Unforgivingly Untitled

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra there is an understanding that the crowd, and therefor the people in general, is fickle. It gives the impression that the real problem in a republic is its people.

The Crowd is easily persuaded in in Coriolanus. We see this when the crowd is persuaded, in the first act, to stop rioting against the Senate by Menenius, who tells them that the Senate has their interests in their minds by comparing them to the belly and body.  He Says: “the Senators of Rome are this good belly, and you the mutinous members.”(Act 1.1 lines 149-150) The mob seems easily persuaded by this argument but even more when they are further appeased by the Senate granting the crowd 2 tribunes that will represent them. Later in the play they are shown to be even more fickle when in act 2 scene 3 Coriolanus tells them he should be counsel and they reluctantly agree only to be later convinced by Brutus that he should not be and more that he is a traitor of Rome. The point is to show or at least to try to show that the crowd or the people will do whatever the last person who speaks says to do.  This is echoed in Julius Caesar.

In Julius Caesar we see this after Julius Caesar is assassinated and Brutus persuades the people that it was necessary that Caesar be killed.  The crowd is so moved by him that they say that he should be Caesar (Act 3.2), harking back to the kingship they wished to give Caesar in the first act.  Then Antony takes the pulpit and convinces them that Caesar was not ambitious as Brutus has said by reading Caesars Will that left all Roman citizen 75 drachmas proving Caesars selflessness, this persuades the crowd to Antony’s side further showing their fickle nature.

In Antony and Cleopatra the Crowd is not ever consulted about the issues like in the other two plays, this is mostly because Rome is no longer a republic but instead ruled by the triumvirate of Lepidus, Antony, and Octavius.  The absence of the crowd is important in understanding what Shakespeare is saying about the crowd.  The Crowd is not needed, it literally is unnecessary to address their concerns.

What does this mean are we to take that Shakespeare thinks rule by the people is bad? 

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Aristotle thinks that all things have an end goal, this way of thinking is called telos or teleology, so it is natural that he would claim that politics would have an end goal. While this is not how we commonly think of things today I will not argue against teleology as a philosophy because I think it is ok to think of politics in this way, but for the reader I will ask that we except Aristotle’s premise of telos.  Aristotle says:

“In all sciences and arts the end is a good…the political science of which the good is justice.” (1215-1217)

It is plain to see that Aristotle thinks that the purpose of politics and government is to bring the greatest good which is justice.  Now justice is a tricky concept, after all we have been discussing different concepts of justice in class and I would say we haven’t come to close to a consensus on the definition.  That said Aristotle has his own definition, He equates it to equality by saying:

“All men think justice to be a sort of equality” (1218-1219)

He goes on to say that “Justice is a thing and has a relation to persons , and that equals ought to have equality.” (1221-1222)

One could simply become frustrated with Aristotle here because most of his theory of politics is based on the notion of the master slave dynamic, in which some people are born to rule and others to be ruled, and if government is to bring about equality then how could slavery exist.  I think Aristotle has actually dodged this particular objection rather well because he said “equals ought to have equality.”  This means that there can still be a class of rulers that need to be treated equally and a class of ruled that should be treated equally.  My concern here is not with this objection, although I think that it is an objection that should be raised to preserve actual meaning of the notion of equality, I am concerned with the idea of justice being equal to equality.  Can we equate justice and equality? What will happen if we do?

The first problem I can think of is with economic principles.  In capitalism it is necessary that we all be treated deferent based on the amount and quality of work we do.  If we were all treated completely equal we would be in a communist society that provided everything from food to shelter for us.  While this may seem like a utopia to some people to others it is a horrible dystopian future.   I could be a little off the mark with this because Aristotle is talking about government and politics and not necessarily economics, but if as Aristotle has said that the purpose is to lead to the greatest good of justice and therefore equality than a government that allows capitalism is not pursuing the greatest good and therefore not a good government.  So according to Aristotle the government that we have is not a good government because it’s not leading to the greatest good, but to most of us this would seem wrong, for the most part we all like our democracy and except capitalism.  So what is this leading us to think about justice?

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I have written about this before in a different blog, so I won't get to upset about the lack of testing that's being done because I already did that.

 The strange thing here is that there has been a settlement with a bank about sanctions of blacklisted countries and that money is being used for this, which is fine i guess, but still it's sad because there is a possibility that if this money hadn't come along then for some of the victims’ justice could still be on hold.

When I first read the Republic by Plato there was a concern I had of a contradiction that is in need of some reconciliation, but even after reconciling it I found that what Socrates’ proposes is a bit perplexing but after careful analysis it makes since.  The apparent contradiction is the difference in Socrates’ Philosophy versus what I thought was his Ideology, by that I mean; philosophy is the way things are, and ideology is the way we want the world to be.

Socrates philosophically gives his idea of the world as it is with the analogy of the cave.  There is a lot going on in this analogy but I am focused on one aspect of it so I will just summarize.  People are tied up in the cave not knowing how the world is they only know shadows on the wall that are put there by their captors who project these shadows.  The captors represent poets, educators, and rulers. (514a-518e) When I first read this I interpreted this to be a type of lie, this is not really what’s going on but I will return to this in a moment.

Socrates shows his Ideology with the construction of a city that will help him explain justice.  His city has a lot in it but here I am focused on the noble lie.  In the city people are told that they are born with one of three types of souls, which determines what station they will have in life.  The noble lie is told to everyone in the city to get them to know there place in the city, and this knowing one place in life is Socrates idea of justice. (414c-415d) 

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