I thought of the farm ... and the work to be done

Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. High today: 9.

A couple of Old-Order Mennonites got on the bus at the Central Fresh Market in Kitchener yesterday, loaded down with--what? I always found it surprising and a little disappointing when the Mennonites showed up in the Central Fresh Market. What does the Central Fresh Market have that they can't grow or raise or whatever it is themselves? Well, anyway. I supposed to myself when they got on the bus that they wouldn't have voted in the election last week--I don't know; do Old-Order Mennonites vote?--and it doesn't matter to them who won. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, it matters, sure, in that it makes some global difference if everyone keeps electing anti-environmentalists instead of environmentalists. Which reminds me of a story I read in highschool, in one of those anthologies of stories for highschool students, about somebody living in the northern woods of somewhere, who sees a strange light in the sky one day and then spends the next week, or month, or whatever it is, dying of radiation poisoning. (This was one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.) But look, it doesn't have to be a nuclear bomb; it might be an asteroid.

Anyway, I don't know anything about these Old-Order Mennonites really, but I imagine that what they do is they just live their lives. I'm probably wrong about them. I wonder, these people always make me wonder, and I see them fairly frequently in bus terminals, to what extent they live their lives reflectively. They must be aware that everyone, everyone, around them thinks they're crazy, or stupid, or both. Does it make them doubt themselves, or at least inquire into themselves?

The temptation to idealize a simple life is the temptation to idealize what Socrates calls the "healthy city" in the Republic. The healthy city, which lives within its means, is the "true" city, he says. The "kallipolis", the noble or beautiful city, which the Republic goes on to describe, is called the just city. (It just today struck me, unfortunately on my feet standing at the front of the classroom, that it is not clear that the Republic does not suggest that the just and the good are two different things and possibly in tension with each other--talk of "justice" has dropped out of the picture by the time the form of the good enters, and the good government of the kallipolis apparently requires the philosophers to neglect their natural function in order to rule.) The kallipolis is, by its nature, not healthy but feverish. It is founded on appetites run wild that engender conflict. The story implies that without conflict there would be no philosophy. As Heidegger says, you stop to examine the hammer as an object when it isn't doing the job. When everything is going smoothly, when there's no resistance, you don't reflect. Do you?

But what is reflection worth? "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Really? Heidegger points out (I don't know if this gets at the heart of the matter ... ) that for Plato the forms are images that guide the making of things. Plato launched productivism in philosophy. Eh, but mostly what Socrates wants to produce is some state of the soul. In the Republic, we want to know what justice is in order to be just in order to be happy. But "happiness" is stipulated as consisting in having your soul in order, not having one part pulling against another--which is to say, being ruled by reason, because reason tells you the one thing you should do, as opposed to the many different things you want to do. If you didn't want many different things in the first place, you wouldn't need reason's mandate to unify the soul and bring it peace. The happiness of the Republic is happiness for the complicated life. Glaucon's objection to the simple life is that it is a life for pigs. We human beings are complicated beings. Glaucon's objection is ambiguous between being an ethical claim and a natural one. The partisan of the simple life claims that we should not be so complicated. Socrates simply concedes Glaucon's point (though pausing to say that the healthy city is the "true" city. True to what?)

I'm the last person on the floor here tonight, which has made me the last line of possible assistance for two distressed students at mid-term time. Everyone seems so innocent when they're in distress.