Classical Natural Law and it's Decline

Part One

Talk Given on 19 January 2019 to SPES economics meeting

Dr Joseph Milne

Let me begin by drawing a distinction between what is called classical natural law and modern natural law. This means that the expression ‘natural law’ no longer means what it originally meant, and so when we find the founders of modern thought, such as Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, using the expression, they are not using it in the classical sense. They are, in fact, deliberately refuting and replacing it with a new meaning.

There is a complex history of how this change came about, but we have to pass over that for now. The important thing to grasp is that the classical and the modern conceptions of ‘nature’ are completely different. The most important change is in understanding nature as teleological. The Greek word for nature is physis which means to ‘grow’ or ‘to come into being’. This growing and coming into being of things aims at their full perfection, or full actualisation. The ‘growing towards’ is the ‘telos’ of a thing, the final form it will take when fully actual. This means that by their nature all things are underway in coming to the fullness of their being. For example, the child is growing into an adult, and so if we are to speak of human nature we have to understand it in terms of the fully grown adult. The same holds for all animals and for plants. Their ‘nature’ is to become what they potentially are, and so their nature includes this growing towards completion. This means that if we seek to know human nature we must understand it as reaching out towards its final completion.

This understanding of nature must be applied to the human community, or in Greek terms, to the polis, the city. For Plato and Aristotle the self-ruling city is where human nature may come to its full perfection. The city, the polis, is the ‘nature’ of human community. So the family, the village, and the town all point towards the city as the complete form of the human community. The city is the ‘final end’ of human community, the form that society takes when it comes to completion. Thus we may say that the town, the village and the family are parts of the greater whole that is the city. And it is in anticipation of the coming into being of the city that the family, the village and the town come into being, or derive their being; for it is the whole that creates the parts. According to Aristotle the mark of the complete polis is that it is self-sufficient and self-sustaining.

It follows from this that if we are to understand human nature we must understand citizenship. For the Greek philosophers the ‘citizen’ is the fully ‘adult’ human being. For it is how human beings act together as citizens that opens the way to the full actualisation of human nature. And so we find in Plato that his enquiries into human nature and the virtuous life always involve an enquiry into the nature of the city, and the enquiry into the nature of the city always involves an enquiry into the just city. It is only in the just city that we can discern the nature of the city, for its coming into being takes the form of completion in justice. Justice in the city is like health in the body.

It is worth clearing up a common misunderstanding at this point. Often the city that Plato or Aristotle speak of are taken to be ‘ideal’ cities, and therefore as embodying a political ideology, or suggesting the best regime. But the word ‘ideal’ has no equivalent in Greek, and ‘ideologies’ are inventions of the nineteenth century. This misunderstanding is due to reading Plato or Aristotle as in search of the perfect regime or system of government. But regimes are secondary for Plato and Aristotle. What they are enquiring into is the manner in which virtue may flourish, in the city and in each citizen. Virtue is not a ‘system’, not even a moral code. Rather it is the completed human being, the citizen who is completely balanced and able always to perform the appropriate action. The virtuous citizen is in harmony with their own being and with the human community. The virtuous citizen is then able to act for the common good, or always act in harmony with the whole city. This is not an ‘ideology’, nor is it established through any particular regime. It is the classical understanding of human nature, as citizenship, fully actualised. It is analogous to the physician’s understanding of the fully grown and healthy organism, or to the musician playing their proper part in an orchestra. Neither health nor musicianship are ‘ideals’ or ideologies. So we need to clear that misunderstanding out of Plato and Aristotle. There is no word for ‘ideal’ in Classical Greek.

Because the ‘citizen’ represents the mature human being there is a natural correspondence between human nature and the nature of the city as a whole, as Plato shows most clearly in the Republic. The city is the human being ‘writ large’. Likewise, the individual is a microcosm of the city. This means that neither can be understood independently. As Aristotle remarks, the person who has no need of the city is either a god or a beast, but not human. This is not because a person could not survive in the wild, but because human nature cannot flourish without discourse, without collective enquiry into truth and justice. It is not quite right to say the Greeks defined man as the rational being. They defined man as the being of language, of logos, the speaking being, and therefore of communal reflection and discourse on existence, as Plato says in the Timaeus and Aristotle in the Politics. This communal reflection on existence is the ‘political’ life. The political life is the life concerning justice. It is therefore also the life of law-making. The truly human life is the life of deliberation, of enquiry into truth and justice. It is an activity, not a system. This is the nature of the polis. In the classical view, any city, or any society or people, will approximate this life of deliberation to one degree or another. Likewise, any city that is in disorder will be failing in the life of serious deliberation, and therefore will fall short of its proper end.

