War : a transcendental body of meanings.

Abstract

This thesis proposes war, particularly in the manner of a civil war, as the underlying order of social causality and by extension, war as an attempt to give meaning to logos. It intends to illustrate the proposed concept by showing how war changes in purpose with each development in social formation and ends up being a form of logos itself in its quest to attain meaning for society. I shall first begin this course of transformation with war as a vehicle used to test the very ideologies it was used or is being used to advocate. For if “war is [indeed] the father of all”, then all that we know, everything that constitutes our epistemology, is either reaffirmed or crushed during war; the locus of a birth and an end. To demonstrate the above proposed concept, I intend to use Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Through the two novels, I am also offering war as a plausible demonstration of what Althusser calls "the last instance", the moment where ideas rise and fall. Just as ‘logos’ is common, so is war. The “underlying order” of ideological change is manifested in war, as a state apparatus needed by both the RSA and the ISA to sustain their respective ideologies. This thesis will also attempt to show that “strife is [indeed] justice”; war as a necessary means to reinstate the power of the RSA or to replace it with the ideology of the reactive ISA. However, this vehicle eventually loses its very purpose the more it is being made used of. This leads to the final claim of my thesis that war has become a tool no longer for any purpose but merely for its own existence.