Kant wrote. (When words don't fail).

"War itself," Kant wrote, "if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it." This was written at the end of the eighteenth century, but it implies a concept of war as governed by codes of honor that reach back to the era of chivalry, and even earlier. And it inflects the way we continue to think of warfare, as is evident in politicians' speaking of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as "cowardly," even if those who executed them were fearless: They did not give fair warning and disregarded the rights of entirely innocent people. The degree to which armed conflict is understood as covered by rules of conduct makes it impossible to find historical precedents for the events that have overwhelmed us. In order to cope with the present, we must abandon the concept of warfare and begin to think outside the framework that has made it one aspect of civilization, however horrible actual wars have been.

Here is an episode of violence that falls outside that framework. It occurs in Book I of the Aeneid, in which a terrible disaster overcomes the forces of Troy as they set forth to establish themselves in a new land. It is a sudden and unexpected storm at sea. "Every sign / Portended a quick death for mariners. /...[A] howling gust from due north took the sail aback and lifted / Wavetops to heaven; oars were snapped in two /... [O]ver her flank and deck / A mountain of grey water crashed in tons." The aggressor in the Aeneid was the goddess Juno, who cries: "The race I hate is crossing the Tuscan sea, /... Put new fury / Into your winds, and make the long ships founder!" She even promises her fairest nymph to King Aeolus, just as the fundamentalist martyrs are assured the caresses of seventy virgins when they pass into paradise.

Why Juno so hated the Trojans is a matter of long history, about which nothing could any longer be done. Neither can we do much about the history of unintended consequences that have made us objects of blind hatred. The gods were terrorists, accepting neither rules nor rights. The ancients had to find ways outside the scope of warfare to deflect their aggressions, and so must we, but the history of war furnishes no guidance for the path before us. I fear our leaders will have found it impossible to think outside the framework of war, and so will mount attacks on other states as an indirect means of dealing with terrorism. This is not really rising to the challenge of finding solutions that do not instead contribute to proliferation.

Arthur c. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at columbia university. His most recent book, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year.