Twelve years ago, when the Chinese jurisprudence was discussing issues such as "big law-big power" and "right-based-obligation-based", I translated what American legal philosopher Edgar Bodenheimer said. Jurisprudence: The Philosophy and Method of the Law.There are two main purposes in translating this comprehensive work of legal philosophy: one is to try to do some knowledge-based work for the reconstruction of Chinese jurisprudence through such efforts, because Chinese jurisprudence at that time was required or driven by the modern legal system construction. Zhongzheng is caught in a historical predicament: on the one hand, it needs to demonstrate the legitimacy of this legal system construction effort;The second purpose is to try to clear up my legal doubts through the translation/thinking practice of this legal philosophy work, because I have clearly realized at that time that in the field of legal philosophy thinking Among them, the relationship between man, nature and society under the legal framework, the intellectual relationship between man or legal man and law, and the legitimacy of legal authority are extremely complicated, and they are by no means as self-evident and simple as people generally imagine.Regrettably, however, translating/thinking about this work has not been able to dispel my doubts, on the contrary, in a sense it has intensified my confusion.The following are the questions I raised in the translation preface (some wording has been revised):

Human beings choose the law and respect the law.However, history has miraculously played jokes, making people who choose the law struggle with helplessness or the oppression of evil laws.The question is not whether the law itself is good or bad, or how legal history unfolds, because inanimate law is absolutely subordinate to human beings.Therefore, the key lies in people's understanding and judgment of what the law is (including what it was originally and what it is now), what the law should be, and the relationship between the two. As early as the 5th century BC, the ancient Romans had such a maxim that as long as there are political and social units, there are laws.Since then, jurists and philosophers in the history of civilization for thousands of years have tried to interpret and analyze this social reality and historical experience, hoping to find some inevitability and regularity from it.Needless to say, they did find a lot.However, what are these inevitability and regularity hidden?Is it the political and economic needs of a certain historical period?Is it the need of the development of human society?Or is it the arbitrariness and inertia of a certain jurist or philosopher's personal thinking, or the safety instinct they have like others as mortals?

Human beings have formulated laws, and since then they seem to be constantly answering why human beings have to formulate laws, as if they have the truth.However, people's limited self-awareness, human self-justification instinct (often reflected in scientific conclusions at a specific stage) and strong dependence cover a deeper phenomenon, that is, law as a means of social governance or control , is an anti-natural choice in the process of human socialization.A post facto argument for a certain behavior choice does not mean that this behavior choice is necessarily more reasonable or correct than another behavior choice.History does not allow assumptions, we can no longer ask whether it is possible for people to make other better choices before the law is chosen as a means, just as we cannot expect human beings to return to the original state of nakedness .Based on this, are we still willing to poetically accept the law as a supreme god of truth?

The external framework of the law is indeed brilliant.From "Justinian's Encyclopedia of State Law", "Napoleonic Code" to "German Civil Code" and other legislative creations, the legal system is quite complete in the eyes of ordinary people, and it seems to be complete enough to meet the needs of human beings for an orderly and organized life. Satisfying the human desire to repeat a satisfying experience or arrangement and the compulsion to respond adaptively to certain situations.However, have the justice values ​​such as freedom, equality, and security marked by the law been realized like the order value?In order to pursue the realization of the value of justice, human beings negate part or all of the content of the law time and time again, but they are still unable to eliminate the disharmony between the relatively long-lasting completeness of the legal form and the relative inability of the legal content to meet the fundamental requirements of human beings, which is this. The limitations of the law itself or the uncertainty of the fundamental pursuit of human beings in an absolute sense?

Man clings to authority because the individual is impotent in an absolute sense.He has to depend on something.Since the beginning of ancient Greek civilization, people in various cultural backgrounds have established their own superhuman authority, such as the gods of the holy mountain of Olympus, Allah and God and so on.However, there is no doubt that in today's highly developed civilization, the law has replaced those authorities to a large extent and has a character of spiritual transcendence, at least an ideal transcendence.While people accept the law as a spiritual authority, they ignore a psychological problem because of the naturalness of this acceptance: why do people in very different cultural backgrounds tend to go the same way and regard the law as a spiritual authority? authority?What is the human psychological conversion mechanism behind this phenomenon?Will the nature of people's cognitive and psychological structure on which the transfer of authority depends lead to the shake of authority?

The complete retranslation of Mr. Bodenheimer’s work at the request of the publishing house not only gave me the opportunity to revise the original translation during the retranslation process (including changing all annotations to more convenient for readers to read and verify). form), but also gave me the opportunity to face directly issues that had perplexed me more than a decade ago.But frankly speaking, despite these years of thinking and research, I still feel powerless to give clear answers to these questions intellectually, and the key reason, it seems now, may mainly lie in the way I raised these questions at that time.However, it should be pointed out that the change in the way of asking questions—including this practice of retranslation/thinking—cannot of course dispel the core that runs through or dominates these questions, that is, my doubts about law and related legal discourses .Fortunately, these years of research in the sociology of knowledge and political philosophy, accompanied by a sustained focus on law and legal philosophy, have made it possible for me to make a more concrete identification of these issues, which I will discuss in a dedicated treatise These are extremely complex issues.What needs to be emphasized here is that if the practice of reading/thinking can open up some more theoretical questions, and through these questions, people can understand the phenomenon that was taken for granted and not questioned, and what lies behind it. It must be more meaningful to question the logic of the problem than to give self-righteous simple answers to complicated questions or simply put these questions aside without any reflection and criticism, because this is in line with the principle of free thinking as an intellectual, As Foucault puts it in "The Archeology of Knowledge": ". . . I will venture in this labyrinth, change my intentions, tunnel the labyrinth, drive it away from itself, find its protruding parts, and these protruding parts Parts again simplify and distort its passages, I get lost in the maze, and when I finally emerge I meet a gaze I never want to see again. Surely I am far from alone in writing like this to lose face Please don't ask me who I am, and don't expect me to remain the same, to be the same: for this is a morality of status, which governs our identity documents. May it give us as we write free".

Weimingzhai in the northern suburbs of Beijing