Ocean Gibson
Title: A Note On Law
Email: ogg2104@columbia.edu
“A Note on Law”
Let each assure the other’s life to come, for we, once enemies, are now become, in very truth, fast friends in the Law. 1 ***
In mentioning “Law” a resurgence of our monarchical heritage in the form of old
associations is unavoidable. The Law is sovereign; it governs, binds, and fastens; it regulates
with impersonal ubiquity; and its operations proceed on a plane at once transcendent and
immanent. The last characteristic is the strangest and perhaps the most essential, for it more than
the others is resistant to the charge of superfluity and anachronism. We call the Law sovereign, binding or impersonal because of its transcendentally immanent nature: for if it were not transcendent, it would not be sovereign, and if it were not immanent, it would not be binding and
consequential. The Law is impersonal because it is ubiquitous: its arbitration is not subject to
whim, nor can its origin be traced back to any particular contingent thing.
The apprehension of a universal Law in the form of an allencompassing order goes back
to the very roots of our mythic identity. Since the dawn of our axial religions and philosophies,
the persistence of a supreme Law has been posited as the ground, origin, and purpose of all being. While diverse in the details, Logos, Dharma, Supreme Vacuity, the Dao, Principle (li
) and Brahman are all structurally akin in that they are expressions and affirmations of some sort of
transcendent order which pervades all things. All the myriad of phenomena derive from the Law
and the Law expresses the myriad of phenomena in their deepest truth. Within the field of Law, is and ought are unified: that which is is as it ought to be, and that which ought to be already essentially is. The identity of is and ought sheds light on the inherent sense of purposiveness
which the Law has always tended to inspire; for without this identity, the bare fact of the Law