Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 17:36:27 -0800
Subject: HAB: Re: Co-origination


Rob:

I wrote: "...administrative power gains its legitimacy from law, whose
foundation is an ideally automous public."

You responded: "Haven't we agreed that the law and the public must be
mutually constitutive?"

That is, "co-origination".

But you indicated the notion of co-origination relative to public and
private autonomy, not law and the public. I would say--and anticipate of
Habermas--that a notion of ideally autonmous public can be made to
capture a constructive sense of public-private co-origination.

Co-origination, it seems to me, involves a equal weight for private
autonomy in the marriage, such that I don't see "humans as
free-in-so-far-as-they-have-the-capacity-to-fulfill-their-
intersubjectivity-and-made-so-by-that-intersubjectivity'." Thus, there
may be no circularity in interpreting law as "manifest
intersubjectivity," but I would weigh law more toward system than
lifeworld (as Joseph Health points out well) and not basically associate
law with *manifest* intersubjectivity altogether.

I don't believe that laws should have much to do with "shap[ing] the
nature and degree of our freedom in the real world" and anticipate that
Habermas gives a regulative weight to law, rather than constitutive.
Architecture might provide a good anology: Houses don't shape homes in
any constitutive sense, but rather shape (and secure) a place for the
creation of a home that accords with the needs and desires of its
members.

Laws have "a hand in the process of their own validation" only in a
metalogical sense that one domain of law constitutes the parameters for
codifying other proposed laws. But constitutionality arises not from law
but from that historical co-origination that designs the architecture
governing procedural interaction. Laws cannot be the condition of their
own validation, as systems cannot derive their own premises.

It seems to me that "a problem at the beginning (temporally, not
logically) of the cycle...remains a problem" in the extra-legal sense
that all the human sciences live with the problem of understanding that
co-origination, in various disciplinary aspects.

Most certainly, you're not "coming from some other galaxy here." To me,
you are stimulating thought!--setting a scenario for interrogating BFN
itself.

You write of the difference between values and norms: "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 think its the converse as well, where personal Values may serve as
lifeworld-based standards for evaluating the appeal of proposed norms
(distinct from public values which tend to be modeled on the market).
But the greater fact seems to be that the difference--another
co-origination!--is easily lost, as one comonly uses either term for
both of the senses you indicate.

You write: "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?"

I think so. But the positive freedom of law--permissions and ensurances
of neutralities--are not, it seems to me, the locus of articulation of
the conditions for the personal capacity to manifest their public
selves. Cultural institutions of family, schools, and community provide
for these capacities that laws may protect "blindly" or
openly-and-fairly, without regard for what resources we might value or
employ.

I can't say whether this view accords with the particulars of BFN, but I
think it accords well with everything by Habermas prior to BFN.

Coming to terms on how co-origination works, in various modes of life,
probably calls for some clarity about what modes are taken to be
fundamental in co-origination. Habermas' pragmatics is abundantly
taxonomical. I would displace a focus on co-origination to a focus on
particular categorial interactivities in his own discourse--the
threefoldness of so much of his work, which outstrips any sense of basic
duality, I believe.

Regards,

Gary

P.S.

Are you getting any nearer to carrying through your
Internet-telecommunications project? Can a global regime of
law--anchored perhaps by a more UN-centered international
community--arise out of the co-original capacity of global
communications and local investments to provide a well-governed house
for social evolution? (Talk about some other galaxy here!)



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