Essence and Hypostases of Law: Development of Integrative Understanding Law
Abstract
The article is an attempt to develop and justify the author’s concept of an integrative understanding of law. According to the authors, integrative legal understanding becomes especially necessary and relevant in the context of postclassical scholar rationality, striving to overcome contradictions between the main classical approaches to the concept and essence of law. The paper shows these approaches are not ideologically views of law that are antagonistic to each other, since they are inevitably united in their ideas about the essence of law as a social regulator, bringing to the fore various aspects (hypostases) of the unified essence of law, which creates theoretical prerequisites for the creation of a unified (integrative) legal understanding. The purpose of this work is to study the relationship between the essence of law and its hypostases, which are interconnected and mutually complementary manifestations of the essence that are subject to philosophical understanding and theoretical knowledge. The following tasks are addressed: to examine the main hypostases of law as a means of constructing legal reality, a social regulator, a method of conflict resolution, a means of social communication, etc., to demonstrate the relationship between the hypostases and features of law, to reveal the significance of legal freedom as an essential dimension of law, and to explore the implementation of the definition of law in various modes of legal existence. The article concludes the category of the essence of law, that serves as a worldview prerequisite for its theoretical knowledge, is not explicable by rational-discursive means. According to the authors, the essence of law is revealed through a set of hypostases that form the basis of the formal-logical and theoretical definition of law. The features of the definition are related to the hypostases of law, which are specific to different modes of legal existence. In practical activities, various features of law can be taken as a basis, which leads to pluralism and multiple definitions of law used by lawyers for practical or didactic purposes. As demonstrated in the work, this pluralism does not indicate the incompatibility of the main approaches to defining law and may be overcome at a higher level of theoretical understanding, namely, at the level of understanding the aspects of law that manifest different aspects of its essence.
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