Lawyers are formidable people.
I’ve always wondered why this is so.
Is it because a Bar Exam weeds out those who are thick as bricks, or plain stupid?
Is it because the Bar organization is powerful? Helping its members?
Is it because we are rich?
You know why. We may be the smartest profession with the biggest mouth, but we are not the only smart people on the planet, and many lawyers get stuck in perspective. The Bar is not a unified priesthood protecting its members from public inquiry. And most lawyers are not in the richest echelon of society. In fact lawyers are peculiarly despised by the rich, for their dependence, if nothing else.
The reason lawyers are formidable, is primarily because we listen to our opponents.
Like no other professional, we are the ones who have adversaries paid to play "enemy" to our ally, and who pay close attention to everything we do and say. No one else has this tool, this engine of criticism built into the work.
Politicians ignore criticism and attack their opponents no matter what they say.
If the Naziis had been capable of listening to their opponents, and learned something, we would be speaking German.
Artists want to express themselves, they are bored by dialogue, the interchange. No one created art in disintermediation, or by committee.
If religious people get into trouble, do they canvas other religions? They try to listen only to God, and to keep from hearing the Devil, and if they hear him they don’t listen and think it pious not to.
And that is what makes us formidable. We listen to what the adversary is saying, knowing that they are listening to us and will try to strip us naked in public if we cannot support what we are saying.
This reduction to judgment through the arguments of proponent and opponent, built into our adversary system, is so similar to the dynamic of Synthesis derived from Thesis-AntiThesis described by Hegel/Kojeve.
ReplyDeleteIt is pointless to characterize law as "synthetic" or "evolutionary" or lawyers as rational participants in a "pure law" system. Stick to the practicalities of competition and cooperation. Judgements are never free of emotional bias, law is never made without factional interests, and lawyers are people trying to make a living.
Certainly, recognizing your opponent (which the Slave does, but the master is not forced to do because he would rather die than recognize the other in Hegel) makes you less one sided, and more free to play in the structure. But I would say artists, those deserving the title, do this a fortiori. Lawyers are caught in the endless nitty gritty. Authenticity is only possible in the blink where you pull back from everydayness and see it as it is, and thereby recognize your real possibilities, not merely all your possible possibilities. Only as such can you act in such a way that might actually make a difference.
ReplyDeleteThe artists have not fled to the desert because they wish to be ignored , and stay perpetually irrelavent. Sometimes, getting in people's faces is the surest way of being ignored.