiness to stop thyself when dealing with the ontological paradox within the own situation, the frequent behaviour of the “average man” seems to explain a slide into non-acceptance, hostility and war. We tend to bear conflict inside- to-out due to the unbearableness of the conflict with oneself, which, in its turn, appears to be the conflict of fundamental duality of the human nature. The inner conflict may therefore represent the conflict of inability to deal with our paradoxical nature, which displays itself to us as a quasi-confrontation of the own and the other, of the whole and the fragmentary, of entirety and lack, of freedom and necessity, etc. It may seem that Good is located only on one of these two sides. Nevertheless, while following through the experience of dealing with the fundamental ontological paradox in a phenomenological manner, we find that the Good is located prior to this difference, being, moreover, provided not by us. Undoubtedly, participating in the outer conflict appears to be just one among other cases of escaping from the unbearableness of the inner; despairing of the encounter with their own paradoxical nature, numerous people drive themselves to mental disorder, drug or alcohol use. Then, can we somehow change the situation for the better at all? Oh, would that we knew where the better was! We are not Gods -- we lack this knowledge. Then, what shall we do within this paradoxical situation? The question turns out to be incorrect, as Heidegger explains: “Before considering the question that is seemingly always the most immediate one and the only urgent one, What shall we do? we ponder this: How must we think?” [68, p. 40]. Accordingly, it is more productive if we restrain ourselves from the activism of “taking action,” at least until we understand what and how we are dealing with. We may think in some other way in order to enter a state of harmony with this comprehensive strangeness, including the strangeness of such a quantity of the repetitions of an undigested experience of war in the history of humankind. It seems to be more productive to accept the fundamental paradox, stopping in front of it with the courage of humility. Being placed into human beings not by the human beings themselves, the enigma of the strangeness of the human nature must be understood as non-uprootable and unresolvable by the human beings. However, we may also abstain from the contemporary approach of dealing with the world instead of dealing with ourselves and with the opened-for-man paradox.

Within our own existential situation, the effort of acceptance of the fundamental ontological paradox opens a paradoxical possibility for our whole Being, for the entirety of our own belonging to Being and for wholeness as fulfilment. Nevertheless, as has been shown, acceptance of the paradox comes only through tremendous effort. The state of acceptance may also be noticed to be very difficult to stay in; due to our nature, we fall out of our own place of “being-seized” by Being. However, the productivity of this state is obvious; hence, the will to return to this state also appears to be natural. If any actual ethics are possible for man, then it turns out to be an ethics of effort of acceptance, which here coincides with ontology. Good -- and the entirety of Being as Good -- may be opened due to the effort of acceptance of all and being in agreement with everything. We appear to be able to come into such a state of the own by means of fine tuning of oneself in an attempt to accept everything as a substitute for “taking action.” Consequently, by marking time for a while and restraining ourselves from immediate activism within the situation of conflict, it appears that the conflict of any scale consists in our own stabbing by the non-acceptance of the state of affairs, including our own position. Nevertheless, if we scrutinise this fact attentively, it may be noticed that, prior to any decision taken by ourselves, our own position as the one-and-only good has already been provided within Being itself. However, this also means that we lack a guarantee of having good and justice on our side without an effort; on the contrary, as Kierkegaard repeatedly claims, “we are always in the wrong” [69, p. 595-609]. In order to understand productively, it proves to be sufficient to practice the fine tuning of oneself to the vision of the fact that we are provided with everything necessary, even despite the lack of knowledge about good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsity. We discover the absence of incompleteness and, ultimately, non-being in the world; other modes, states and ways of being are likely to exist and all of them appear to be existent within Being in such a way as is necessary. In this context, one of the variations of the fusion of ethics and ontology may have been represented in the Leibnizian idea of this actual universe as the most perfect among all possible ones [70].

