What is the Definition of Peace?

The penny of desired mental states

Peace is a concept of societal friendship and harmony in the absence of hostility and violence. In a social sense, peace is commonly used to mean a lack of conflict (such as war) and freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.

Without negotiation, no definition will do peace justice. The word is too expansive, modest, loaded with nuance, and practical. The penny of desired mental states, peace is taken for granted unless continuously multiplied. Yet peace is not entirely mysterious to us: we recognize it in people’s words, actions, and characters. What meaning does a peaceful day possess if not compared against events of a hectic one?

Multiple dimensions coalesce whenever we demand peace. Perhaps like love or wisdom, peace is the energy we understand tacitly, instead of overtly, knowing more internally than we can easily define with language.

Although examining the nature of harm and other dimensions of violence retain importance in understanding peacebuilding, it would seem that questions relating to the blurred boundaries between society, our desires, and peace require further deep thinking.

The current canon of peace scholarship emphasizes a nation’s relationship to war. From Kant to Rousseau, this lengthy canon lives as though the individual’s relationship to peace is only related to how a country manages its rights, along with how quickly the government is willing to resort to violence to expand or protect its regime. Society plays a part in our understanding of peace, but not to the degree that most scholarship articulates. We understand peace as much from its absence as its presence, and we can discern peace from pretense.

In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere “forms of intuition” which structure all experience, and therefore that while “things-in-themselves” exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere “appearances”, and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us

Peace is as assorted as we are. It lives in our avarice and charity, genius and stupidity. We catch it in transient moments, sensing it and then internalizing it as an infrequent sensation that we’d prefer to replicate. Nevertheless, we’re able to name peace as a central component during an enduring, loving relationship. And to that same degree, not even a perfect relationship bears all the patterns of peace.

Yet, the more I study peace, the closer I am to being comfortable with how far modernity is to making peace a norm and how far we are to investigating its essence. Peace is desirable, but for what purpose precisely? An upset infant, wailing at the top of its lungs, knows no complex iteration of peace, nor does it care about the possibility of disturbing the peace of others. When the infant is irritated, the world will feel it. The infant doesn’t have the words to describe what it desires; however, its caretakers and those who hear the crying understand that something needs to end. Peace is desirable: always within reach, yet somehow elusive. So how do we call it from the depths of our subconscious into our waking life?

Peace usually characterizes an absence of some element of strife. So as the word becomes more than a word, we demand different experiences to match personal expectations of peace. In more ways than one, we are perpetually infants, howling about to demand something about our existence changes but troubled that we don’t have the language to express what needs to change and why.

Throughout history, leaders have used peacemaking and diplomacy to establish a type of behavioral restraint that has resulted in the establishment of regional peace or economic growth through various forms of agreements or peace treaties. Such behavioral restraint has often resulted in the reduced conflict, greater economic interactivity, and consequently substantial prosperity.

Most notions of peace are relational, meaning it’s pretty challenging to determine a universal peace standard. For example, a woman sunbathing naked in her Palo Alto home’s backyard might enjoy peace in that state, but she has neighbors, and her neighbors have children. True, it’s her property that she has worked for, but her rendition of peace may impact others.

Individual attitudes of peace get homogenized into a collective whole without much effort. That Palo Alto woman might’ve never even thought to try sunbathing nude in her backyard because why would that even cross her mind? This mental blocker is a natural deterrent to fostering an individual’s true potential, which might be essential in uncovering peace’s essence.

We’re starting to understand that peace may be contextual. An action in one circumstance might promote peace, but it may result in conflict in another. Our relation to other human beings is our most outstanding strength and weakness. We often make concessions with the world, bending our wishes to fit alongside a given image of propriety. The bending is altruistic. Living in a harmonious society requires us to forgo individual desires from time to time. But, the question remains, does this continued bending we do to fit within culture make us happy?

Happiness and meaning play a vital role in peace. So, I pose an overarching question that looms over this whole text: can an individual be peaceful without being happy, and can happiness be formed without meaning? We travel down the central difficulty of existence from asking that two-fold question.

“Psychological peace” (such as peaceful thinking and emotions) is perhaps less well defined, yet often a necessary precursor to establishing “behavioral peace.” Peaceful behavior sometimes results from a “peaceful inner disposition.” Some have expressed the belief that peace can be initiated with a certain quality of inner tranquility that does not depend upon the uncertainties of daily life

The transience of existence is the frontier we all must face. In the face of death, we must figure out how to embrace life. And not just any life, but the life explicitly designed for us. We give death too much power when we believe that it robs human beings of life when in actuality, death brings peace and gives life meaning.

Imagine the kind of lives we would live if we believed our time here was not finite. Then, we would be justified in postponing everything, nothing done in the present, and everything pushed into tomorrow. Only when under the pressure of death does it make sense to act now. For if we are creatures searching for meaning, the reality of death awakens the sense of responsibility in maximizing our time here.

It’s only fitting that I bring up Friedrich Nietzsche, who once famously said, “He who has a why can endure any how.” Once an individual attains this sense of self-knowledge, they quietly fight the challenges in their life. When a “why” is realized, every waking moment is motivated with an intensity that asks, “If I don’t rise to do this one thing, then who will? And if I don’t find the strength to do it now, how long will it take for me to gain the power to do it?” Through this lens, life has the potential to have meaning regardless of the conditions.

