Ping Pong – The Last: A Circle of Justice
Foucault’s final gift to philosophy was to re-connect ideas of the subject and the individual back to justice, as they had been in Ancient Greece. The problem of being just is thereby caught up in the problem of doing justice to oneself as a self. But there is nothing naïve for Foucault in this return to Greece. He does not claim that he is somehow hacking back to the true root of philosophy, but rather, that to understand how history has given us theories of justice and theories of identity, one needs to understand first how those theories were initially created. Once this understanding is achieved, he suggests, one ought to be able to trace how this idea then evolved across the centuries, and became eventually a theory in whose light we were born, and through which (although in a way radically different to the Greeks) we still live. It ought, he suggests, to be possible to start to think the history that is silently thinking through oneself; The history that one needs to think, to be a self at all. History is therefore not the study of the past for Foucault, but rather the articulation of that past into the present: it is giving history and time legs to march with…
Such a project has three main levels. On the first level, the act of going back to Greece, and re-reading texts from two millennia ago challenges what one is. To read history with an open heart is to be asked to rethink how one assumes the world is. And here history has a very particular power. To go back into the history of one’s own culture is necessarily to ask whether that history contains elements or thoughts that would be useful now. Thoughts that then could be taken up again and used to think with. To go back into history is therefore to ask exactly whether it can teach one something useful in the present. The second level then looks at what was happening in that past that is useful and relevant in the present. That is, what is it that was first created by the Greeks, and yet which still overhangs us all? What did the Greeks ‘ever do for us’, and what are they still doing to us? Finally one needs to understand or at least begin to understand, what it means to have an idea with a long history of its own. How do the two millennia between us and Greece warp our conception of them, but also (and far more vitally) how do they change our conception of ourselves? How then are we really a product of the slippage of time, and the constant reworking of ideas which began in Greece? Each of these three levels will be examined in this Rant.
What then do the Greeks offer us that is so very different? Foucault suggests that one needs in understanding Greek thought, to draw a difference between morality and Ethics. Morality is the forming of an external series of laws, by which one is eventually judged. Such a system Foucault argues, was alien to Greek thought. On the contrary, he suggests that thought was ethical (and not moral). The essence of ethics lies in the way one in which uses the world and one’s own experience within the world, to become, for want of a better phrase, a better person. Ethics is therefore not about rule following so much as learning and developing.
This distinction comes down to freedom. The essence of morality lies in the idea that one has no choice. One needs to follow a prescribed set of rules, or fulfil a series of hurdles, and any attempt that one makes to buck this trend is taken as a sin or at least a falling short. To be moral is therefore to not be free (the only freedom one might have is the Kantian one - that one ought to agree with the rules wholeheartedly if they are good ones). Ethics in contrast is always free. To be ethical is to seek freedom. The Ethical human is therefore one who attempts to build a mind which is free not only from the arbitrary acts of others, but far more importantly also free from the tyranny of passion and desire. To be ethical therefore first and foremost, is to be free from oneself: That is, it is to be free from being only one self. One becomes then free both to make genuine choices, but also from those choices and their effects. One is never therefore caught in the traps of regret or endless guilts.
This distinction has become, since Foucault, one of the key dividing lines within society and the provisions of services. The question about education (but also health policy) is always what is this for? That is, why are we educating people? Is it because we are forcing pupils into a system of regulation, and squeezing them into and sorting them out across a series of tasks? Is education then an exam based ‘moral’ system? Or is it a more ethical concern? I.e., it is really about personal development and giving pupils the tools to rework their own world and rethink the nature of their surroundings? And if it is, how is this best achieved within the school environment? Likewise what is the value of public health provision: Is it to enforce certain standards of health on the population (to eliminate certain diseases by vaccination or reduce the risk of ‘flu)? Or is it about helping each individual with their own health care, to maximise their healthy potential? These are both genuine paradoxes, and yet they are essentially irresolvable, as they attempt to link totally different approaches and judge between irreconcilably different outcomes.
What then did the Greeks do that was so different from their forebears? What difference did they conjure up that we still live with? Foucault suggests here two: Firstly the Greeks, in their cult of freedom (and young boys) set up amongst a small subset of their population (free men) a (non caste based) system which demanded that they respected the rights of others to be different. The Greek’s great creation then in this limited circle was in a sense, the Other. That is, the idea that there existed another human being whom one needs to understand or at least allow for. There existed others who were different, and differences that mattered. To be a free Greek was therefore to listen to debates, and to think about other (free Greek) lives, and other systems of thinking or governing.
The (free male) Greeks therefore lived in a world which was open to more than one way of thinking, and one way of governing, and had to develop mechanisms and strategies for listening to others, and for articulating their differences. They divided such differences up into two main categories. There were those differences that one needed to respect because they were separate from one because of age and education. Other people without one’s education were therefore going to be different. This difference was not absolute. And needed to be respected. One ought not to abuse one’s own position and manipulate another through one’s knowledge. Education became therefore just that. It became a system in which one helped another, as another, move on or change. One challenged and yet allowed for, the differences between individuals. Alternatively there were those differences between differing mature folk. These differences could not be so simply dealt with or examined. One needed therefore to persuade other humans (free Greeks) of one’s point of view. One could not force one’s opinion upon them, but rather needed to work out strategies and arguments to make a case. To allow others their freedom, was therefore to have to persuade them in argument. That is, power became achieved not through military might, but rather through the ability to understand how other human’s minds actually worked. Power became in a sense, in modern terms, psychological.
