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The Feast of Love (Charles Baxter)
- Highlight Loc. 3359 | Added on Wednesday, May 04, 2011, 05:55 AM
I KNOW ONE UNASSAILABLE TRUTH: Help your friends and those whom you love; hurt your enemies. The very banality of this formulation ensures that most academics —- who enjoy hurting their friends -— will ignore it.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
"The very banality..."
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8 comments:
So...
This narrator has never gone beyond the opening few paragraphs of The Republic?
Guy's an elderly philosophy professor, so my guess would be, yeah, he probably has.
The character certainly hasn't.
"And what is that which justice gives, and to whom?
If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the preceding instances, then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies."
Right...and then the book continues as a criticism of that very limited definition. It is far from an "unassailable" truth.
Hence the "never gone beyond the opening few paragraphs of The Republic."
What is good to a friend? What is evil to an enemy? What if doing good to an enemy makes him a friend?
Blah, blah, blah.
Not a "truth" to be ignored, rather the beginning point to a conversation.
I added confusion here by not pointing out right away that the "guy" is the character, not the novelist. My reading is that in his golden years the professor has realized that the primordial original impulse has something to be said for it, after all. That's more or less the theme of the novel.
This seems to be an attempt to be pithy, and as such I am likely being a little hard on its usage.
There is -- of course -- nothing wrong with the initial formulation in general. It is only in the particular that things get dicey with the "unassailable truth." The quote seems to be an attempt to say that academics cannot even live up to such an obvious positive thing would be inverted by academics -- who it seems favor things that are "original" over the staid that they will be evil just to be original.
I don't think that thought is particularly bad, in fact I think that asserting that academics will do anything to avoid banality, including hurting their friends -- whom they actually enjoy hurting -- is a nice observation.
But having just had a conversation with a mentoring professor, who waxed philosophical, I don't find it very plausible that an elderly professor of philosophy would use the term "unassailable truth" with regards to one of the initial justice formulations in The Republic.
It's like having a modern physicist rely purely on Newtonian mechanics. They have their uses, but...
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