McDermott Orual's Understanding of Justice

A major premise of Till We Have Faces is Orual’s search for justice in the form of correcting the ‘exaggerated’ stories told about her in relation to Psyche. However, her version of justice later turns out to be a false, invalid form of it, which reminded me of the definitions of justice offered in Plato’s Republic.

One of the definitions offered in Plato’s work comes from Cephalus, who argues that the definition of justice is to tell the truth and repay one’s debts. This is very similar to what Orual originally wanted: her version of the truth to be told (which she believed was the objective truth at first), and to get revenge on the gods who ruined her life and took Psyche away from her. However, this definition does not hold up because it is too shallow and conventional to be considered real justice.

Another definition comes from Polemarchus, who claims that justice is helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. However, this is too subjective to be true justice – and Orual herself proves this. She wanted to help Psyche and ended up harming her and hated the God of the Mountain even though he showed her mercy (which she did not realize at the time).

Plato concludes that true justice is a harmony of the parts working together. In Orual’s case, she was missing the imagination part, which would have let her perceive her sense experiences as myth (reality). Instead, she was clouded by excess reason, swayed by those such as the Fox who only encouraged the continued use of reason, and was therefore unable to see the world as it actually was. It is only in her confrontation with the gods that she finally perceives via imagination, not logic, and thus realizes the truth.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

McDermott The Social Ethic

  My final paper for my honors seminar was about how Americans form their moral compasses and one of the things I researched for it was called the “Social Ethic.” It describes the tendency to submit yourself, as an individual, to the whims of the group, such as religious organizations or political parties. I think that myth can be a tool of the social ethic – in this sense, reason can function as an organization or group. Reason relies on imagination (we perceive the senses through it), and while too much pure logic can be bad, so can too much imagination. For example, back when the pandemic hit there were a bunch of people who said that they were immune to covid because they didn’t have the right “waves” for it to transmit to them because their political party and the people within it told them so (a view relying almost entirely on imagination with very little science to back it up, if any at all). It was almost like mob mentality. We saw this happen in Big Fish . The son was affe...
Read more

Tyler van Opstal "Inklings Apart"

    In the 1968 Understanding Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings (alternatively titled The Tolkien Relation ) by William Ready, C.S. Lewis is mentioned more regularly than anyone but Tolkien himself. This itself is entirely rational, Lewis having been another member of the Inklings club to which Tolkien also belonged, but the treatment of Lewis by Ready is often strange or otherwise notable.     Lewis is first mentioned in Understanding Tolkien in the first chapter, after Ready discusses the Andrew Lang lecture by Tolkien that we read at the beginning of class to lay a framework for how myth and story can be understood. Ready takes umbrage with what he sees as an unfair treatment of Tolkien by scholars, blaming the fame of Lewis for coloring their opinions of him (Dr. Thompson states it is his recollection that Lewis was indeed more famous than Tolkien prior to the LotR movies). Ready complains that "Tolkien has been tarred by [Lewis'] brush" and that the resulting mi...
Read more

Tyler van Opstal "Here There Be Dragons"

     In Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet , when the protagonist has his revelation about the nature of Space and its true identity as the Heavens, he is realizing that the maps of the storytellers are more accurate than any map that science can produce. And if the storytellers can chart the stars better than the physicists, then perhaps the storytellers also charted the seas better than the satellites have.      Many older maps feature creatures and gods. Even when the explorers had discovered the world was a sphere and that there was not a giant cliff at the end of a flat world guarded by dragons, storytellers continued to etch their maps with "Here there be dragons." The winds remained portrayed by the four wind gods perched in the map corners, and the sketches of great serpents in the oceans were kept. The storytellers understood that it did not matter whether there were literal dragons and wyverns lurking in and above the ocean, the danger they represent...
Read more