Summary
Aleksandar Kožev: Blueprint for a phenomenology of law
As strange as it seems that French philosophy has systematically avoided the problem of law for the last half century, it seems so normal and expected that this encyclopedic spirit, such as Kožev, has been working on it. To that extent, it does not seem unusual that in this work, written in 1943, he tackled the problem "from scratch", as if nothing had been written about it before him. Thus, he begins this extensive exposition, divided into three parts (Law as such, Origin and development of Law and System of Law) with the most general position that "Law as an (empirical) existence realizes the essence of 'Law' in the spatio-temporal, material world, and the phenomenon of 'Law' reveals (man) that essence through its realization". Seen from the outside, Law rests in the intervention of the third "impartial and disinterested", person C, which realizes the idea of Justice, canceling the "unjust" resistance of person B to the action of person A. But there immediately, from Koževl's phenomenological point of view, arises the difficult problem of "impartiality and disinterestedness" of that third person C (legislator or judge). The solution proposed by Kožev is reminiscent of Kant's aesthetics: "eidetic" is the obviousness that man finds satisfaction in the realization of his ideas, and therefore also the idea of justice. This is the only way to explain our urge to get involved in some conflict on the street on the side of the one who is obviously being wronged. However, some consider that "Kantian" answer insufficient, so they put a justified complaint to Kožev that he did not answer the questions that he, for his part, provokes: how does it happen that a person can overcome this interactional conflict and overcome it with "Ideas"? How is this Idea, which is the basis of Law, actually possible? By what dialectical "cancellation" does this foundation of rights go beyond the initial situation of the conflict? As he was criticized for equating "state reason" and "social utilitarianism", which, inexorably logical as he is, led him to deny any purely legal nature to the Constitution, since it derives from politics. Etc. Etc.
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