As can be seen from the above, while, on the face of it, the existential effort of acceptance seems to change nothing in any “outer” state of affairs; paradoxically, it actually changes everything, turning “minus” into “plus” in our “inner” dimension. We remain in the same place anyway, since the effort aimed at taking us out of this place is impossible and hence unproductive. Nevertheless, through the acceptance of everything in its entirety including the duality of “good” and “bad,” “I” and “Other,” “light” and “dark,” etc., we return to the own, including the acceptance of this own as inevitable. What do we need this for? Only through the own, only finding oneself within the own place and only with the courageous acceptance of the own finitude, limitedness and paradoxical nature, we become able to produce sense, to understand, to be attentive to everything around us -- and to act. Consequently, the fine-tuning of oneself in terms of the harmonisation of self-state turns out to be what is ultimately common to humanity, i.e. what makes a person who he or she actually is. Then, may we dream about the elimination of all conflicts? Unfortunately, no, since the paradox, which includes the mode of conflict, seems to be inevitable for the human nature. Conflicts will continue to take place independently of our effort of acceptance; nevertheless, in the present work, I have attempted to develop an approach towards an understanding of the fundamental nature of conflict in the light of this effort. This approach consists in the practicing of an actual existential-phenomenological work with and on oneself, which I have tried to demonstrate within this research. These methodological results are in agreement with those achieved by such Russian phenomenologists as M. Bakhtin, M. Mamardashvili, V. Bibikhin and E. Bakeeva, whose tradition I carry on in an attitude of hope and respect.

Conclusion

In the present paper, I have followed a serious -- and even, as may be argued, rather overambitious -- aim that consists in arriving at an understanding of the fundamental nature of conflict. However, whether successful or not, philosophical research following such an aim should be continued. The search for a unified grounding of the phenomenon of conflict may provide insights both into new aspects of “outer” conflict, which may be valuable for science, as well as into an understanding of “inner” conflict for the individual person who experiences this phenomenon within their own existential situation. In light of the designated perspectives, a variation of the existential-phenomenological approach has been applied as a special work with the ontological paradox. Faced within the state of existential experience in its diverse variants, the paradox of Being is experienced as unbearable; hence, it is frequently “born out” in the form of conflict, engendering latent or patently hostile attitudes towards the Other. In this research, I have developed a methodology of adaptation to the phenomenon of conflict infixed into the human condition; this methodology makes it possible to work with the situation of an “inner war,” refraining its bearing inside-to-out and a productive “recycling” energy of unsolved and actually non- solvable conflict into understanding the sense of the ontological paradox. In this way, harmonisation of self-state takes place in order to fine-tune oneself to the actual vision of the situation through and beyond schemes and illusions; in turn, this proves to be helpful in creating forces resistant to the destructive nature of conflict.

Despite the introduced techniques for dealing with a conflict situation, this methodology cannot be understood as universal in the sense of its inability to be applied “mechanically.” Harmonisation of selfstate must -- and only may -- be embodied by means of participative experiencing. This means that its reproduction appears to be possible only by means of being embodied each time anew, “from scratch” and in the unique way in any single case. Nevertheless, within the form of each concrete act, the following “steps” may be distinguished as follows. First, an encounter with the ontological paradox should occur in any of its content-burdened variants. Then an effort should be undertaken in order to accept the seized situation in its entirety and wholeness and, hence, in its inevitably paradoxical nature. As the following step, a rigorous phenomenological investigation of the paradox should take place, aimed at an understanding of the sense of what the experiencing one is dealing with. Finally, harmonisation of self-state should be practiced by means of adaptation to the paradox and its simultaneous fitting in the function of an “instrument” for purifying one's own vision. Therefore, work with the self-state proved to be a work on fitting; it consists in the dynamics of fine tuning oneself to the productive vision of how everything is, which shows the “exit” as a path, or as the “lighting of Being” [71, p. 89].

Undoubtedly, this methodology has its own disadvantages and limitations and requires further elucidation. This paradoxical methodology is also sure to be unsuited to a theoretical approach to problem solving aimed at revealing the development of trends of diverse conflicts; fortunately, numerous contemporary scientists are engaged exactly in the production of these kinds of theories. In terms of the author's interest, future research will focus on further elaborating the methodology for dealing with the ontological paradox presented in this article. This “inner” work is expected to be productive in diverse situations due to its methodological potential, which may be embodied as a means of harmonisation of self-state and a way of fine tuning actual understanding in the face of the dispersing and destructive tendencies of contemporaneity.

conflict good evil social

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