Knowledge and Experience

Often we are told that you cannot truly understand something unless you have lived it. You cannot look a struggling, former POW in the eyes and tell him you know how he feels if you have never even been in the military, much less in war. The place we most often apply this principle is grief. The phrases "I know" and "I understand" from people who have never come close to knowing or understanding are among the most frustrating a grieving person can hear. We apply this idea to many areas of life, but Plato points out one area where this idea is not the best standard to use: judging justice.

"That, you see, is why," I said, "the good judge must not be young but old, a late learner of what injustice is; he must not have become aware of it as kindred, dwelling in his soul. Rather, having studied it as something alien in alien souls, over a long time, he has come thoroughly aware of how it is naturally bad, having made use of knowledge, not his own personal experience."

Plato remarks that it is far better for a man to have studied injustice his whole life and gain his knowledge about it in that way than it is to personally commit an injustice and therefore know by experience. Injustice is said to be something "dwelling in his own soul." Surely some care must be given to what is allowed to dwell in our souls. In the same way that we do not want to know injustice by the experience of having committed it, we would also rather study injustice than have injustice enacted upon us.

Therefore fellow Honors students, in the case of justice and injustice, let your knowledge of injustice be from your study of Plato, not your own personal experience...





I commented on Jeremy's post.