Asian-Arab philosophical dialogues on globalization, democracy ...

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Asia-<strong>Arab</strong> Philosophical Dialogues on Globalization, Democracy and Human Rights
justice in itself by discovering the property common to all the things that provide instances of it, appears
to commit Socrates to both of Wittgenstein’s “primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language”.
Socrates’ obsession with this idea is as clear a case of a <strong>philosophical</strong>ly induced craving for generality
as one could hope to find. It is sustained by his longing to discover a moral substrate to our world
rather than a purely material one, which we first met in his response to Anaxagoras. This <strong>philosophical</strong>
inclination predisposes Socrates to look for common ingredients instead of family resemblance, social
modification and cultural analogy. It blinds him to the possibility that such things as beauty and justice
are not fixed and finalized features of the world, but variable and evolving ones. It limits him to an
inquiry in which the moral order must be discovered rather than invented.
The root of the problem lies in the assumption that the moral order is something already inherent in the
nature of things and that needs only to be discovered. We need to divest ourselves of this presumption
much as we must abandon our allegiance to the idea that there has to be a common quality in all
things to which a name applies. We need to acknowledge that an inquiry into such things as justice
and freedom should engage us as much in constructive or creative activity as in gaining a clearer
understanding of their existing manifestations. We need to allow for the extension of our concepts of
freedom and justice to take account of changing historical and social circumstances, much as we might
extend the concept of a game to cover cases that bear only a family resemblance to those with which
we were earlier acquainted.
We can hardly gain a better appreciation of this fact than in considering Plato’s 54 view of justice in the
Republic. Here justice is expressed in the rule “that each one man must perform one social service in the
state for which his nature was best adapted”. He then has Socrates express this colloquially as the saying
“that to do one’s own business and not to be a busybody is justice”. Not being insiders, we gain a clearer
appreciation of what he means when Socrates goes on to elaborate this as “the principle embodied in
child, woman, slave, free, artisan, ruler, and ruled, that each performed his one task as one man and was
not a versatile busybody”. 55
It is difficult for us to see the justice in each person keeping to his or her own station in life, even if it
involved being a slave. We do not see justice in such social arrangements. Nor are we likely to think,
with Plato, that these arrangements offer services for which the slave’s nature is best adapted. The
manifest injustice that we see in the social arrangements of ancient Athens might have been ultimately
incomprehensible to Plato, but the way that he and Socrates went about trying to define justice only
exacerbates the problem. Reliance on the common features of justice in familiar surroundings all too
easily leads to a definition in terms of accepted social arrangements.
To compare Plato’s understanding of justice with our own is not meant to show how much more we
understand about the nature of justice than he did, of course, but to warn ourselves of the limitations
of his methods. A merely analytical approach to the tasks of philosophy is more likely to provide a
justification of existing conditions than a means of transcending them. As Karl Marx once famously
noted: “The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change
it”. 56 When he made that comment Marx obviously did not have Socrates in mind. For Socrates was
intent upon changing the world. As Marx would be quick to point out, however, Socrates’ conception of
moral values failed to come to grips with the processes of social and historical change.
54 Although put in the mouth of Socrates, unlike in the early <strong>dialogues</strong>, most scholars are agreed that we are here
dealing with Plato’s and not Socrates’ views. For an influential defense of the distinction between the historical
Socrates and his Platonic surrogate in Plato’s <strong>dialogues</strong> see Vlastos, Gregory. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher,
p. 45-106.
55 Republic, IV, 433a-d.
56 Karl Marx, XI th thesis on Feuerbach.