In discussing perception, the dark is a good place to begin. As a society, we think that dark things are evil and light things are good. This concept originated from the Bible. There are many references in Genesis that allude to darkness being bad and light being good. The first verse in Genesis contains the first seeds of this idea. It states, "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters." In this excerpt "the deep" is formless and empty, while the surface has God. The deep of the oc

Justice is hard to discern. Sometimes it really depends on who one is, i.e. one's perception of the world and one's personal experiences. Killing one's enemy is just, but if the enemy kills him, that is injustice. Stealing bread is just for a person who is starving, but is unjust to the person who made or bought it. For a rich family to punish a poor family for stealing would be injustice, just as a rich family stealing from a poor family- because the rich family could-would be wrong. Plato acknowledges that when he says that a ruler could sometimes forget that he is there to create just laws for all people, and not just himself. For the poor, justice is different that for the rich (since the rich more or less make the laws). The poor have different personal experiences than the rich do, therefore the poor's perception of justice is radically different. Class has always played a large role in how people perceive justice and virtue, which Plato also writes about in The Republic.

In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche talks about the perception of good and evil, upper class versus lower class. Nietzsche talks about how the upper class symbolize themselves, and anything related to themselves, as good. The upper class perceive themselves as good and perceive the lower classes as bad. What about the lower class, though? Do they perceive themselves as bad and evil, or do they think that the upper class is in fact the bad class? In a world where the upper class perceives the lower class to be bad and the lower class perceives the upper class to be good, one class has to be wrong-or maybe both have to be wrong. If each class saw themselves as equal to the other class just on the basis that they were all human beings the perception of money and bloodlines would be vastly different. Fanon continues this debate.

Fanon describes a very different society than Plato does even when they are both discussing class. Plato's society is based upon perfection and philosopher kings. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon discusses a society that thinks it is perfection, but is really based on caste system. Fanon talks about colonization and decolonization; people who treat people who are different as lower class citizens, as savages (it is all perception). Because the native is different than the settler, "the native is declared insensible to ethics[,..he is]the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil"(p 41). The natives do not perceive themselves as a lower class or enslaved until the settlers tell them that they are. The natives are content until the settlers show them their life. They tell the natives that the settler life is better, and, gradually, the natives believe them. The natives' perceptions of the world have changed. In a way, though, Fanon's society is more related to Montaigne. Montaigne talks about experience and perception in book three, chapter thirteen of his book Essays.

ean is a considerably darker place than the surface. The first thing God creates is the light. The passage states, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness." It does not say that the darkness is good-it says that the light is good-and that God makes a concerted effort to separate the dark from the light (obviously to not have the dark corrupt the good light). God separates light and dark again when he creates night and day as he says, "Let there be lights in the sky to separate the day from the night[...]and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light to the earth." If that example is not obvious enough the verse states, "God made two great lights-the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night." It says that night is lesser than the day!

A society, however, cannot be perfect until peopl

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2618
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)