The Young Nietzsche and the Truth in the Teaching of Law: An Approach

Abstract

One of the fields where Law and Literature has become strong is in the Teaching of Law. The words of the law, those that our students learn from the jurisprudence, are part of a language that supposes a legal paradigm that, to this day, is none other than the formalist one. This language, taken to the extreme, becomes rigid and makes the concepts of Law appear in front of the student as institutional truths that he only has to learn and recite by heart. One of the big problems with this way of teaching legal content is that it makes you forget that legal words are the result (among other elements) of legislative conventions, political agreements and that they are not scientific truths to be discovered. The great challenger of truth and knowledge is the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who, early in the 1970s, wrote two texts: On the pathos of truth (1872) and On truth and lie in an extramoral sense (1873). In both, he questions language and truth, making a critique of the elaboration of concepts, the attitude they promote and the isolation of science to which they lead. He thinks he sees a way out of the situation by resorting to art. In this brief paper I intend to point out that Nietzsche’s ideas can enrich the way in which we reflect on the words of the law understood as truths in the classroom.