Aristotle grappled long and hard with the “highest good,” as he called it. We can use him as a starting point for our discussion on the individual’s relationship to meaning. His highest good, he contended, had three characteristics: it is desirable for itself, it is not desirable for the sake of any other good, and all other goods are in service of it. I believe peace fits this mold. The first burden of finding peace through meaning is societal habits rooted in maintaining a functioning economy. People need jobs, and they need to do jobs they hate to keep this ship afloat. But again, we must make from meaning and peace what they indeed are, not how they can free you from misery.

Victor Frankl published 39 books. The autobiographical Man’s Search for Meaning, a best-selling book, is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps.

Some 2,000 years after Aristotle, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and my idol, conveyed his experience to understand meaning. For Frankl, creating a meaningful life was about having a cause to serve or another person to love. It was about enjoying something that took you beyond yourself, which Frankl termed “self-transcendence.”

For Frankl, all good things derive from self-transcendence. However, for our uses, we’ll need to understand that the more we single-mindedly strive for anything, the less likely we will achieve it; the more you focus beyond yourself, the more likely what you’re seeking will meet you.

Most Christians will know the Parable of the Mustard Seed, wherein Jesus describes the Kingdom of God as like a mustard seed in that it is tiny but grows into a great tree. Buddhism, too, has its Parable of the Mustard Seed, but here the story is quite different

I n Buddhism, there’s a narrative called “The Parable of the Mustard Seed.” It’s about a woman named Gotami, who’s dealing with the loss of her son. Riddled with sorrow, Gotami brings her son’s dead body to her neighbors, asking if they have medicine to heal him. Everyone she encountered said the same thing: “Where did you ever meet with medicine for the dead?” Finally, after Gotami’s neighbors met her cries for help with sarcasm and jeers, a wise man saw her sorrow and directed her to a man known as the Sage of the Ten Forces.

Gotami proceeded to the sage, and she asked him the same question as she asked her neighbors. For medicine to help heal her son. The sage said to her: “You did well, Gotami, in coming hither for medicine. Go enter the city, make the rounds of the entire city, beginning at the beginning, and whatever house no one has ever died, from that house fetch tiny grains of mustard seed.” She listened, entering the city, and at the very first house, she couldn’t accept the mustard seed. Someone died in that house before.

She journeys to the second house and the third and fourth, but she couldn’t accept a single mustard seed because someone died in every home visited. Eventually, Gotami understood the lesson the Sage of Ten Forces sent her off to learn. Overcome with emotion, she went outside of the city, carried her son to a pyre, and held him in her arms. Then, to her son, she said: “Dear little son, I thought that you alone had been overtaken by this thing which men call death. But you are not the only one death has overtaken. This is a law common to all humankind.” Gotami then cast her son away in the burning ground. From that understanding, she learned firsthand how to make peace through acceptance of impermanence.

The acquisition of such a “peaceful internal disposition” for oneself and others can contribute to resolving otherwise seemingly irreconcilable competing interests. Peace is not often in the state of excitement although we are happy when excited, but peace is when one’s mind is quiet and satisfied.

I once told that parable to a student I had whose stepdad had killed his brother. After months of missing school, I asked around to see what happened to him. Quickly, details of the terrible event got back to me, and I had time to think about the kind of affirmation I wanted to share with him when he returned.

When he returned, I could see he’d changed. Aspects of his face had hardened. He was a wholly foreign individual, something that only tragedy can do to a person. I pulled him to the side when I saw him and embraced him. I told him that whenever he wanted to talk, I was available.

He tolerated my offer and came to talk with me after class that day. Everyone knew what took place, and he said he no longer felt like a human being. He had become an embodiment of the event itself because that’s the first thing people would mention when they saw him. The tragedy became his identity. When he came to speak, I noticed that the bags underneath his eyes could’ve held groceries. We danced through small talk and dove into his incident, the tragedy, and the trauma that followed. “I don’t understand it,” he said, “but I’m doing better. I was angry at first, then I was sad, and now I’m just empty.” At that moment, I regaled him with the Parable of the Mustard Seed. But when I finished the parable, he just looked at me. There was no enlightenment. Just calm sat in his eyes. He stared at me and told me that he didn’t care about that woman or her son or the Sage of the Ten Forces. His brother was dead. No matter how many connections I made, the parable did not resonate with him. None of it could bring him peace.

The phenomenologists consider meaning as being at the heart of the human experience. My student’s first reaction to tragedy was confusion or even more acute than that shock. Because our minds are meaning-making engines, seeking rational connections to sort out life’s randomness, we have difficulty accepting — especially with things we didn’t plan to happen. However, the stark reality is that life is inherently irrational and random. There is no true meaning in why you were born to your life or look the way you do. Some powerful force delivered the minutiae of your life without your consent. Pain following the random categorizations that make up the characteristics of your life cannot be rationalized.

Adherents to the phenomenological tradition like Heidegger and Brentano Husserl acknowledge the difficulty of separating physical existence from conscious experience and psychological processes. This tradition seeks to move our conversation surrounding life away from the domain of the obsession with appearance, penetrating deep into the world as we live it in real-time.

Accepting life’s nature for what it is holds a large portion of peace’s definition. Acceptance is a foothold in peace’s reins. For our purposes, we must attend to things in life from the perspective of immediacy. How are things, really? Don’t lie to yourself. What things in your immediate present can you alter if you’re unhappy? Is your rent past due? Are you jobless? Does your boss abuse you? Do you hate your job, and if you do, why? For any semblance of peace to manifest, we must analyze the things in our lives for their essence. The truth without kid-gloves. This practice involves the dissolution of the ontological gap between the inner and outer world, subjective and objective experience, mind, and reality.