A post-scientific look behind the news: We humans, as observers, can’t ever meaningfully experience the full impact of terrorism on victims. We must also acknowledge the real motives of the perpetrators. (Special to israelnationalnews)
“So says science, and I believe in science. But up to now, has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man).
Recent videos of ISIS/IS-inflicted beheadings revealed, in conspicuously graphic terms, what has generally remained hidden – that is, the deeply human suffering side of Jihadist terrorism.
Still, unavoidably, even these intensely grotesque images must fail to let us fully understand the victim anguish in such barbarous circumstances, here, the unimaginable terror that screams desperately, but also silently, “from within.” This absence of a genuinely interior perspective on terrorism – a partially irremediable absence, as we shall soon see – must always leave observers with only a limited understanding of terrorist-inflicted harms.
It’s no one’s fault. We are not to blame for this serious absence. After all, we haven’t somehow created or “allowed” such regrettably limited kinds of understanding.
Jihadist terrorists are actually much worse, and much more insidious, than they might appear.
Even today, the best available science is able to illuminate only selectively partial truths. Accordingly, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, in his deservedly modern classic, The Phenomenon of Man, queries insightfully: “I believe in science, but up to now, has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?”
Sigmund Freud himself, much more familiar to modern readers than Teilhard, a Jesuit Father and paleontologist, had already understood this “phenomenological” point of view, and, quite naturally, also in much more distinctly therapeutic contexts. He had early recognized, in what was both an utterly primal and spontaneously visceral observation, that useful psychological examination must never neglect intimately private feelings. More precisely, whatever the intrusive limitations of any subjective investigation or healing enterprise, Freud had wisely cautioned, the capable therapist must pay close attention to the human psyche, or “soul.”