Anti-Climacus

A FIRST THOUGHT ON JUSTICE: The old Law and Justice course is moving on to the "justice" section beginning tomorrow. Our first reading is Republic I. The problem is always where to begin: there's a lot going on in the dialogue, and since we won't be reading all of it (but will be reading more Plato), it's important that they learn how to read and understand the text. Much must be bracketed (I will not, tragically, begin with a fiften-minute exposition of the importance of the word 'down' and its place throughout the work).

Reading through the work this time, I focused more particularly on the account Cephalus gives of his own life, and his late recognition of the importance of justice. The standard philosophical account usually says philosophy is an activity best left to the old, who have had the requisite life experience, and there's something to that--though I also have sympathy with Peter Euben's view that Cephalus, by giving up eros, has removed one of the driving forces of philosophy--at any rate, I'm not sure someone with no sympathy for what it's like to be young ought to do the leading. The debate, though, puts me in mind of two things I've read or re-read recently.

First, from F. Scott Fitzgerald, "What I Think and Feel at 25":

Well, now I'm twenty-five and I'm not callow any longer--at least not so that I can notice it when I look in an ordinary mirror. Instead, I'm vulnerable. I'm vulnerable in every way...

I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged--the twenty feet includes the skin of my family--but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin I begin to shiver.

Second, Michael Oakeshott, "On Being Conservative":

Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what we can make of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands--unless it be a cricket bat...

For most there is what Conrad called the 'shadow line' which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions.

There's a lot to say about each (I find Oakeshott compelling in the last quoted part, since this maps onto what I have frequently, but unsuccessfully, tried to say about the transition to adulthood), but I'll let it suffice to make this observation: the difference between old and young in Oakeshott, and the difference between callow and not-callow in Fitzgerald, comes from the presence of others. Once I have someone other than me to worry about, the world becomes more complicated.

Perhaps, then, one can follow the specific arguments about justice in Book I as a series of attempts to defend egoism: to think about justice in terms of its consequences to me (Cephalus), its consequences to me and my friends (Polemarchus, but never mind if we have a hard time specifying who the friends are or what we might owe them), or its consequences to me and my social group (Thrasymachus, on the assumption that it's not best to be a tyrant and only have to look after your own interests). Fitzgerald, Oakeshott, and Socrates when he rebuilds the polity in Book II, begin from the fact of people around you, whom you cannot wish away and to whom you owe certain responsibilities.

Hmm. It's enough to make me rethink communitarianism.