Cooperation is more than exchange. In cooperation, the aims of others become the form of one’s own.
Exchange and acting together
The Latin cooperatio means working together, from co-operari, to act jointly. The word alone settles nothing, since even a buyer has to play a part. What matters is what the contributions are aimed at.
In an exchange, each side contributes in order to receive something in return. When you buy something, you hand over money and receive the goods. After that the relationship is essentially over. Both sides have gained, and both have remained who they were. This is the old do ut des: I give so that you give.
It is different when the exchange is meant to last. Anyone who supplies, advises or teaches over years cannot lay down at the outset everything that will one day apply. The parties have to fill the gaps together along the way, and in doing so the other’s aims begin to shape one’s own. The exchange turns into cooperation, whether or not the parties call it that. The example below shows such a transition.
Most accounts of cooperation stop at this model. They speak of mutual benefit, pooled resources and a common goal. None of that is wrong, but it misses the core. The question is whose aims are realised in a cooperation, and what happens to them along the way.
The aims of others as the form of one’s own
Whoever cooperates wants to realise their own aims in a way that requires the actions of others, and in a way that realises the aims of those others as well. The aims of others, not the others themselves, become the means to mine. By the same token they become their limit. My aim takes its shape from the aims of others.
A simple image makes this clear. A nail is what a hammer can drive in, and a hammer is what drives in nails. Change the nails and the hammer changes too. If the nail turns into a screw, the hammer can still achieve something, but the right tools are now a drill, a wall plug and a screwdriver.
In a cooperation this happens all the time. When the aims of others change, mine change as well. Insisting that hammer and nail were once agreed is pointless, at least where it was clear from the outset that the collaboration would last and grow more complex. The development is then already contained in the common will of the original agreement, provided reasonable participants can be assumed.
This feedback has to be made conscious. Otherwise one goes on using means that are no longer the means they once were.
Benefit and freedom
As soon as a relationship goes beyond a one-off exchange, it is no longer only about mutual benefit but also about mutual freedom. Whoever cooperates invests part of their life in a relationship with others, and that relationship changes what they are able to want.
This is not a loss. The freedom to want only oneself remains empty. Anyone who wants to realise something definite, on their own terms, soon finds that this is possible only with others. Everyone frames even their own aims in a language they learned from others.
Along the way, something grows that nobody decided on. Behind the backs of those involved, as it were, a lived common order emerges: habits, expectations, norms that actually hold. Hegel calls this layer ethical life (Sittlichkeit). It is the foundation of every community, from the family to the community of states.
Levels of cooperation
Cooperation takes place at many levels: in the nuclear and the extended family, in the neighbourhood and the municipality, at work and internationally. It also takes place inside organisations, among shareholders, within management, on the board of an association.
Everywhere, the participants’ aims shape one another. What differs is what holds them together when their aims diverge: in the family affection, in a company the contract and the articles, between states international law. What this page says about cooperation holds at each of these levels, on site as well as online.
An example
Language lessons online, one session a week by video call. At first it looks like an exchange: the teacher offers lessons, the learner pays for them.
After a few months it has become something else. The teacher plans each lesson around the mistakes the learner is currently making and the topics that occupy him. He prepares in a way that lets her work with him. Her aim of teaching well has taken its shape from his aim of really speaking the language, and vice versa. There are fixed routines, recurring jokes, a particular way of correcting each other. Nobody agreed on any of this. It grew.
What this means for the law
The law knows the difference. A contract of sale (Section 433 German Civil Code, BGB) governs an exchange. A partnership agreement obliges the partners to promote a common purpose (Section 705(1) BGB). In between lie exchange contracts meant to last, contracts for services and for work, and cooperation agreements. They contain more than performance and counter-performance, and the longer they run, the more so.
For these, the law provides tools that leave room for aims to change. Each party must have regard to the rights and interests of the other (Section 241(2) BGB). What lies in the parties’ common intention is brought out by interpretation (Sections 133 and 157 BGB). If circumstances change seriously in a way nobody expected, adjustment of the contract may be demanded (Section 313 BGB, interference with the basis of the transaction). Continuing obligations can be terminated for good cause (Section 314 BGB). A good cooperation agreement does not rely on these alone. It sets out how the parties will develop their aims together when the nail becomes a screw.