Tending the Garden: Equity and Exscription

The first part of this essay means to make a modest contribution to the critical – that is to say investigative and non-traditional – study of the philosophical origin, sense, and parameters of the concept of equity. Its focus will at first be on Aristotle. Then I will seek to widen the Aristotelian concept of equity by a consideration of the moral and intellectual capacity of “enlarged mentality” as found in Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Kant. In doing so, I will actively seek to loosen the legal or judicial bonds of this concept, instead allowing it to freely enter a larger conceptual space involving the political and the psychological. In the second part of the essay, this larger conceptual space leads me to a wider meditation with speculative moments concerning the possibility of an ontological extension of a trans-legal interpretation of equity through a consideration of some aspects of the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, particularly his notion of “exscription.” In the third part of the essay, I then supplement this Nancean meditation with a psychological turn focusing on Nancy’s commentary on Freud’s remark on the “extension of psyche.” I offer these speculative moments to step beyond Aristotelian and Arendtian/Kantian constraints and also in order to advance possible philosophical exploration of equity and justice against overly narrow containers in “legal philosophy” including “critical legal theory.”