Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 00:03:53 +1100
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: BFN & co-origination


Thanks for the helpful note, Gary.

I'd suggested:

>>[h] we legitimise this process by way of the application of norms
>>(universally obligatory, and therefore requiring justification) and
>>values (historically specific, contingent and teleological preferences);

and you replied:

>A distinction between norms and values is very important. But norms may
>or may not make universalistic claims, and may be called to account in
>any case. Norms may be based in values! For example, the value of
>"liberty" is partically constitutive for democractic norms of political
>action.

Yeah!  I was a bit worried here too.  As I've not got the book to hand, I
can't pursue this just now, but if the distinction is an important one, I'd
love it elucidated here.  Is the difference just one of
status-of-claim-in-society (ie. what we call 'values' are recognised a
priori as appropriately variable and tolerably dynamic within the life
world, whilst what we call norms are the very building blocks of our life
world, becoming moot only if explicitly invoked in discourse?).  I just
dunno ...

>I enthusiastically support a notion of co-origination! But I don't see
>why--and don't believe Habermas claims that ---private autonomy should
>be represented in the law, other than formally: as protections of what
>is not the business of public representation.

I reckon you're right.  Else we have something approximating a
regurgitation of classical liberalism, don't we?  So, is the autonomy of
the individual to be read as no more than the negative freedom required to
test validity intersubjectively?  Does this not require some positive
freedoms for real people, who do, after all, need the energy, time and
material resources to manifest their public selves?

>>[n] well, let's look where we should - at the object/subject of the
>law;
>
>Let's not. I doubt that such a look can avoid implying a subject-object
>dualism, so I question that this is where "we should" be looking to
>understand third ways.

I didn't have a good word for this co-original identity, so I amalgamated
object/subject, Lukacs-style.  Am I missing something?

>Yes, BUT Habermas doesn't locate law in administrative power. Rather,
>administrative power gains its legitimacy from law, whose foundation is
>an ideally automous public.

Haven't we agreed that the law and the public must be mutually
constitutive?  Administrative power can be defined as a regulatory presence
in society.  If we keep going on about humans as
'free-in-so-far-as-they-have-the-capacity-to-
fulfill-their-intersubjectivity-and-made-so-by-that-intersubjectivity' and
the law as manifest intersubjectivity, we're in pretty circular territory,
aren't we?  I mean, to the degree our laws do shape the nature and degree
of our freedom in the real world, they must also have a hand in the process
of their own validation, mustn't they?  If there's a problem at the
beginning (temporally, not logically) of the cycle, there remains a problem.

Sorry if I'm coming from some other galaxy here - I don't think I've ever
discussed a book having read so little of it.

Cheers,
Rob.


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Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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