Who needs a world view?

Abstract

In your sleep or relentlessly awake, rehearse reasons. Yes, I balled up my hands, no not making a fist, but because I was scared that they would break my fingers. Why were you resisting? Why were you there? Cross-examinations refract through the half-remembered face of that primary school teacher who took a dislike, complained of your 'look of defiance' on parents' evening. Do you really think it's very ladylike in such a manner to hold yourself? Why do you exist? It's not going to help your cause, is it?'Perhaps the Enlightenment was mistaken to jump to the conclusion that life was like a continuing court case, in which it was imperative to come, quickly and efficiently, to definitive judgments about what was ''true '' and what ''false''; what was ''legitimate'' and what ''illegitimate''; and what was ''justified'' and what ''not justified''' (p. 58), writes Raymond Geuss. It is impermissible not to know why your leg twitched as they forced you against the concrete, why that patch of grass is so implausibly large in your memory. Absolutely unjustifiable not to know why digging dried leaves out of black kids should be anyone's duty to execute; or why duty is supposed to be so great in the first place. Be reasonable, they hiss in your ear as they cut off your clothes. Their statements say they didn't hurt you; they say they hurt you because you deserved it. You will insist these can't be true together. They are contradicting themselves and you will use logic to vanquish them. Scratch the justifications into yourself. You won't be allowed notes on the stand (although they will).That making yourself defensible can be an all-consuming and traumatic process is an observation likely to resonate with anyone who has stood in the dock or attended a philosophy conference. Even in the best-case scenario, whatever vindication the court, the discipline, or the Tribunal of Pure Reason can offer may not undo the damage that subjection to its requirements has inflicted. It will take a quite another process, a therapeutic one, perhaps, to un-batten the hatches on the disconnected, ambiguity-intolerant, legitimate subjects it has made of us, to let the playful, fluid element back in.