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15
CHAPTER
ON THE COMMON SAYING
‘WHAT’S TRUE IN GOLF IS
TRUE IN LAW’: THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
THEORY AND PRACTICE
ACROSS FORMS OF LIFE*
Stu Woolman**
Ya know, it’s a work in progress. Sean has a different theory about the
mechanics of the swing. It takes some time – lots, and lots of practice – until
the theory becomes second nature. It’s working, and every day I understand
what Sean is saying, the theory, the mechanics, better and better. It’s slow, and
I’m grinding, but I’m starting to see the results.
Tiger Woods (September 2010)
A picture [has] held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our
language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably (para 115) ... What we
do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (para 116) ...
Now, however, let us suppose that after some efforts on the teacher’s part [the
student] continues the series correctly, that is, as we do it. So now we can say he has
mastered the system – But how far need he continue the series for us to have the
right to say that? Clearly you cannot state a limit here. (para 145) ... The grammar
of the word ‘knows’ is evidently closely related to that of ‘can’, ‘is able to’. But
also closely related to that of ‘understands’. (‘Mastery’ of a technique) (para 150).
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical investigations (1945)
[That shared practices are constitutive of our being] implies that the world is
already given as the common world. It is not the case that there are first
individual subjects which are at any given time have their own world; and that
[through] [we then] the task of putting them together, by virtue of some sort
of arrangement , ... [we then] would have a common world. We take
pleasure ... as one takes pleasure, we speak ... about something as one speaks.
Martin Heidegger Lectures on the history of the concept of time (1926)
* I want to thank Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke for initiating this
conversation. See, eg, Moseneke ‘The relationship between legal theory and legal
practice’ Paper delivered at the SAIFAC Is this seat taken? Conference (11 October 2009)
(notes on file with author). I have, it goes without saying, benefitted immensely from
the spirited reply of my colleagues Associate Professor and Director of SAIFAC, David
Bilchitz and SAIFAC Researcher Juha Tuovinen.
** Professor and Elizabeth Bradley Chair of Ethics, Governance and Sustainable
Development, University of the Witwatersrand; Academic Director, South African
Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public Human Rights and International Law
(SAIFAC).
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