LAW

Today I would like to reflect upon law with you. I do not mean those laws which are determined by parliament and applied by the courts, but rather law in the scientific sense of the word-physical, chemical and biological laws, especially laws of the p ure, abstract sciences, as in the various branched of mathematic.

Everyone knows that there are such laws. It also should be clear that they are of enormous importance for all human life. For law is that which has been established by science, and from which our technology has been formed. Law is that which is clea r and certain, the ultimate basis of every rational action. Were we to have no natural laws, not mathematical laws, then we should be mere barbarians, helpless beings exposed to the sway of natural forces. It is hardly an exaggeration when I say that we know few things which are so vitally important for us as laws: --among others, or perhaps above all, a the mathematical pure laws.

Now, there are men who are prepared to make us of an instrument without knowing the slightest thing about its construction. I know radio reporters who don't even know whether their microphone is a ribbon for a condenser apparatus, and drivers who only know where the starter is in their cars. In fact, it seems to me that the number of such automatic men who use everything and understand nothing is becoming larger and larger. It is a frightful fact that only a few of most radio listeners are intereste d in the structure of this wonder of technology, the receiver.

But even if it were so that most of us have lost all interest in technical equipment, still it can be hoped that this is not the case with the law. For the law is not only an instrument. It affects our lives deeply, it is the condition of our culture ' it is , as we said, the element of clarity and rationality in our view of the world.

And for this reason it seems to me that for once we should ask the question: What is a law?

Merely asking this question and reflecting on it a bit suffices to make us realize that a law is something very remarkable and singular. This can be best shown perhaps in the following manner.

The world around us consists of many and varied things, but all of these things-beings, as the philosophers say --have certain common characteristics. By thing or begin I mean here everything that is to be encountered in the world-- men, animals, moun tains, stones and so forth. The common characteristics of these things are among others, the following:

First, all of these things are in some place --for example, I am in Fribourg and am sitting at my desk. Then they exist during a particular time-- for me, it is today, Monday, twelve o'clock. Third, we know of no thing which did not come to be at som e point in time, and ,as far as we know, all things are transitory. A time comes when they disappear. Fourth, they are all subject to change; man may now be healthy, another time sick --a tree is once small, then it grows larger, and so forth. Fifth, e ach of these things is singular, individual. I am I and no other, this mountain is precisely this mountain and no other mountain. Everything that is in the world is individual, singular.

Finally, and this is very important, every known thing in the world could be otherwise or not at all. To be sure, some men believe that they are necessary, but this is an error. They could also not exist, and probably without too great a loss for the whole.

These are, therefore, the characteristics of everything in the world. Everything is in a certain place, at a certain time, everything comes to be, passes away, changes, is individual and not necessary. Such is the world; or at least so it seems to b e.

But now, into this cozy spatial, temporal, and transient world consisting of many individual things comes the law.

But the law has none of the above-mentioned characteristics of thing --not one.

For, first of all, it would be absolutely senseless to say that a mathematical law exists at any given place; if it exists, then it exists everywhere equally. Of course, I make an image of this law in my head, bu that is only an image. The law is not identical with this image, but rather external. It is beyond all space.

Second, it is beyond time. It is meaningless to say that a law came to be yesterday, or that is has expired. Indeed it was recognized at a certain point in time, perhaps at another point in time it will be found to be false, that it was no law; but t he law itself is timeless.

Third, it is and can be subject to no change. That two and two are four will remain for eternity without change --it would be nonsense to think of changing it.

Finally --and this is perhaps the most remarkable-- the law is not individual, it is not singular, it is general. It is to be found here and there, and again somewhere else, ad infinitum. For example, we find that two and two are four not only on the earth but also on the moon, and in all of these innumerable cases we have found the same --I emphasize-- the exact same law.

But this is connected with the most important thing of all. Law is necessary, that is, it cannot be other than as it presents itself. Even in the case of the so-called laws of probability -but that it will happen with precisely this and no other prob ability is necessary. This fact is unique and is to be found nowhere else in the world except in law; for, as we said, every thing in the world is only factual, it could be otherwise. So much for the facts, at least as they seem to be. For there are la ws, and it appears that they are precisely what we have seen them to be.

