Hymn to Apollo: Philosophy, Justice and the Condition of Plurality

Hymn to Apollo: Philosophy, Justice and the Condition ofPlurality* LIONEL RUBINOFF What is the meaning of the madness of asking a philosopher to think out loud at the conclusion of a banquet marked by an atmosphere of festivity? Let us consult Hegel, the wisest philosopher of all. It was Hegel after all who defined truth as a Bacchanalian revel where not a member is sober. Of course Hegel was merely following a tradition established by Plato, the author of a dialogue called the "Symposium" in which each symposiast is invited to sing praises of love and to tell tales of their own choosing, in an atmosphere replete with good food and libations. Needless to say, for both Plato and Hegel, the feasting, libations and revelry are intended as metaphors. They remind us that the flight of the intellect into realms of metaphysical speculation is a festive and intoxicating experience which is best enacted in dialogue and in the company of others. I am therefore grateful for the opportunity to follow in the tradition established by Plato, and tell my tale, which, like the statues of Daedalus, has a great urge to take flight and find audience among kindred spirits - perhaps even with Apollo himself, at whose calling the vocation of philosophy was first established. The renowned philosopher Immanuel Kant began the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason with the observation that human reason has the peculiar fate "that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer." 1 The most celebrated of the questions with which philosophers of all generations must wrestle arise from what Plato has aptly described as the quest for "the right manner of living"; which for Plato meant the quest for the meaning of justice. Indeed, *An address to the Association of Canadian Studies, June IO, 1980, Trent University. Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 15, No.3(Automne1980 Fall) it might be argued, the very raising of such questions is itself essential to the condition of justice whose meaning is the subject of inquiry. For when men become distracted by the pursuit of the mundane , worldly pleasures of the appetites and spirit, the human condition reverts to that state of nature in which, to recall the well known words of Thomas Hobbes, "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short...[ln] this war of every man against every man...nothing can be unjust [because nothing can be just]. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place.... Force and fraud are...the two cardinal virtues."2 When Plato wrote the Republic he perceived his city of Athens to be very close to this condition. Under the inspiration of his teacher Socrates, Plato undertook the formidable mission to re-awaken in the minds and hearts of his generation a concern for the raising of that question with which mankind originally earned passage from barbarism to civilization. And so it is with every generation of philosophers, when at Apollo's bidding they follow the example of Socrates and Plato, renouncing their purely private concerns, in order to become the instruments by which the corporate consciousness of their generation can re-examine and criticize itself. Following the example of Plato, the question I wish to consider at this time is the question concerning the right manner of living as it arises for a twentieth-century Canadian philosopher who still hears the call of Delphi, which is still being uttered among the fallen stones of the temple of Apollo, and is still echoing from the pathless peaks of the daughters of Parnassus. It is the same call which, for those who listen carefully enough, speaks also from Charlottetown and the distant Plains of Abraham. In Plato's Republic, which may be regarded as the first great example of utopian thinking, the essence of justice is located in a principle of differentiation which, on the one hand, assigns specific roles to both institutions and persons, and, on the...