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GloverWrightFirstPaper 3 - 01 Apr 2010 - Main.GloverWright
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To Hold in a Single Thought Reality and Justice | |
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> | A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried | | | The philosopher Richard Rorty writes that when he was 12, he was preternaturally occupied with two of his parents' books about Leon Trotsky, which he regarded as did other children their family Bibles. He "grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at leasts socialists," and "that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice."
Outside of thinking about Trotsky and social justice, Rorty spent a great deal of time hunting wild orchids in the mountains of northwest New Jersey. But for some reason, he says, he felt that he could not separate his passion for orchids from his desire for a more equitable society. He wished "to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids" -- "to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me [following Yeats] 'hold reality and justice in a single vision.'" He wished to bring into commensuration those moments where he "had felt touched by something numinous ... of ineffable importance" with "the liberation of the weak from the strong" for which Trotsky stood. In the manner of children, and perhaps of law students, he wished to find a necessary relation between those things which in the world meant the most to him. |
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