Charley Mejame

If there is a topic that continues to draw forth debate today as much in philosophy as in other human and social sciences, it is incontrovertibly violence. Philosophy, human and social sciences have toiled to address the problem of violence to date, but the problem still go unanswered. The omnipresence of violence in political history—whether it is wars, revolutions—seem to reduce to nothingness the utopia of non-violence. In contemporary French thought, Albert Camus rejects violence by resorting to the absurd and revolt. Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls for action, Claude Lévi-Strauss raises the problem of violence faced with human diversity. Gilles Deleuze thinks the ultimate dimension of being as difference. Michel Foucault attaches himself to intolerable confine ment. Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida analyze the transition from metaphysics to ethics. Vladimir Jankélévitch examines the question of forgiveness(pardon), the unforgivable and the imprescriptible. Several fundamental questions are at the heart of these disciplines. Should the specificity of human violence be considered? Is the idea of human nature relevant when it comes to thinking about violence? Can we ever think of eradicating violence, as the Enlightenment philosophy hoped, or should we accept the idea of an intrinsic ambivalence of human beings who, subject to contradictory impulses are never totally good, totally bad? The inquiry focuses on Sartre’s attempt to address the moral issue of violence via freedom, political violence and the violence of racism bedeviling the modern world.

The aim of this paper is the exploration of Heidegger's interpretation of the phenomenon of technology against the background of his new vision of reality. It can be said that in this context sin which was formerly moral and religious became in our age, as it were, technological. Because man has distanced himself from the Nature, he finds himself at the same time alienated and guilty, contemplating, like a child brazen in the brainlessness of what he has done and waiting in anguish the imminent punishment of a mother who does not forgive. Cum multis aliis, it is not only ugliness with which Heidegger reproaches technoscience but aggressiveness as well.

Contemporary philosophers, humanists, and social scientists have been wrestling with the difficulties mankind has in living together, with the problem of alterity, the problem of the other, the conundrum of the damnation of hell (as Jean-Paul Sartre terms it), its torture or agony and sufferings in the modern world. It is mentioned that we are nothing without others, that we are strongly interdependent, and that it is beyond the bounds of possibility avoiding their presence, which is basic to what we are. Yet living together with them is complex and difficult. Sundry problems, torments are, as it were, caused by their behaviors and judgments. We are sent negative images as well as deterministic plans to wrestle with. For Jean-Paul Sartre our relation with others is per se conflictual. The problem of alterity has all along presented serious problems to philosophers and humanists; they have not only found themselves powerless in the face of these manifestations but even seems foster them. This article identifies and examines the function and the devastating repercussions of this conflict, the representation, which we every one of us can have of himself in terms of identity in contemporary society. The paper also establishes significant points of convergence and contrast between contemporary Western thinkers (Levinas, Derrida etc.) and the healing wisdom of Africa implicit in its yet to be explored linguistic and literary corpus in addressing contemporary problems in humans living together, the problematic of an ethical life. According to Edgar Morin, we are in the prehistory of the human mind, meaning that the human mental capacities are yet to be explored, especially at the level of our relations with others.