| The key claim that Aristotle makes in both his Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric regarding the character of equity is that it goes beyond the written law in its ability to speak to life's particularity. "All law is universal," writes Aristotle, "but about some things it is not possible to make a universal statement which will be correct." Equity is, then, "the sort of justice which goes beyond the written law." The principle concern of this essay is to show that the universality of reason or rationality is essentially the same kind of law of which Aristotle is speaking. Rationality expresses itself by uttering universal statements attempting to address life's particularity. This project moves to show how two instances of life's particularity, concerning race and gender, come under the heading of Aristotle's insight as things about which it is not possible to make a universal/rational statement that will be correct. My conclusion with regard to this matter is no more anti-rational than the kind of suggestion one can easily read in the Greek tragedians who repeatedly remarked upon the limits of reason.;This is exactly what I have in view when I turn to Sophocle's Antigone, race theory, and the discussion on Malcolm X and violence. There is something factical that cannot be altered when one confronts a person's gender or the color of a person's skin. As Arendt observes: "Racism, white or black, is fraught with violence by definition because it objects to natural organic facts---a white or black skin---which no persuasion or power could change." The rules for such engagements, if they are to be ethical within a paradigm suggested to us by Aristotle, are established through logov&d12; , but not logov&d12; as rationality or reason operating as a universal, but rather logov&d12; as speech. It is through speech, to continue following Arendt, that "we insert ourselves into the human world" and as well "become visible and be of significance" in the world. It is through equity that we find Aristotle's ethical character hard at work addressing and being addressed by the language of universality in the world of particularity. The justice disclosed by doing the right thing is not the work of an accountant, a mathematician, or for that matter, a metaphysician. Justice requires traveling at the speed of life and making changes on the fly, changes that cannot be made from a distance, but rather changes that are made up close and personal through the kind of engagement that only occurs through discourse. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
