From Universalistic Law to the Law of Uncertainty: On the Decay of the Legal Order's “Totalizing Teleology” as Treated in the Methodological Discussion and its Critique from the Left⁺

Abstract

The practical principle of legal certainty, in the sense of a regularity and calculability of legal practice, has a “deep structure”, which can be found in Kant's attempt at a new foundation of morality through universalistic formality. In both cases the concern is identical: to break with the dispersed local practices used to integrate norm and facts, and to execute a break which would at last give normativity a systematic independence. The existence and continuity of substantial tradition, of particular customs, should be interrupted by the pre-supposition of a law distinguished by its pure, universalistic form. The unified life-world (Lebenswelt) would thus be split into norm and norm-application, thereby founding a new meaning-giving deduction of practice. Action could find normative meaning only through the fracturing of the continuity of life-contexts in the mirror of the generalized other.