Philosophy Journal 01

For my philosophy class I have been directed to journal my thoughts regularly. My assumption is that this exercise will allow us to more thoroughly analyze our own thoughts. Even I fear what I might learn if I were to ever truly understand my own thoughts.

For this class, which I have in about 7 hours, we are reading Plato�s Republic. I have finished the first section of the book and have to say that I was suprised at how easy it was to sit down and read it when I was really bored and had nothing else to do. I think that the point of philosophy is the painful elaboration of the obvious. Socrates seems to be the kind of guy that plays devils advocate and teaches by challenging his students to intellectual duels. He has crossed mental sabres with 3 different people already on one basic topic, Justice. Justice certainly seems to be a tenuous idea. No-one in this book is able to grasp any solid defining ideas on what Justice is. Socrates and company are able to point out many instances of effects that justice has, but lack any sort of structured definition. This book actually seems to be drifting over a variety of topics and will no doubt eventually land on the island of politics. Just a hunch, but I see this lengthy discussion leading to a discussion on what the role of government in peoples lives is, and why governments rule, and why a government needs to rule justly. And, oh yeah, what was justice again?

I�m just throwing words out here now, this is all raw thoughts I�m about to spew into being. Justice is the set of consequences (rewards and punishments) that allow society to hold itself together. Even if the very acts that are commited in the name of justice are truly atrocious and cruel they must still be done by each person in the society to hold it together. We may not really want to believe in the ideas that our current culture holds as justice, but we will follow blindly these ideas and even enforce them simply to perpetuate the society that we are a part of. Continuing the social stability through total justice offers the individual the greatest chance of surviving by way of giving the population a greater chance of surviving. Lack of justice means chaos, and chaos means greater likelyhood that an individual will die prematurely or be unable to continue his genetic line.

Of course that does not mean that each groups idea of justice is correct, in fact our ideas of justice are almost certainly wrong and harmful to many many individuals. Perhaps leading to our own distruction, but on a time scale that is too large to have a meaningful impact on our current decisions. So the people who are most able to affect a socio-ppolitical change are those who are willing to ignore conventional ideas of justice and follow their own ideas. These people can have good effects, or they can cause bad effects. A patriot and a traitor are two labels that can be applied to the same person, that depends on your perspective.

Whoa, these late night philiosophizing sessions kinda wear me out. At least blogging this is easier than shudder pen and paper.