The Paradigms of Legal Thinking

Varga, Csaba (2012) The Paradigms of Legal Thinking. Philosophiae iuris . Szent István Társulat az Apostoli Szentszék Könyvkiadója, Budapest. ISBN 978 963 277 299 8

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Abstract

The author introduces the reader to reasoning in law through the possibilities, boundaries and traps of assuming personal responsibility and impersonal pattern adoption that have arisen in the history of human thought and in the various legal cultures. He discloses actual processes hidden by the veil of patterns followed in thinking, processes that we encounter both in our conceptual-logical quests for certainties and in the undertaking of fertilising ambiguity. When trying to identify definitions lurking behind the human construct of facts, notions, norms, logic, and thinking, or behind the practice of giving meanings, he discovers tradition in our presuppositions, and our world-view and moral stance in our tacit agreements. Recognising the importance of the role communication plays in shaping society, he describes our existence and institutions as self-regulating processes. Since law is a wholly social venture, we not only take part in its oeuvre with our entire personality, but are also collectively responsible for its destiny. In the final analysis, anything can be qualified as ‘legal’ or ‘non-legal’ in one or another recognised sense in which law can originate, but, as a relative totality, it can only be qualified as ‘more legal’ or ‘less legal’ in any combination of the above senses. Being formed in an uninterrupted process, neither the totality nor particular pieces of law can be taken as complete or unchangeably identical with itself. Therefore law can only be identified through its motions and computable states of ‘transforming into’ or ‘withdrawing from’ the distinctive domain of the law. Thereby both society at large and its legal professionals actually contribute to—by shaping incessantly—what presents itself as ready-to-take, according to the law’s official ideology. For our initiation, play, role-undertaking and human responsibility lurks behind the law’s formal mask in the backstage. Or, this equals to realise that all we have become subjects from mere objects, actors from mere addressees. And despite the variety of civilisational overcoats, the entire culture of law is still exclusively inherent in us who experience it day to day. We bear it and shape it. Everything conventional in it is conventionalised by us. It has no further existence or effect beyond this. And with its existence inherent in us, we cannot convey the responsibility to be born for it on somebody else either. It is ours in its totality so much that it cannot be torn out of our days or acts. It will thus turn into what we guard it to become. Therefore we must take care of it at all times since we are, in many ways, taking care of our own.

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