Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Understand?

In 1949, Wittgenstein wrote the following:" The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other.  If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect tem to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are."  When I read this the other day, it really got my attention.  I'll grant that understanding one another can be work, sometimes (but not necessarily always) very hard work.  I think here of Longergan and what he says about the task of fidelity to the transcendental precepts: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible!  But Longergan also holds that sometimes love floods our hearts, and when it does the usual order by which we come to understand is reversed.  Setting Lonergan aside for now, though, the question I'm pondering is what our Catholic faith teaches about our capacity to understand one another.  Is the task of interpersonal understanding (necessarily?) as fraught with difficulty as communication between, say, cats and fishes?  Obviously, the answer to this question has serious ramifications for the possible success of communicative theories of law (and the competing non-communicative theories of law).        

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/03/understand.html

Brennan, Patrick | Permalink

TrackBack URL for this entry:

https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834515a9a69e20133ec43a704970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Understand? :