Previous - 86. Social contracts
Absalom
Now I'm thinking Faulker just has a thing for italics. I was thinking this was well on the way to turning into a full blown epistulary novel, but that, peeking ahead, doesn't seem to be the case. And then there are pages of interior monologue also rendered in italics.And now that we've gotten used to the father and son (whoever they are) we get Shreve who we know even less about except that he was born to recite the last chapter in Absalom, Absalom! summary while being either ignorant or willfull about the connection between Quentin and Miss Rosa. And still our story is either recited by one character to another or read or recounted in reflection. In some ways I'm reminded of Ford Madox Ford's style in Parade's End from about a decade before. But that's mostly because the method of storytelling is convoluted and difficult. Something like a cat feeder I saw recently that required the cat to climb around and really work for its kibble.
And Shreve progressing from calling Sutpen a "Devil" to calling him "Faustus." I admit I didn't see that coming. Does that make Jones Mephistophelese? That does make a kind of sense.
I'm at Sutpen's backstory now -- Southern Culture as viewed by a Virginia hillbilly -- so it occurs to me (could it really be for the first time?) that slavery was a way to re-assert what Ford would have called a "Tory" world order in a New World that rejected the Tory order of social classes. Slaves were the new peasantry that had even fewer rights than in old England. America was a step back not a step forward for "all" men. (Interesting to note that serfdom was developing in Russia (1600-1650) around the same time that chattel slavery was developing in the North American Colonies (1650-1700)).
Social contract theory
I'm now into part 3. of that piece on political and moral philosophy. John Rawls is the kind of academic who gives ivory towers a bad name. I'll give him credit for terminology that is more meaningful than his buddy Kant's, but "the Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance" sounds like he spent his youth reading comic books. (Not that that's an entirely bad thing.)In a way, Rawls' rational ethics reminds me of pre-Copernican calculations for the movements of heavenly bodies. If you don't understand the actual logic behind these movements all you can do is invent increasingly convoluted schemes. It's all really clever, but it has nothing to do with reality.
Reasoning from an "Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance," you could show that everyone should eat a low calorie, vegetarian diet; walk, run, or bike everywhere; women should probably have their babies before they are 20 with mates chosen by computers; and I could come up with a better list if I wanted to think about it a while -- which I don't, because it's just silly.
And there is nothing here to suggest that this rational invention of an ethics would make actual people happy. I do agree with the final statement in 3. a. "Rawls’ theory of justice constitutes, then, the Kantian limits upon the forms of political and social organization that are permissible within a just society." He does take Kant's notions about as far as they can go. If we were rational beings, it would all make prefect sense. Though even then you would need to demonstrate that an ethics and a political constitution constructed on this foundation actually made people happy.
The 3. b. update of Hobbs is just the same, too Kantian in thinking we are rational. I'm still going with Hobbs.
In 4. a. ii. there's this interesting passage, "C.B. Macpherson, for example, has argued that Hobbesian man is, in particular, a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would expect of a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized early modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a particular, historical, and embodied person. (As have race-conscious philosophers, such as Charles Mills, to be discussed below.) More specifically, they have argued that the person at the heart of liberal theory, and the social contract, is gendered. Christine Di Stefano, in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity, shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from within the perspective of masculinity, as conceived of in the modern period. She argues that Hobbes’s conception of the liberal individual, which laid the groundwork for the dominant modern conception of the person, is particularly masculine in that it is conceived as atomistic and solitary and as not owing any of its qualities, or even its very existence, to any other person, in particular its mother. Hobbes’s human, is therefore, radically individual, in a way that is specifically owing to the character of modern masculinity."
I think Hobbs was just trying to be as rational as possible, but this is another way of saying that all three of our imaginers of a Social Contract, were ignoring sociological and anthropological factors.
This seems to be the case with most of the gender or race based attacks on the Social Contract that follow.
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