Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Le mot juste
- 2 Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
- 3 Time's desire: the temporality of justice
- 4 One touch of nature: literature and natural law
- 5 The course of a particular: justice and singularity
- 6 Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
- 7 Conclusion: legal fictions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Le mot juste
- 2 Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
- 3 Time's desire: the temporality of justice
- 4 One touch of nature: literature and natural law
- 5 The course of a particular: justice and singularity
- 6 Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
- 7 Conclusion: legal fictions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free
(John 8:32)truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions…Art is with us in order that we may not perish through truth.
(Nietzsche, “Truth” 694; Will 264)I began this study with le mot juste, Gustave Flaubert's pursuit of a literary style so precise that it would contribute equally to a justice of expression, thought, and judgment, each enhancing the others and all sustained by pleasure. The joyful companionship of truth, beauty, and virtue is an ideal perpetually sought but never quite found; indeed, Flaubert takes sardonic pleasure in its failure, which testifies to the banality of bourgeois culture. However, it also demonstrates his belief that literature is vitally important, because it can help to cure the ethical and intellectual malaise of his nation. Faith in the political value of literary language recurs with varying degrees of confidence in modern theory. It appears in Ezra Pound's complaint that in the modern republic “the health of the very matter of thought” is weakened when “the application of word to thing” becomes “slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated” (Pound 21). It appears more cautiously in George Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language,” where he warns that modern political discourse must be reformed, not just because it is sloppy but because it deliberately clouds judgment, making the most atrocious injustice seem normal.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions , pp. 118 - 137Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010