The Greeks therefore inaugurated (in Western thought at least) a system in which one respected the profound differences between humans as a product of experience. The problem was therefore, in both cases how one turned that other into oneself either by education or argument. (I.e. persuade them to your point of view.) ‘The Other’ of the Greeks, the other which we still live within and reckon with, is always then this other which is opened up and yet then suppressed within education or argument. I might allow you to be different (we all know that Iran is different) and yet will not allow that difference its own power. We want always to reduce it, or restrict it. We see other democracies (even in Iran with its two millennia of history) as either immature or misguided. We assume therefore that given time, we can mitigate centuries of thought and tradition, and make everyone else just like us. A prejudice that is the dark side of the Greek legacy. We and they see ‘Others’ a bit…
The second element of Ancient Greece that is still very much present for us, is the very conception of the self and a subject. That is, the self as a process in which one builds one’s identity, and through which one becomes a thing. The Greeks created a system of thinking in which to be a self was not something straightforward or easy. On the contrary, one was a project, a work at hand. To be a self was therefore to endlessly, by critiquing that which one currently was, (and with the long term aim of becoming something else) become something quite different. Thence passion and pleasure became a thing to be used in the development of a soul.
In making this move the Greeks postulated a self which would come to lodge itself within certain functions of the mind. The self therefore assumed that reason was its own, as well as certain memories and perceptions, but had a far more complex relationship with feelings. Certain feelings, it wanted, to own or possess, whilst others it wanted to deny, or at least to move beyond. ‘The Self’ was therefore a spinning of a self within a mind. The aim of such discrimination, was to build within the day to day affairs of a mind, a long term project. The self was therefore that whose task was to coordinate the various aspects of a mind to ensure that over the long term the mind was as happy (and as free) as possible. The self’s special concerns were therefore that future which I would become and that past which I once was. It used the past to build a future.
This individual, this whirl of identity as a defiance of time was to have a long history. Critical in this history was the sheer vulnerability of the initial Greek’s conception of the self. The self was merely an engineer within the great forces of the mind. It had no real power beyond that power it could subsume by correct use of the powerful passions that gripped an individual. The self was therefore open and very vulnerable. The history of Western thought has been in some sense the history of this vulnerability. Different epochs have faced it with very different approaches and thoughts, very different ruses, but all who live in the shadow of Greece have had to tackle it in some way or other.
This last point leads one back to Foucault’s third great argument. The past is not something passive within us, he argues, nor is it a simple legacy, a shadow in which we live. On the contrary, to claim to be a self is to think, at least in part, like a Greek. That is, it is to face, albeit in a totally different series or set of circumstances, some of the same issues as the Greeks. As we are a self, we as they attempt to mitigate what we are, and make times jangle one within the other. A little piece of one’s mind is therefore forever Greek. And yet of course, this is the point that that other aspect of history kicks in. We have also the legacy of all those thousands of years of history, that gulf of time between us and the Greeks. We therefore cannot simply think as if we were Greeks, without that thought being dragged into other times and yet others. The point here is then, that these other times are not development or regression so much as different takes upon the same idea. As such they are also what we are. We think therefore also as a Roman or as Spinoza, and yet we do so without being able to hold that thought down or make it simple.
Hence history creates the weirdest of palimpsests. The layers of this palimpsest are still active and still capable of reaching out both to the world and also to their subsequent (or previous) history. That is they are still capable of both helping us understand the world but also of haunting other ideas, which followed (or prefiguring themselves within ideas that were before them). In the palimpsest of our minds we therefore think like a Greek and yet in doing so, suddenly find ourselves thinking as Ricardo and so then Marx. One moves across lines in history and through epochs with almost effortless speed, and become dizzy in the process. One loses oneself in the history of it all, and the history of that history.
To do justice to an idea such as justice, is therefore to become caught up in the endless ricochet of thought. One lurches from times and across epochs backwards and forwards, as one finds or uncovers new ways to be just and new forms or takes upon justice. Justice therefore in a sense loses its cogency. It is not a single thing, so much as a way to relate to others, and oneself as another. At times those others will need to stand out in one’s mind and stand apart, a thing in themselves: One will need to do justice to that difference. At other times, those others will need to function as things akin to oneself, things with whom one might make a pact, and through whom one might learn. At yet others, those others might be genuinely different to oneself and yet that difference is only a product of time or place – relative yet irreconcilable (the past might be another country, but it is one very much active in our heads). At still others, no link might be thinkable and it is best to respect another’s difference. The real problem here is that these different ‘times’ are not different events so much as different takes (different times within us) of the same event. Justice is therefore not ever something simple or tangible. It rather names the problem of containing many different reactions to the same event in the one motley world. To be just is therefore to allow these many voices a degree of power, and yet to do so, knowing that as an individual one can only have the one life, in the one scary world. To be just to oneself, one needs then to be just to others, and can only be just to those others by allowing for the myriad othering which they and the past, make within one’s mind. It is some of these otherings that this series of essays has traced, in the hope that in allowing these different perspectives their rights to cast a shadow on our world, one might see more clearly, how it is that they demand we act justly. A project which personally is the only possible way in which I can conceive of justice in this world, but whether others share that opinion will of course need to be up to them…