But, as we have emphasized, this fact is quite remarkable. The world, our world which we deal with daily, looks completely different form these law. It is variegated and contains different species of objects; however, everything which it contains has the familiar character of the spatial, temporal, transitory, individual and non-necessary. In this world, how do laws fit in which are non-spatial, timeless, general, eternal, and necessary. Don't they seem to be ghost-like? Wouldn't it be much simpler if they could be explained away somehow, removed form the world so that, in the final analysis, it could be shown that they are basically no different form the usual things of the world? This is the first thought which occurs the moment it becomes clear that there are such things as laws. And from this originates the philosophical problem.

Why do we have a philosophical problem here? The answer is that all other sciences presuppose the fact that there should be laws. They advance laws, investigate them, but what a law is, if of no interest to them. And still the question seems not onl y meaningful but also of importance. For which the assumption of the law something like another world creeps into our world. But this other world is a bit unpleasant, somewhat ghostlike. Wouldn't it be nice if one could get rid of these laws by a suita ble explanation?

In fact, such explanations are no lacking. For example, one can advance the opinion that the laws are products of thought. That would mean that the world would be thoroughly composed of thing, that absolutely no laws could be found in it; they would be only fictions of our thinking. In this case, a law would exist only in the mind of the scientist --the mathematician or the physicist, for example. It would be a part of his consciousness.

This solution has actually been recommended often, among others by the great Scottish philosopher, David Hume. He believed that natural laws have their necessity from the fact that one becomes accustomed to them. Thus, for example, when one has seen very often that water boils when heated, one becomes accustomed to this being so. and this habit becomes second nature --man then cannot think other than as he is accustomed. In a similar manner, Hume and his disciples explain other supposed hall-marks of law. At the end of their analysis none of these hall-marks remain; the law reveals itself as something which fits very well into our good old spatial, temporal, transitory, and individual world.

So much for our first possible interpretation. Let us attempt to reflect a bit on it. It must be admitted that it is somehow human; it permits us to explain away the laws with their unpleasant, ghost-like characteristics. And its foundation seems to be truly rational; for it is a fact that we easily get used to various things and then act as though we were under a compulsion. One need think only of the compulsion which the smoker has in smoking cigarettes.

And yet we have many weighty misgivings about this solution.

First, anyone can see that at least one fact in not explained by this solution. I man the fact that, in the world, laws are really valid. Let us take the following example. When an engineer plans a bridge, he relies on a great number of physical law s. Now, if one would assume, as Hume does, that all of these laws are only habits of mankind, or more precisely of this engineer, that one must ask how it is possible that a bridge which is correctly planned the engineer has made mistakes will fall apart . How can human habits be decisive for such masses of concrete and iron? It seems as if the laws are only secondarily in the mind of the engineer. Primarily they are valid for the world, for iron and concrete, totally independent of whether anyone know s something about them or not. Why should they have this validity if they were only structures of thought

This objection can be avoided by saying that the world itself is a product of our thought, that we superimpose our own laws upon it. But that is a solution which the proponents of Hume's doctrine --the positivists-- along with most of mankind, found t o be monstrous. We shall have more to say about this possibility when we come to the theory of knowledge. But for the present we may assume that only a few men would accept it, and therefore we don't need to take it into consideration.

That is the first objection. But there is a second. Even when one transplants laws into thought, this by no means eliminates them. They exist no longer in the outer world, but continue to have validity in our soul. However, the human soul, human th inking, and in general everything that is human is also a part of the world and has all of the characteristics of the worldly --it is objective.

Here, for the first time, we touch upon that remarkable creature that is we ourselves, man. But we cannot yet begin to think about man. However, one thing should be said, and I want to say it with the most precision I can for a whole series of prejud ices stand in the way of a correct understanding of our problem.

