Wojna jako „zguba językowa” a filozofia
War as a ‘linguistic loss’ and philosophy. Studium ex malo: The article undertakes a philosophical consideration of war, conducted ex malo — through the prism of evil, understood as an orienting point for thinking about limit‐experiences. War is approached as a ‘linguistic loss’ in its affinity with evil but also its distinctness from evil — not as an object susceptible to neutral conceptualization, but as an experience that simultaneously demands articulation and compromises eloquence, rendering silence problematic as well. In this sense, the question of war becomes a question concerning the conditions of possibility for philosophical questioning itself and the competence of philosophy in the face of limit‐experiences. The argument unfolds in dialogue with the thought of Cezary Wodziński and selected motifs from the philosophies of Lévinas, Agamben, Heraclitus, Hegel and Heidegger, revealing different ways to situate war within ontological and historical horizons, as well as the tensions arising from their relation to the problem of evil. The article bringsto light the resistance that the experience of war poses to attempts at conceptual grasp, along with the aporias of its articulation. Three fundamental obstacles are distinguished: insufficient experiential immediacy, the normative uncertainty of utterance, and the excessand traumatic character of experience, which undermine both discourse and silence. Rather than offering a definition of war, the study proposes a recognition of its limit‐status: when war is considered through the prism of evil, philosophy is confronted with the boundariesof its own expressibility and with the loss of a more primordial competence — the discernment of good and evil.
Authors
- Anton Marczyński (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2588-3607)
Institutions
- University of Białystok (PL)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Argument Biannual Philosophical Journal
- Published
- 2026-10-30
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.24917/20841043.16.1.2
- Primary Topic
- Philosophical and Cultural Analysis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00