THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTStions has declared the human rights because ‘‘the recognition of the inherent dignity...
of all members of the human family’’ is the foundation of ‘‘freedom, justice, and peace in
the world.’’ The necessity of recognizing and declaring liberty and justice to be the foun-
dation of human essence is drawn as a conclusion from this very foundation. A declara-
tion, therefore, is the medium of an act of joining together: of a ‘‘General Assembly of
the United Nations’’ or of the ‘‘Representatives of the French People.’’ It corresponds to
a conclusion, a decision, or a determination and serves to join together the essential
ground of what in it is called ‘‘human’’ and the universal ‘‘recognition’’ and juridico-
political enforcement of this ground. Although the UN (in contrast to the French nation-
state) lacks an executive power and has to confine itself to recommendations for the
enactment of its declared principles, the relationship between these principles and their
declaration nevertheless remains the same as it is in the nation-state. This relationship
has the form of a conclusion, no matter whether it presents itself as an executive or merely
an instructive or educational power.
The conclusion is not only the political form in which the representatives of a people,
or even of all peoples,join together, nor is it merely the technical form in which delibera-
tions and negotiations can beconcludedand brought to a consensus. In both the French
and the UN declarations of human rights, a conclusion is, more importantly, the logical
and ontological form in which the essential determination of manis joined togetherwith
its explicit recognition and public enactment. The essence of man establishes itself in the
rights of man, and these rights explicate themselves in their public proclamation, which
in turn presents itself as the first mode of their recognition and of their executive or
educational actualization. In each case, right is conceived as a declaration—and therefore
in the strict sense as acategory—of human essence, and can therefore never appear inde-
pendently of its categorical exhibition and of its conclusive connection with this human
essence. In this sense, the UN declaration is no less instructive than the Declaration of
- If the latter once again makes present what has always been evident, even though it
has been forgotten, denied, and treated with contempt, the UN General Assembly declares
that the ‘‘recognition’’ of human dignity—of freedom, in other words—is the ‘‘founda-
tion of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.’’ If this sentence, the first in the declara-
tion, is to be more than a trivial tautology, it can only be understood as claiming that the
cognitive grasping of human essence is the condition for its political realization, and
that the declaration is the connection—theconclusio—between the recognition and the
actualization of human liberty and justice. But the possibility of such a cognitive-political
conclusion, and therefore also the possibility of a declaration, presents itself only once the
act of recognition grasps human essenceas such, and only once the act of actualization
transforms a preexisting foundation into a verifiable fact. The declarative ‘‘recognition’’
of the dignity of the human individual must therefore itself be an act of dignity. It has to
enact its own grounding and must present an ontological tautology—an ontotautology—
rather than a merely trivial one. Man unveils, explicates, and joins himself with himself
PAGE 673673.................16224$ CH34 10-13-06 12:37:37 PS