Always post things in their entirety if you can, so that people would understand the context of the article.
Originally posted by: ChaoZ
^ Hahahaa, you're so smart, can't believe you figured it's from that. So I'm asked why there's no poetic justice in Shakespeare's plays. This is the full paragraph:
And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognize the connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in some cases (e.g. Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we call the order of the tragic world just we are either using the word in some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown us of this order and are appealing to faith.
The author finds it tragic that consequences of action [taken] does not necessarily follow what we believe or judge to be just. In other words, consequences of someone's action could be worse than what we would deem fair and just, and the author sees it as tragic that
often the doer of whatever evil is punished more than he deserves.
Furthermore, the author thinks that arguing that someone such as Lear deserved suffering is to blur the above fact that sometimes people are punished (regardless of the punisher) more than they deserve. The reason is that many, if not all, agree that Lear deserved to be punished for whatever evil he did, but the level of punishment he got was unfair and beyond what he deserved. In other words, the punishment did not fit the crime and was excessive.
Then he concludes that to therefore call the action-consequences just is either a case of language barrier or people are looking beyond events--which in his opinion and backed by his exmples are not just. In essence, he is saying that it is either a case of misuse of word, lack of clarity, or some belief in faith to look at the world as just.
I understand the argument, but I'm not sure if I've made it clear. It's pretty much about justice. What is just and not in regards to action and punishment/consequence. The argument he makes is to support his thesis that use of the words "justice and merit or desert" is incorrect.
Hope this helps!
Facebook
Twitter