Another obscurity of the utmost importance: metaphysics. The category is ambivalent because it seems to be under the jurisdiction of philosophy. Metaphysical, as we know, is a world that describes an obscure behind; metaphysical effects are not of this world. Metaphysics circumscribes a realm beyond the real world and thus stands in strict opposition to everything understood under the category of politics.

Nevertheless, in the history of violence, various alliances between politics and metaphysics can be observed. These alliances encompass not only the realm of the religious but also all forms of millenarianism, the history of salvation and ultimately the ideological wars that flag themselves with sacred motifs. They are alliances that obviously point deep into the past and form a hermetic section of history.

The present age has distanced itself from the realm of the metaphysical in various ways. Power and politics depend on physical but not metaphysical grounds. The doubt one cannot shake at this point goes back to the absoluteness with which one can make this judgement. It would be all too easy for a contemporary observer to find traces of metaphysical orientations even in the present. Metaphysics is not ‘historical’; it repeatedly pervades the surface of liberal structures. Such a tendency seems to be formed not only in the figure of the god-warrior but also in the forms of contemporary power politics that invoke supposedly overcome ideologies of the older war.

If we simplify these phenomena drastically, violence is justified by invoking the almighty God. God warriors invoke a higher, sacred law, absolute commandments that are disturbing to all outsiders. No less disturbing is the return of war in the first decades of the beginning millennium.

The impressions of the present (2022) are now difficult to fit into a reflection that would have to judge events from a serious distance. However, all observers seem to have the impression that the wars of the present (including above all the so-called civil wars in Syria and the wars on Ukrainian territory) are taking on anachronistic, if not metaphysical forms. In particular, the attack on the sovereign state of Ukraine in February 2022 seems to suggest such a description.

These violent confrontations are not the actual subject here, although they do enter into the reflection via detours.