Carlos Ayres Britto(*)
“I don't want to know about your laws.
I want to know about your interpreters.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is made up of pairs of opposites. As in the Hegelian proposition of thesis and antithesis. That's why quantum physics and neuroscience have reached an expected conclusion: the human brain is also dual. Binary. It is composed of a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere, the latter housing feeling or emotional intelligence, and the former housing thought or intellectual intelligence.
2. Well, the right hemisphere of the brain holds the individual's gifts for an instantaneous overview of reality. Gifts that are a mix of intuition and imagination, or another name for the human capacity to leap to grand syntheses without the need for analysis. This presupposes a firm willingness to question dogmas or mantras of any origin; eyes always awake and ears permanently open to the surrounding world, as if open to the message of things, the cosmos, and life; courage to "learn to unlearn" (Fernando Pessoa) and thus begin anew from a theoretical zero, which is none other than the experience of nothingness as a starting point for grasping reality; serene fearlessness in facing existential tensions of the highest temperature. All flowing into the estuary of the most original of knowledge, which is in natura or firsthand knowledge, to the extent that it is obtained in a sudden burst of perception. In short, the cerebral hemisphere with the highest blood supply, because it is there that the feminine ray of art bursts forth and authentic mystical vocations explode.
3. The left side of the human brain, on the other hand, is where our greatest aptitudes for the focused isolation of the phenomena to be investigated manifest themselves, and, in this compartmentalized realm of investigation, we act with the most objective rigor of Science: method, research, comparative study, analysis, testing, reflection, calculation, planning, demonstration. Consequently, it involves working in a pasteurized or coldly proceduralized manner, with all the cautions of those who handle crystal pieces or artifacts of great explosive power, metaphorically speaking. This endows us with a type of indirect knowledge, also called discursive or speculative. Progressive knowledge, or knowledge through successive approximations, is, in short, more focused on the value of legal certainty, just as intuitive-emotional knowledge is next door to everything that tastes and smells of material justice.
4. We are dealing with neural potentialities (feeling is as much a part of our neuron pool as thought) that are crucial to the balanced development of every human being, and even more so, of those professionals who habitually judge the concrete interests of each of these human beings: judges. Judges of all instances, including the highest courts. And the fact is that such neural potentialities must be harmoniously integrated in a kind of marriage of love that has the gift of birthing the offspring of consciousness. This added value restores the wholeness of the human being by endowing them with a spherical vision of themselves and everything else (it is known that the geometric figure of the circumference contains all angles). Furthermore, consciousness translates into that much-desired "middle path" referred to in classical Greek philosophy; that is, the point of possible unity between polarities, constituting consciousness, in that type of intelligence that the most acclaimed quantum physicists of today call “spiritual intelligence”. Danah Zohar ahead.
5. Now, it is this spiritual intelligence, a true state of osmosis between our original rational composure and our emotional nature, that will operate as a kind of third eye. But a third eye so acutely penetrating that it pierces the very flesh of reality to x-ray it from every aspect. Translating an inner growth that already corresponds to a qualitative transformation of the subject, who positions themselves as an attentive observer of everything external and internal. This enables them to piggyback on the essential movement of the things that make up life ("the being of things is movement," Heraclitus taught) to engage with them in a kind of dialogue that, although muted, is mutually influential. The knowing subject no longer separates itself from the knowable object, triggering reactions in the latter, and vice versa. The human investigator surrenders themselves entirely to the phenomena being investigated, and these respond by revealing the entirety of their own being at each moment of their changing telluric performance.
6. This is also how it should be in the judge's interaction with the constitutional and legal provisions to be applied, with a view to disentangling the norm that the case under judgment may require. The judge must surrender himself completely to this living thing that is the legal provision to be interpreted, so that it surrenders itself completely to him, the judge, presenting him with normative possibilities often as unprecedented as they were unsuspected ("life only gives itself to those who gave themselves," Vinícius de Moraes rhymed). With what this communicative judge reveals, more than linear technicality, more than an uncontrolled outpouring of bile, the aforementioned evolution as a person. A change of mentality, then, more than mere personal behavior. Therefore, the improvement of the judge not only as a professional but also as a human being in search of his existential fulfillment. In line with that spiritual proposition that Shakespeare immortalized in the judgment: "Transformation is a door that opens from within."
7. This is a new kind of judge. A judge militantly focused on reconciling the poles of the most important human dichotomy (thought and feeling), in order to also reconcile the principal dualities with which he or she works professionally: security and material justice. The latter is present in those values that most dignify life in society, exemplified by administrative morality and the political-civil, social, and fraternal inclusion of human beings. Hence, we can now speak of a three-pronged democracy—precisely liberal, social, and fraternal—as a holistic "State of Justice." Something far more advanced than a simplistic and often deliriously formalistic "Rule of Law."
8. Ultimately, we are talking about a new type of judge who, in addition to interacting dialogically with the standards they are responsible for applying to the highest degree possible, seeks to listen to the real desires of society to see to what extent they are met in our legal system, thus enabling the formation of well-founded decisions. This promotes the reconciliation of law with life itself. If you prefer, a judge who operates within themselves this reconciliation between thought and feeling, to achieve a state of consciousness that leads to the most perfect combination of science and art, firmness and lightness, attention and relaxation, the brief and the intense. A judge whose only closed question is their openness to the new.
(*) Supreme Court Justice. PhD in constitutional law from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Member of the Brazilian Academy of Legal Letters.