JUSTICE IS "UNDERSTANDING". All human beings ACT when they sense the JUSTICE they are acting towards.

make assumptions about what is the case even as one seeks to focus on what ought to be the case.

Essentialism is the misrepresentation born of hasty generalization, jumping to conclusions about the particular because of a characteristic thought to belong to a whole genre (usually, a group of people). The ―essence‖ in essentialism is a traditional translation of Aristotelian ontology: human beings were said to have an essence, an underlying real self (the Latin essentia is a translation of Aristotle‘s ousia, ―being,‖ or hupokeimenon, ―underlying being‖). In the practical world, essentialism is typically known as ―stereotype.‖

Beings have imagination, a capacity to see a different world than the one they materially inhabit, empowering them to desire, to fantasize, or even to act so as to realize—to bring into the material world—what they have dreamt.

people have essences, elemental pieces that are permanent, or are at least temporarily stable, that make them who they are even as other pieces around essences may change.

permanence and change are made cognizant to us only to the degree that one moment‘s reality can be distinguished from the reality of another moment.

speakers are motive-laden and strategic, even if irrational, actors.

• Define what would be GOOD.
• Figure out what EVIL is in the way.
• Get responsible about eliminating the evil.
• Get them to understand the EVIL the same way.
• Now tell them to GET JUSTICE with you.

tongue-lashings can make a difference in how the world is seen and, perhaps the reader has heard, ―seeing is believing.

(a) all thinking and doing presumes an ontology, and ontologies can stack the deck in favor of certain kinds of dangerous political understandings, like essentialism and totalitarianism; (b) rhetoric cannot save itself from its capacity to propagandize because human beings cannot ―be‖ and be free of the didacticism generated by their performances—old habits are hard to break, and ―good‖ habits will always ―fall prey‖ to types of the ―discipline‖ condemned by Foucault or the sorts of bureaucratic ―banality‖ condemned by Arendt; (c) the artistic, aesthetic side of rhetoric is the best shot human beings have at creating some kind of worldly justice because creating the new, continuously, is the only hope human beings have of breaking free of the disciplinary influences of traditional performances—we must always be turning against the totality, turning and turning to the point of spinning and dizziness;

Whatever evil is determines what responsibility is which then determines what justice is or rather what justice ought to be.

Joy of Rhetoric, second round of notes because the first round printed out was 12 pages and that implies a limit of sorts.

Necessity is the traditional domain of ontology or metaphysics—things that cannot be otherwise than they are.

Reason took over as the explanation for all things, and its methods became the standard for all study (and the humanities, to this day, have not lived this down). If only scientific reason were applied to all things, then perhaps all things would be explicable, predictable, useable, and so on—the ontological implications being clear. In the early twentieth-century, before the ―Great War,‖ thinkers gave the sum of all this scientific reasoning a name: totalitarianism.

―Totalitarianism,‖ the word, came into this world with a utopian connotation (Isaac). We could know everything if we studied it properly.

Should anything slip, should any accident occur, we need only study it more so as to find a means of controlling it.

Therefore, any resistance that she may put up to the GOOD suggestion of getting naked with me, is necessarily EVIL. It is my responsibility to fight evil. Therefore JUSTICE is simply: getting over her resistance to getting naked with me. GET JUSTICE.

http://metanotes.com/user/sri/joyrhetoric

She wants justice, too.

―categories that ignore otherness while claiming to represent the total of all beings. The economizing principle of ontology, what Levinas calls totality (as in ‗totalitarianism‘), consists of the sweeping optic whereby one would categorize beings. Totalizers make a claim to be above the gameboard,‖ not even in an objective sense necessarily, ―but merely as an observer distant enough to be able to distinguish light from dark, rook from pawn.19

The project of the Western Enlightenment‘s ontology has been to form totality: to account for any and all pieces and places they might occupy, to define a place for everything and everything in its place.

Metaphysics is, thus, a deathly serious business: from Levinas on, the stakes will be dehumanization, concentration, Holocaust.

A totality claims to be the total, the all, inclusive of all things without exception—which is, of course, impossible. But one may nevertheless be convinced of a totality, resulting in reduction of exceptions, forcibly fitting them into the totality or freely eliminating them on the basis of their non-being.