Abstract:
This article is part of a larger project that explores how to channel people’s passion for popular arts into legal social justice by reconceiving law as a kind of poetry and justice as dance, and exploring different possible relationships between said legal poetry and dancing justice. I begin by rehearsing my previous new conception of social justice as organismic empowerment, and my interpretive method of dancing-with. I then apply this method to the following four “ethico-political choreographies of justice”: (1) the choral dance of souls qua winged chariot-teams (from Plato), (2) a dancingly beautiful friendship with the community (from Aristotle), (3) a tightrope-dance of the cool (from Al-Farabi), and (4) humans dancingly reimagined as positioned actors in fluidly moving groups (from Iris Marion Young). I then synthesize these analyses into “dancing justice,” defined as the dynamic equilibrium sustained by a critical mass of a community’s members comporting themselves like social dancers.
Keywords:
justice, social justice, Plato, Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Iris Marion Young, dance
How to cite:
Hall, Joshua. “On Justice as Dance.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5, no. 4 (2021): 62-78. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0039.
Author:
Joshua Hall
Department of Philosophy, William Paterson University of New Jersey
300 Pompton Road Wayne, New Jersey 07470, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0762-6375
j.maloy.hall@gmail.com
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