Mit kínálhat a kozmikus horror a jog számára – és mitől foszthatja meg azt?

A természetes rend összeomlása H. P. Lovecraft fikciójában

Absztrakt

One of the most ancient and enduring issues in the history of legal philosophy is the relationship between law and morality. This can be explained with the fact that the birth of legal philosophy can be traced back to the emergence of philosophy in general. For this reason, for a large period in Western intellectual history, the philosophical analysis of law traditionally implied the assumption that fundamental moral principles and human-made legal rules are related, the former, with a validity beyond human volition, serving as a source of legitimacy for the latter, which are susceptible to change by temporary human will. Thus, one of the main pursuits of classic legal philosophy was to identify the eternal values supplying the foundations of positive law. My paper is an attempt at viewing the “law and morality” question through the lens of the “law and literature” approach. Interdisciplinary movements in legal scholarship like “law and literature” or “law and (popular) culture” offered insight into the various ways literature and other cultural products touch upon problems that are pertinent to how law works or how it is perceived in the popular imagination. From the principles of just distribution to retributive justice and the desire for vengeance to social inequalities, from the greatest literary classics to contemporary popular fiction, a plethora of interactions between fictitious stories and the world of law have been and are being explored to date. My paper focuses on weird fiction and cosmic horror, partly overlapping subgenres of horror fiction pioneered by H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The central motif in cosmic horror is the insignificance of all kinds of human endeavour, and the meaningless world’s indifference towards humanity; an affront to our perception of ourselves as being inherently worthy or possessing some kind of inherent value. My claim is that cosmic horror, by annihilating the teleology attributed to the world by many, implicitly touches on the problem of the destabilization of universal values, a problem that led to the critique and marginalisation of natural law theory by the 19th century. While Lovecraft does not describe situations in which his protagonists face moral dilemmas, he repeatedly hints at an implicit belief in rules and limits inherent in the natural order of things—an assumption not unlike those found in classic natural law theories—and the realization that there is no “cosmic order” is an important writerly tool in his specific brand of horror. This way, cosmic horror offers an opportunity to reflect by the means of fiction upon the fragility of a universal (or any kind of) moral order.