Kelman M., Syvulia T. The concept of “legal understanding” in the arsenal of scientific categories of general theory and philosophy of law

DOI: 10.33098/2078-6670.2023.15.27.1.61-71

Purpose. To analyze the peculiarities of approaches to legal understanding through the prism of various criteria, which will make it possible to determine its essence and significance. Legal understanding is a meaningful system, since the answer to the question about the essence of law is also the answer to the question about the content (purpose) of law. Methodology. In this sense, quite reasonable questions arise: how can one create law on the basis of comprehending a huge set of social phenomena without imagining at least the signs of this law, without even basic knowledge about it (here, by the way, one’s own life experience should be eliminated as an obstacle to objectivity), how can one find the optimal method by which one can at least come close to understanding the essence of law that one is looking for? Let’s assume that before cognizing the subject matter, i.e., law, we managed to identify the means of cognition in the form of scientific methods. Again, the question arises: how are these methods discovered? After all, in order to find them, one needs some other method, and to find the latter, one needs the next, and so on ad infinitum. The only way out of this circle is to identify some “obvious” properties of the subject. The methodological basis of the study is a system of conceptual approaches, general scientific and special legal methods, as well as methods of scientific knowledge: anthropological, idealistic, need-based research, systemic, communicative approaches, and such methods as historical and legal, comparative legal, etc. Results. In the course of the study, the author proves that three things are necessary for the study of the concept of legal understanding: knowledge of law (intellectual element), activity (volitional element), and – undoubtedly – consciousness (spiritual element). After all, only the spiritual identifies the first two. Only the spiritual component fills the “legal light”, content, purpose, spirit of the law, legal connection, and guarantees them from turning into a formal scheme at best, and criminal law chaos at worst, and law itself is not law. Practical significance. Without exaggeration, the problem of understanding law can be classified as “eternal”. Since the emergence of professional legal activity and up to now, there has not been and probably is not a single lawyer who would not think about the question of what law is and would not try to answer it.

Key words: law, understanding, the right to understand, system, relations, freedom, justice, society.

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