HOMO MILITARIS: WHY DO HUMANS WANT TO WAGE WARS?

• Main Authors: Kateryna S. Honcharenko, Karina V. Krahel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University Publishing 2019-12-01
• Series: Вісник Харківського національного університету імені В.Н. Каразіна. Серія Філософія, філософські перипетії
• Subjects: war; peace; human nature; philosophy of war; homo militaris
• Online Access: https://periodicals.karazin.ua/philosophy/article/view/15178/14105

The phenomenon of war occupies one of the leading places in socio-philosophical and cultural studies. War also has an ambiguous position in human life. On the historical map we see the ongoing waves of armed conflicts, which inevitably lead to fatal consequences for countries, peoples and human beings. War mainly appears in the form of horrors and tragedies. However, in philosophical studies, war is considered from different angles. Philosophers often emphasize the ambiguity and multidimensionality of war. In this work, the authors analyze the phenomenon of war, given a certain “attractiveness” and even the “necessity” of this phenomenon for humans. The authors also summarize the available range of answers to the question of where the desire for violence comes from, that is, the so-called “thirst for war”. It is this desire that gives rise to a constant stay of people in a state of war. The results of this study show that war is indeed an important phenomenon, which can also be considered one of the fundamental attributes of human nature. Analyzing various approaches that explain the causes of war (naturalistic, psychological, economic, etc.) the authors note that the source of any armed conflict is precisely the “militancy” in the very essence of homo sapiens. Human beings must constantly fight for their existence. And such a struggle often takes various forms, which can be considered as concrete variants of the same phenomenon. This phenomenon at the theoretical and philosophical level is fixed in the concept of war. Despite the natural sense of horror that the word “war” evokes at the level of everyday consciousness, pain and hope, death and freedom, faith in human and the justice of the universe, as well as a willingness to fight for this justice, are simultaneously hidden under this “ language shell”. All these internally contradictory meanings are united within the framework of the philosophically processed concept of war, and are also embodied in many different “wars” that a person constantly wages due to his / her specific “being structure”. Human, therefore, is a “warring creature,” or, as the authors propose to denote this feature, “homo militaris”.