What I want to say is this. We find in man much that is unique and which is not to be found in the rest of nature. This singularity, uniqueness, this differing from the rest of nature is generally called the spiritual, or the spirit. Now, the spirit is most certainly an interesting phenomenon for philosophizing. But, as thus everything embodied in it --apart of the world, of nature, at least in the sense that it, like this stone, like this tree before my window, like my typewriter, is temporal, spa tial, changeable, not necessary, and individual. A timeless spirit is nonsense. It could be that it will endure forever, but, in so far as we know it, it endures, it is a temporal thing. Granted that is can survey far reaches of space, but still all sp irits which we know are bound to a body and therefore spatial. Above all, the spirit has nothing necessary in it --it could just as well not exist-- and to speak of a general spirit is senseless. Every spirit is always the spirit of a particular man --i t cannot exist in two men, just as a piece of wood cannot exist in two places at the same time.

But if such is the case, then our problem is not solved, merely postponed; if laws are to be found in our spirit it still must be explained what exactly they are. For they are certainly not a part of our spirit. Perhaps they are in the spirit, but on ly in so far as they are know through it, and therefore they must exist in some manner outside of the spirit.

If therefore, one transposes the law into the spirit, one clarifies the situation very little and creates at least one great difficulty; it now must be explained why a law belonging solely to the spirit holds such strict sway in the outer world. For t his reason most philosophers have chosen another course. This course consists basically in saying simply that the laws are something independent of us, of our thinking, and of our spirit. It is thereby asserted that they exist, are, or are valid in some way outside of us, that they are only recognized --more or less clearly-- by mankind, but not created, just as we cannot create stones, trees, and animals by mere thinking. That presupposes, the philosophers say, that they form a totally different, seco nd kind of being, of that which is. In this view, therefore, there is in reality --if we want to call it such-- something else beside things, realities, namely laws, and their kind and manner of being is called the ideal. It is said that laws belong to ideal being. Expressed differently, there are two basic forms of being --the real and the ideal.

Returning to our problem, it must be added that those who recognize the otherness of law --that is, ideal being-- are divided, each according to his conception of this ideal, how could one conceive it? There are, generally speaking, three very importa nt answer to this.

The first is: the ideal exists independent of the real, so to speak, in itself; it forms a special world above and beyond the objective world. In this ideal world is naturally no space nor time, no change and no mere facticity --everything is eternal , pure, unchangeable and necessary. This conception is often attributed to eh creator of our European philosophy, Plato. He was the first to post the problem of the law and seems to have solved it in the above --mentioned fashion.

The second solution: the ideal does exist, but not separated from the real --it exists only in the real. More precisely, there are, in the world, only certain structures, a certain formation of things which repeats itself, called essences, and they a re so formed that the human spirit can detect laws in them. Formulated laws appear only in our thinking, but hey have a foundation in the thins themselves, and are therefore valid for world. This, in a nutshell, the solution of the greatest pupil of Pla to, Aristotle, the founder of most sciences.

Finally, there is a third solution which I touched upon in the discussion of positivism. It does not deny that laws are ideal, but believes that the ideal takes place only in thought. That the laws are valid for the world comes from the fact that the structure of things is a projection of the laws of thinking. This is the doctrine of the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

It is no exaggeration to state the almost every important philosopher here in Europe embraced one of these three solutions, or to state that our philosophy has consisted, and consists to a great degree today, of reflections about these three solution.< /P>

Three years ago, I took part in a discussion at the well-known American University of Notre Dame, near Chicago, in which more than one hundred and fifty philosophers and logicians participated. All three speakers were mathematical logicians, and every thing that was said took on a highly scientific, mathematicological form. The discussion lasted, almost without interruption, for two days and three nights. And it dealt with precisely our problem. Professor Alonzo Church, of Princeton, one of the most important mathematical logicians the world, championed the platonic doctrine essentially just as the old master had one defended it in the agora in Athens. And I must admit that he did so with great success. It is an eternal problem of philosophy; perh aps it is only for us moderns, who know so many laws and for whom they have become so important, that it is so much more pressing than for any other epoch.

Bochenski

Introduction to Philosophy

The Chapter on Law