What's in a name? That which we call a rose

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.

—— Juliet, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

The first time I saw Romeo and Juliet, I was 12.

Like all the other girls at the age of 12, I had a strong affection of reading romances no matter they are  classics or modern fictions. I loved to envision those romantic scenarios of what I read in my head, and usually I got satisfied with my envisioning because the stories I used to read were all ended with a happy ending—— before I encountered Romeo and Juliet. 

When I first read Romeo and Juliet, all I understood about it was just "It's a love tragedy which makes me sad". Though as a 12-year-old kid my understandings were really shallow, I was right about one thing: it's different. At that time the reason it was different to me merely because it didn't give me an ending which I'd be willing to see. 

Now, from that moment nearly six years have passed, and Romeo and Juliet had definitely become my favorite Shakespeare's work. During the six years I've read the whole play at least five times, watched at least three different versions of the movie, and saw the French opera performed in 2002 and even can remember the lines......

Finally, I got to understand why it is so different, why I like it, and why it is so great and immortal. 

The words I quoted were said by Juliet, right after she passionately fell in love with Romeo but then accidentally got to know that Romeo was her enemy's son. In modern language what she meant was simply "Roses are roses that even if they are not called 'roses' they would smell fragrant and sweet." The meaning behind the sentence is "Name is nothing; what matters is what something is, not what it is called. "

Exactly. For Juliet, she loves Romeo, the person himself, not the name "Romeo Montague". I remember she even told Romeo that she would be very willing to change her family name "Capulet" as long as she would be allowed to stay with him. There's another sentence talking about the name: "I know not how to tell thee who I am. my name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee." I remember when I was watching the movie acted by Leonardo DiCaprio in 1996, when I saw Juliet's beautiful but sorrowful face, when I heard her artlessly speaking these words, I felt my heart melt. These words soon became my favorite line in the whole play.

Juliet was right. However ironically her parents and Romeo's parents didn't understand the truth that names are nothing. At their time all the men who were "Montague"s were "Capulet"s' enemies. The names "Montague" and "Capulet" became the first labels tagged on the men. Even for those people who had neither "Montague" nor "Capulet" as their last names had to choose a side to stand. Today we don't judge people only by their names any more, of course, because that is ridiculous. However people in the play chose to hate or like someone only by checking their names. What's worse is that the people  in the play were more willing to be around by hatred rather than love. As Romeo once said, "My only love sprung from my only hate; too early unknown and known too late." Therefore, the love between Juliet and Romeo under such a condition meant to be dead.

Love and hatred are always Shakespeare's favorite topics. However, personally speaking, one of the greatness of Shakespeare is that he knew how to symbolize something not concrete, like hatred. In Romeo and Juliet, he used names to represent people's hatred of each other, while in Hamlet, he used masks to show people's hypocrisy. I think because of his talent to use these techniques, he is so different and more successful than others.

No wonder Karl Marx once said: "Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time."

The Definition of Justice

About three years ago, Harvard created a new way for students to learn knowledge and exchange academic ideas that it uploaded many of its popular courses on the Internet, such as Professor Michael Sandel's philosophy class Justice and Professor Tal Ben Shahar's psychology class Positive Psychology and The Psychology of Leadership. The university soon became the trailblazer of open courses that after that, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge and many other top universities successively uploaded their classes on iTunes in order to better and broader advertise their universities to the whole world.

Thus, that is how I got to know Michael Sandel and his great class: Justice. 

Before I watched the whole 12-episode class, I held the impression of philosophy that it is boring and dry. People argue about it all the time from past till now, but no one is able to say who is right. To me, because when I was in high school we had to remember the theory which ancient people had come up with, philosophy used to be my least favorite subject to study.

However, in his first class of Justice, Professor Sandel asked the students several tricky questions which soon drew my attention and obsessed me. For example, suppose you're the driver of a broken trolley car, will you stir your wheel from your original l track which stand on five workers to avoid hitting them, and turn to another branch which stands only one person and kill him/her? Why or why not?

Those questions are all about morals. Yet because they trigger people to think in different perspectives with different but all justifiable reasons, they are not only about morals anymore. According to Professor Sandel, your answer determines the category you stand in, such as utilitarian and libertarian, and those categories therefore make the whole philosophy complicated but interesting.

Then we have one of the most interesting topics in philosophy, the moral correctness. When I was reading Les Miserable, I encountered so many scenes which readers cannot easily decide whether they are morally correct or not. For example, is stealing right? Definitely not. However, if someone steals foods only because he is extremely poor and cannot buy foods for his starving and dying daughter, is his stealing forgivable then? You might answer "probably". Then what if I tell you that the stealer steals an apple from another poor family, and the apple he steals is the only food the family have? Now suppose you're a judge, can you quickly and directly make decisions of this case? I kept asking myself what was right and what was wrong when I was reading the book, yet I would subvert all my initial opinions and hesitated between "true" and "false" all the time. 

Then I made a conclusion: there's no absolute "correctness", no definite "right" and no certain "justice".

Aristotle says that when people argue about justice they usually are "speaking of a limited and partial justice." I totally agree. The first question I asked about Les Miserable indicates the limited and partial justice of the "stealee". When we turn into the second and third question, we obviously can't feel the confidence of the answer towards the first question. It is so difficult to talk about justice in the larger sense of the word rather than to discuss a limited aspect of justice, because we never know the future sequence of our decisions. In other words, we cannot include all the aspects of justice, and therefore we cannot make a perfect decision of justice.

When I was studying Economics, it seemed so reasonable for the government to tax the rich heavily to save the poor. However, in Economics there're two determinants of a market: equity and efficiency. The weights of the two determinants decide the mode of the economy of a country. Generally, capitalism encourages more efficiency while communism cares more about equity. Therefore, though taxing the rich heavily to save the poor is apparently people's preference and it seems so reasonable and justified, it's not correct. People who earn money will lose the incentive (which is another significant determinant in Economics) to work, and without enough labour force the market will gradually lose the efficiency and cannot function anymore. 

So as a conclusion, I don't think there's a definition of the word "Justice". It's so complex that it's not something we could merely define with.