What influence did ancient Greek philosophy have on Roman law? What is it that Roman law sought to preserve? What are the core values/beliefs it revolved around? Who were its enemies? Did the system work? Is law more than a system of thought, if so – whose thought was it?
Was it my dear beloved Plato who believed that philosophy had the right answer to everything? Plato didn’t like rhetoric yet all the orators fought on was the basis of rhetoric. Plato wants us to fight and achieve using knowledge, not rhetoric. Rhetoric changes and is contingent. Knowledge, on the other hand, is everlasting and binds you to what’s real. I truly believe Plato did believe in a separate reality of Forms.
The belief of something more, something beyond doesn’t always have to stem from imagination. Even so, where does imagination come from? That line dividing rationality and imagination – can’t it be argued that we imagined that line there? If so, well what does that say about our rationality? This project of reconciling ancient Greek philosophic thought with Roman law seems to have gone off track. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know how much of Plato’s idea survived? Plato believed in these innate principles of goodness, beauty, etc. He held onto the notion that these principles were not simply man-made but that is transcendental for our mind’s eye.
The law is a man-made structure, yet I feel it is also sustained on this notion of innate irrefutable principles. That’s why law has the power it has. It is viewed as everlasting, objective, and right in its own right. It is another thing beyond our control. It exists. It changes form many times but we can never really get rid of the substance. Just as water evaporates into air, it still exists everywhere – just in a completely different form. Law attempts to give things structure – a form that is intelligible. Plato believed that real Forms were intelligible through our minds. Does the same apply to law as well? I am at a blank now as to what the relationship between Plato, the individual with his theory, and Roman law or law in general is.
Okay, moving onto Aristotle now. Does the Aristotelian system fit the Roman law context? In a way it is much closer than Plato, given that it defines and categorizes things on a much deeper level. Aristotle viewed the world to be explained both by theoretical and practical sciences. Everything in the world has a final end. This belief in the “final end” entails a belief in the beginning as well. The whole span of existence/living then is the purpose of that thing. All the stages it goes through, it endures in order to fulfill its natural purpose. That might be the key word here: natural. There are certain things that are meant for specific particulars, Aristotle maintains. This brings forth another emphasis on the innateness of certain principles.
The innateness is what seems to connect all these schools of philosophy to law. Innateness evokes a kind of impossibility – like the law of non-contradiction – that makes it desirable as the foundation for a superstructure like law. Now, determining whether there really is something innate is what’s extremely hard and pushes some towards scepticism. Like me, my position now is a floater who cannot fly because I’ve realized that to move is to admit that there is bivalency between the “me” that exists and whatever else is beyond me.
That’s the hard part. How do I know what’s beyond me? How can I even know what’s beyond if I can’t even see my own shape in the first place? A lot of this sounds like metaphysical/metaphorical language that’s simply figurative. Yet the figure of what emerges on this paper, in my imagination, can carry the same validity as textbook explanations for me. The only reason why no one else can completely understand what I’m saying is because other people cannot experience my imagination. But why should I discredit my imagination just because other people can’t relate to it? For the sake of living? Don’t get bogged down with all these questions they say; at the end of the day, you still have to live apparently. Don’t I know it. Every day I make the conscious choice to live. My contract is no longer tacit. I’ve made it explicit by recognizing my own discovery of existing within a contract. I really did not ask to be here. I did not ask for many of the things I’ve received. Yet many things happen independent of my will/desires. This is supposed to signify that the world has this “order” or something beyond my own power that I must consent to coexist with if I want to live. Uncertainty/never-ending change is what I must get familiar with.
Ok, I’m back to change. I keep returning back to the phenomenon of change as it underlies as the bedrock for everything that exists. Yet I don’t understand it! In me, in the world. I feel like I’ve stopped thinking now. I can’t understand it. I’ve tried so many systems of beliefs, but they all fall once I see what it’s comprised of: hope. Hope that it’s right. Not knowledge or “wisdom” as they call it (that it’s right). No, instead what sustains our entire system of beliefs is hope. From words to numbers to God, it’s all based off hope. You know what’s beautiful and scary about hope? It’s that it is both beautiful and scary at the same time, it is everything that defines this notion of bivalency we have. We believe that contradictions cannot exist because to exist, it no longer fits the meaning of contradiction. No, this is wrong. Contradictions exist because it is in our vocabulary. Hmm… interesting point: is what exists only what’s in our vocabulary? Well, the intuitive response is no because there are plenty of things that we feel but we cannot express through words. Yet can the mind comprehend anything that does not make itself present through the form of language, whether this language be in the form of words, numbers or pictures? Break
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