The Need to “Rediscover” the Right in the I-the Other Dialectics

Abstract

Which is the proper proprium of the right, in other words its essence? Is it possible to speak of a “single essence” of it? In our epoch is it sufficient the study of the right in its ontic dimension, as a fact, or it needs to be ontologically rediscovered, as a meaning/sense? In order to give an answer (a in-exhaustive one) to these questions posed to the contemporary right, one of the most reasonable ways is its rediscovering by means of a rational key, a rediscovery in the “I-the” other dialectics. It is not an unknown reading key. On the contrary, it is widely recognised, but paradoxically it is left aside: it has to do with the Aristotelian formula “the right belongs to the human as such, thus as a man”. In other words, the right prior to being a rule and a norm needs to be conceptualised as e relationship. This means that, as an associative form the right needs to place at its hub the socius exigency, its social mutation, its capacity and need to adapt to the dynamics of the society where he lives. It cannot be but in doubt that the right remains a regulated form, but in the rule-relationship dichotomy it is (and it should always be) the rule in function to the relationship and never the reverse. If it was not this way then the right would be transformed into an arbitrary mechanism, without its basic cell, in other words without its recta ratio. Acknowledging the axiom that the rule is born to serve the rational relationship, we have directly acknowledged that it also needs to adapt itself to the dynamics of the relationship, thus with the social body dynamics. It is precisely for this reason that the contemporary right (in the former communist countries in particular) is obliged to face phenomena and problems that it simply needs to discipline and juridically regulate, but moreover it needs to give them a meaning. It needs to be accepted that the set of topics of the debate concerning the right has been broadened so much that it could not be imagined a few decades ago. This set of topics exceeds the matrix debate, the so-called traditional, including aspects of the philosophy of moral, legal anthropology, sociology, politics, and bioethics, etc. It is a confrontation that these disciplines need to make with the right, rediscovering this way a number of dimensions of the latter which have been eclipsed due to its limited normative dimension. Multiculturalism, legal plurality, and bio-juridical are some of these phenomena that these lines seek to address. Their particularity compared to the right, their imposition for a reconceptualisation of the right, the acceptance free of complexes of the limitations of the right.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n2p155