An Understanding Heart

Almost every morning when I walk from The Hague Central Station to the Court of Appeal, I come across a pile of blankets and rags close to the wall of the Royal Library. I presume that a homeless person is sleeping there, and that it is the same person every day. I do not really know, of course, because I always hurry along to the caseload that awaits me. I do not ‘see’ this person, either literally nor figuratively. In the city centre of The Hague, I sometimes encounter a street vendor who is trying desperately to sell copies of a newspaper as part of a project for the homeless and the addicted. I never buy one. Who needs that kind of paper, right? One time – as I walked past him as usual – I heard him say, ‘Nobody sees me’. This struck me, because his observation was as correct as it was tragic. Nobody saw him for who he was, a fellow human being, down-and-out. I felt a pang of remorse for not having bought a newspaper and given him some attention.

What does seeing someone actually mean? Does it imply the understanding that comes with feeling with someone, as Musil's The Man without Qualities claims in Chapter 4? What does it mean for the connection between narrative intelligence and empathy, which Chapter 8 has already highlighted? If we agree that, in order to understand, we must be prepared to take a leap of meaning in that we have to try to break through the wall of our own limited individual existence, that requires, at least for the moment of our encounter with the other, that we accept his or her position and try to grasp the circumstances that this person is in. That is what I hope we do in law when we really try to hear the other side, because, as Martha Nussbaum suggests, ‘we are invited to concern ourselves with the fates of others like ourselves … to do unto ordinary men and women as to ourselves, viewing the poorest as one who we might be, and seeing in the most ordinary and even squalid circumstances a place where we have made in fancy our dwelling’.