The idea is to show, time and again, how justness as a quality of character depends on wonder as its core, extent, and ground, with justice being understood as a process of working out relationships into freeness for all involved. The planetary part of that is to understand that justice depends on power from the planet - the freedom of being that makes relating possible at all for the living. In this way, the book argues for an understanding of justness that focuses on generation. Wonder is linked to it.
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PJWP excerpt.pdfComplete draft to be posted when both the draft and doing so feel right.
The idea about power coming from the planet and of the attention to all of the living as enabling justice comes from the much later paper on acceptance from within the last half-decade.
(23) Acceptance Governance.pdfThis decades-old paper delineates how relating is part of being human and proposes an existential understanding of communication as a basic orientation. I take that rough background as a core assumption for thought about justice.
(95) We all stand.pdfOne thing that might be of interest is how wonder relates to love. People who have connected with Kierkegaard's work, as the above paper's author did at the time, often center love as the core relation to everyone and to everything. (Recently, Rick Furtak and Sharon Krishek have argued this separately in the Cambridge Elements of the Philosophy of Kierkegaard series, in 2025 and 2026 respectively). You might think that I would be disposed to root justice in love, then. Also, Nussbaum, whose work on wonder got me going on this path to my approach to justice, does root justice in love (in her 2013, Political Emotions). The details, of course, are complex.
But I can say simply why I focus on wonder, and not love. The answer is that the essence of love is relational freedom. At the heart of relational freedom is singularity (the Kierkegaardians tend to use the word "individuality," but the term "singularity" evokes better the uniqueness of the person at stake). What is it to hold singularity in practice and in relationship? My answer is: it is to wonder. In other words, wonder is the essence of love and is necessary for justice.
There are other considerations, too. Certainly, love is not true when it is pathological. But in actuality, no love is pure that is personal. We have some degree of narcissism as a part of who we are, and the work of love is in large part a complex effort to part it and assume it while holding open the freedom of each other. Wonder more directly and clearly goes right to the point of freedom in relationship, though. As my friend and colleague Urszula Lisowska has been writing, wonder is "non-appropriative." In other words, for actual (and also for rhetorical reasons in popular culture), wonder gets closer to the truth of relating, freedom, and justice than love does. The wonder is the heart of the love.
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