This presentation aims to articulate preliminary terms for a critical philosophical response to the global reality of anthropogenic violence, or the violence of the human over the generality of the beings and lives of the earth.  It develops this critique by presenting two related pictures or schemas of the general form of this violence as it has been staged in Western philosophical thought, and then considering the logical and formal implications of these schemas, as they portray and position the global relationship of a (human) self or subject of identity, thought and action to the totality of (indifferently human or non-human) beings and lives.  The first of the schemas – that of ontological violence as total war – is articulated by Emmanuel Levinas at the beginning of Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being and presents to thought an indifferent totality of beings, each defined as a one by the essential interest of its own propriety and thereby consigned to the generality and ubiquity of its pervasively “allergic” confrontation and struggle with any and all others.  The second schema is that which articulates, for Aristotle, the privilege of the human as the unique possessor of the capacity (dunamis) of language, thought or reason: the capacities that ensure, for Aristotle and the tradition he inaugurates, the ability of the human reasoning in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction to comprehend in knowledge the phenomena and beings of the world as a whole. 

Drawing on resources and critical arguments from Plato, Nāgārjuna, and Wittgenstein, I argue that the two schemas are fundamentally interrelated and also both formally and logically incoherent in their presentation of the constitution and relation of (what is called) a one with (any and all) others; and further, that by appreciating this incoherence we begin to bring in view some conceptual contours of collective forms of life and relation no longer marked by the ubiquity and inevitability of the violence they present.