Law and Language: ‘an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies’

In the first instance, Bouvard and Pécuchet's craze is the apotheosis of the quest for certainty that started in early modernity with the rise of rationalism and empiricism, and culminated in the scientific positivism of the nineteenth century. It resonates in legal positivism and formalism. Important for the context of the history of ideas of law and philosophy, in view of the overarching topic of this book, is the parallel development of a descriptive language view that favours a picture theory of the world in which the idea of full correspondence between the thing and its representation in language dominates. As far as the search for truth is concerned, it is reminiscent of the correspondence theory, or adequatio rei et intellectus, as found in Thomas Aquinas, that starts from the premise that in order to understand the world and find the truth, the knower's intellect must be adequate to the thing. It culminated in the idea that, given their explanatory methodology, the natural sciences are superior instruments of knowledge. In the second instance, the craze is the outcome of a long process of disciplinary differentiation that terminated the old unity of law and the humanities, occasioned by the Justinian Corpus Iuris Civilis in eleventh-century Bologna.

Cogito and certainty

When the goddess Athena in Aeschylus's Oresteia decides to ‘appoint judges … and establish a tribunal’ to judge Orestes’ case, a narrative of ongoing violence ends in the foundation of an institution that settles disputes between people. From then on, the instrument by means of which law and justice are to be shaped is language: hence the title of this chapter. However, the formative aspect of language as our way of being in the world does not preclude outgrowths of violence and power. Remember the story of the tower of Babel. The Bible's Book of Genesis describes how the people decided to build a tower in order to make a name for themselves, ‘lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ (Genesis 11:4 (AV)). God's interpretation of this human action is based on the fear of losing divine authority, because ‘now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do’ (Genesis 11:6 (AV)). The divine reaction is to cause a linguistic diaspora.