Maximin, Mastication, and the Moonlit Veil: An Autobiographical Fragment Toward a Phenomenology of Prehensile Predation¹

The night grounds of Harvard Yard, circa 1971 were lit only by those amber sodium lamps that made everything look like a crime scene from a movie that hadn’t been shot yet. John Rawls moved through them with the slightly bow-legged gait of a man who has spent too many hours sitting in seminars pretending to listen while actually thinking about the difference principle and whether it applies to the distribution of late-night rodents. He was wearing the same corduroy jacket he’d worn since Princeton, the elbows now more philosophy than fabric, and beneath it a white Oxford shirt that had once been crisp. No one saw him at this hour, which was part of the point. The veil of ignorance, he sometimes thought, extended temporally as well as socially: at 3:17 a.m. no reasonable person could be said to know whether they were tenure-track or tenure-denied, predator or prey, original position or merely positioned.

Between the Doric columns of Massachusetts Hall he paused, because Doric columns always made him pause; they were so unapologetically load-bearing, so indifferent to the human drama they supported, and Rawls felt a kinship there. He leaned his forehead against the cool fluted stone and exhaled a small cloud that smelled faintly of sherry and the particular despond of a man who has solved distributive justice but still can’t figure out why his marriage is the way it is. Then, of course, the improbable, whip-like tongue that flings outward with a sound like a philosophical retractable tape measure: fwip.

It wasn’t a decision, exactly. More like a reflex that had, over the years, become the one part of himself Rawls had never managed to subject to reflective equilibrium. The tongue in question was long (absurdly, almost komodo-long) and pale and thin, the color of uncooked calamari left too near a space heater. It tasted the air first, because that’s what tongues do when they’re that long and belong to philosophers who have read too much Merleau-Ponty: it phenomenologized the breeze. A squirrel (gray, fat from careless freshmen discarding bagel crusts) miscalculated the branch-to-branch vector and dropped half a foot. That was all the invitation required. The tongue snapped out again like a chameleon that had taken extension courses at the Yale Law School, wrapped the squirrel once, twice, with the neat efficiency of a contractarian binding parties to fair terms, and reeled it in. There was a brief, almost courteous struggle (the squirrel’s claws scrabbling against Rawls’s lower lip like a tiny libertarian arguing for entitlement theory) and then a wet, considerate gulp.

Rawls chewed meditatively. He was not proud of this. He was not un-proud either. Pride implies a position from which to survey one’s actions, and behind the veil one has no such position. The squirrel, from the original position, could have been him. Or he could have been the squirrel. Either way, calories are calories, and the maximin rule suggests you eat when you can, because you never know when you might be the least advantaged member of the kingdom Animalia.

He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that had, only hours earlier, underlined a passage in Kant about respect for persons and whether persons include squirrels.

Somewhere a clock tower that believed itself very important struck four. Rawls adjusted his glasses (the lenses of which were so thick they constituted a kind of private veil of ignorance all by themselves) and moved on, weaving between the columns like a man trying to find the least humiliating exit from his own metaphor. Behind him, the Yard settled back into its pretense of civility: the grass pretending it had never been a killing floor, the columns pretending they supported only ideas.

He thought, as he often did at this point in his nightly perambulations, that maybe the real original position wasn’t a thought experiment at all. Maybe it was this: the brief hot pulse of a life against yours before it becomes part of you whether you will or no. Maybe fairness is just what we tell ourselves afterward, when the fur’s stuck between our teeth and we’re trying to remember why we ever thought we were different from anything else that hunts in the dark. Then he caught another squirrel (this one red, smaller) and the thought folded itself neatly away, the way certain regrets do when there’s fresh protein on the tongue and the columns keep their ancient, impartial silence.

¹ This is the kind of title that gets you laughed out of a department meeting but looks perfectly reasonable at 4:07 a.m. with squirrel fur still clinging to your incisors.

LLM