A text for this post is from Wendell Berry:
Justice is a rational procedure. Mercy is not a procedure and it is not rational. It is a kind of freedom that comes from sympathy, which is to say imagination – the felt knowledge of what it is to be another person or another creature. It is free because it does not have to be just. Justice is desirable, of course, but it is virtually the opposite of mercy. Mercy, says the Epistle of James, “rejoiceth against judgment.”
That is from an essay published originally in Citizenship Papers (2003); I am reading it in Essays 1993–2017 (Library of America, 2019). The quoted essay is called “Two Minds”: those minds are rational and sympathetic respectively. Although Berry does not use the term here, I would say that those two minds are in antithesis.
I often read Berry at a beach that is in antithesis to Lesbos. Continue reading
Polytropy 