Main | Uses of Terms: the Case of Democracy »
March 05, 2006
Preliminary Reflections on a Busy Intersection
‘My talent is scribbling; and I the readier fell into this freedom, as I found delight in writing...’
Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson
Overlooking the Hachiko crossroads at Tokyo's noisy and packed Shibuya. The scramble intersection on an otherwise quiet hazy afternoon of early spring. The light changes and the immense crowds throng the street crossing in all directions.
Each of the pedestrian passers-by is presumed to possess a purpose and life-plan of his or her own as they cross each other's paths. It is mind-boggling enough to try and imagine all the thoughts and emotions going on down there at a single moment. But even harder to grasp intuitively is the notion that all these – all the individual wills, perceptions, and pursuits of respective happiness – are at some level of imagination and practice connected into a whole of a political society, with an ascertainable will of its own; the people with whom – the public story of our self-understanding claims – lies the ultimate sovereignty.
At moments like these it is difficult to conceive how such notion might in any way represent an intuitive empirical description of the arrangement of our public affairs and of the processes of decision-making. How on earth have we come to find it appropriate and acceptable to evoke terms of, say, democracy, representation, equal rights, freedom of the individual, voluntary choice, to describe what we are for?
The sheer curiosity concerning questions like this is what spurs me on to such enquiry as I have made into the problems of through what processes and under what circumstances we came to use the terms and categories of our public self-understanding and justification. What values can we invoke to render our policies, choices, actions plausible and defensible in the eye of the public other? What language do we have at our disposal to name problems and to propose and advocate solutions to those? And if such public languages and values appear to differ widely between respective societies and cultures, if they differ, indeed, between respective periods of history of a single society like our own, how does one cope with such awareness?
It is at this point that history becomes intimately relevant to the present; that the old layout of Edo becomes palpable under the skin of present-day Tokyo; that the writings of a Comenius, a Hobbes, or a Rousseau inform in their ways what can be spoken about and comprehended in classrooms, parliaments, or newspapers of today's Prague, London, or Geneva.
My concern is with that history of that present. The kind reader is welcome to join in.
Posted by david at March 5, 2006 11:23 PM