Censorship

What does the censor do? The censor controls the channels. The censor decides what is appropriate. What is appropriate? What are the channels? Which channels matter? And when? The channels are the vehicle for the transmission and presentation of processed information. How is this information processed? The city planners hold the reigns. They process the information. They are the city planners. Yeah right! We are schemers with a penchant for ad hoc-ery!

Aren’t Socrates and his friends just flying by the seats of their pants? I guess that’s what we alll do. Maybe sometimes, other times maybe not.

Justice: Nothing as it Seems

OK. So. Where should we begin? I just read Book II of the Republic and didn’t take any notes or save any key passages, so I guess this is what is called “winging-it.” The last time I was on this topic, I mentioned something about different kinds of cities. We’ll get to that in a moment. I want to try to recollect as much as I can about Book II and as I’m doing that, give my own commentary on it.

Since we are being so anthropocentric (and abstractly metaphysical, too), let’s stick to the subject of unjust/just people and their congregations. What is seeming? It would seem that seeming is a type of being. It would be a type of being as something ”taken to be.” It would be that which shows  itself (not just in a visible sense) as such and such a being. We still don’t really know what Justice is. That’s what we’re trying to find out. We are just using its adjective form to describe actions or people. This would be like using the word in various ways in its common senses in order to get at what it might mean in a more abstract sense. Let’s take two people and say that one is unjust to the max and one is just to the max. Would the completely unjust person’s life seem to be really good or bad. It would seem to be good, and furthermore, the unjust person (since all about him is unjust) would seem to be just. How so? Suppose an unjust person acts unjustly for some type of corrupt personal gain. That person would seem just plain unjust. But if the unjust person gets away with the injustice, then an even greater level of injustice is reached. This would pretty much be the perfectly unjust person. He or she would be a person who gains all at the expense of others while seeming  just and even praiseworthy in the others’ eyes. On the other hand, let’s say that we have a completely just person. How would he or she be completely just? Well, suffering seems like it would take up a great deal of his or her time. Why suffering? The unjust person’s injustice would intrude. If there were to be just one completely unjust person, truly unjust, in an otherwise perfectly just community, then that community itself would suffer greatly. For the purposes of argument, say Justice is a type of moderation. A generally just community that has one completely unjust person would have something like a vampire on its hands, sucking the moderation from the community which would have to continually readjust its fairly just “social contract” in order to survive. So would it be good to be unjust or good to be just? It would seem that it would be good to be unjust (accumulating all sorts of personal gain undetected) and bad to be just (always suffering at the hands of the unjust without knowing that the unjust were behind it all).

Justice writ large, the division of labor, and the music of the gods: In the end we really want to know the Idea (Form) of Justice, what Justice is. How can we make this easy on ourselves? We can start with the big time. Socrates or someone suggests something like an eye test, i.e., the doc tells you to read the big letters first and then progressively go on to the smaller ones. Let’s go from city to person, starting at city, since we suppose that it, in some way, is larger than a person and will give us a better overall and general picture of what Justice is. Ok. For one thing, there seem to be different kinds of cities, depending on how many persons are present. Cities, though, also seem to have a tendency to grow in Socrates’ and co’s. account. Eventually, we get to the kind of city which, among various other employments, needs some strong defense forces. These forces must be strong but they also must be “philosophic” lovers of learning in some sense. They will need to be educated to become good guardians. They will have to be educated from the get go. Since you can’t just throw a toddler into the lion’s den, you have to start by shaping his or her mind. This is done through “music” of which speeches and tales are also included. Now, as builders of the just city, we have to act as censors to educate our young correctly. We gotta tell ‘em that the gods are the cause of only good, and that the gods are not shape shifting confounding wizard types. Is this enough?