From all this we see that ‘nature’ seeks full actualisation of its potential, to fully come into being. At the biological level we can see this clearly enough. Nature strives for the healthy organism best equipped to flourish in its natural environment, the biosphere. But with human nature and society this is not so easily seen or attained. This is because to see it and to attain it requires enquiry and deliberation. Human nature must reflect upon itself in order to become itself. This is a huge leap from the autonomy of biological teleology, requiring deliberate effort, and a capacity to foresee the consequences of undertaking actions. With the rise of mind and thought in the human being there must be decisions on what actions to take, what truths to hold, and how to venture into the future. This is the natural world of society, calling individuals beyond themselves to concern for the whole. It is as much a part of nature as any other, the natural human habitat. It is here that the question of how we ought to live arises, and this is the beginning of understanding natural law in the classical sense. The natural law shows itself when the question is asked about the place of society in the greater order of nature or the cosmos. And what emerges is that the city and the citizen must seek to live in harmony with an eternal order, or an eternal law, beyond mortal life. This eternal law is the law towards which mortal life tends.

At this point we must introduce a concept which has been wholly forgotten in modern enquires into human nature and the nature of society. Human nature, though dwelling in temporal time, is open to the eternal. That is, the human intelligence is aware of eternity and temporality at the same time. And this awareness of eternity allows us to discern the contingent. In terms of our enquiry into natural law, this means that ‘justice’ is seen as at once eternal and contingent. Therefore we can make a distinction between a just action and justice in itself. By analogy, it is like conceiving the perfect circle and seeing any drawn circle as approximating it. The perfect circle is the ‘law’ of any drawn circle. Yet the drawn circle is an instance of the eternal circle.

From this we see that a ‘law’ is not a force imposed upon things. A society ‘seeks’ to be just out of its own nature, striving to approximate eternal justice in contingent circumstances. Here we must put aside the erroneous Enlightenment idea of law as a ‘force’ imposed on things, and even more the doctrine that it is the ‘will of the ruler’. The perfect circle is not a force imposed upon the geometer. Rather the geometer must orient himself towards the perfect circle. In this sense he is ‘obedient’ to the perfect circle, but through his intelligence seeking perfection. Likewise with justice. True justice must be actively sought for it to manifest itself. True justice ‘redeems’ things, brings them back to their proper condition from which, through human weakness, they tend to stray. This is why Plato says that we should not rejoice when wicked people suffer misfortune through their bad deeds. Misfortune is not justice. This will make them worse and lead them into the company of other wicked people, which in turn will harm the city. Rather they should be redeemed through education and restored to their proper human condition. This serves both them in themselves and the common good.

It is the natural telos of the city to strive to bring itself into alignment and conformity with the eternal law, with justice. Although it is its nature to become just, this telos or aiming towards justice comes from within the city itself and is not imposed on it from outside. It is the same with the individual citizen, who must strive to become virtuous since this cannot be imposed from outside. Courage, prudence, temperance and justice cannot be enforced upon a person or a city. These must be admired and honoured if they are to be cultivated. They are rather like latent talents, waiting to be nurtured, and which will flourish only through deliberate exercise.

Since justice does not impose itself upon the individual citizen or society, it must be loved in order for it to be realised. The love of justice is natural, just as the love of being or of truth or beauty are natural. This is why Plato suggests in the Laws that citizens should be educated in such a manner as brings them to love the law and justice. The love of justice blossoms into the love of the common good, which is the natural ground of citizenship. A society will flourish only so far as it seeks the common good, and it is only the common good that assures individual good. Indeed, it will be a society only so far as it seeks the common good. And out of seeking the common good comes friendship. This is why Plato and Aristotle hold friendship in such high esteem. For Plato friendship is the final end of the law, the purpose the law-maker has in view when making a law. For Aristotle friendship in its highest sense is the love of the good in the friend. Such friendship can exist only between good people. Such people are true citizens in the highest sense.

This, then, is the classical understanding of the telos of human nature and of the city, the natural habitat for the human being. The telos is the law of their being, the natural law. It is at once the orientation of their inner order and their orientation to the cosmic order. Likewise, it is simultaneously grounded in the temporal realm of becoming, and the eternal realm of pure being. Human nature stands between these two realms, accountable to itself for its own integrity and yet measured before eternity. And because it dwells in the between, the metaxy, the eternal and the temporal, or the immortal and the mortal, it is always underway, always in question, always called to itself and beyond itself.

We begin to see that ‘natural law’ is not a code that can be laid down. What can be laid down are reasoned regulations which reflect the law, or embody the spirit of the law. These in turn may take the form of conventions. Plato and Aristotle both recognise how customs or conventions unite a city and root it in a history. Examples are weights and measures. In trading these are important and assure just exchange. But different cities will have their own measures, just as they will have their own currencies. These are conventions and may be codified into laws. Now one of the disputes in Plato’s time was over the meaning of the word nomos, the Greek word for ‘law’, which does not quite mean what our word ‘law’ means. As the philosopher Voegelin observes in his discussion of Plato’s Laws: “Plato’s nomos, however, is deeply imbedded in the myth of nature and has an amplitude of meaning that embraces the cosmic order, festival rites, and musical forms”.[1] Some sophists held that all nomoi or ‘laws’ were conventions, and that ‘nature’, or physis lay outside all societal laws. And so the word nomos became ambiguous. Thus ‘law’ and ‘nature’ became divorced from one another. And still modern scholars often translate nomos as convention.

Now this divorce between nature and law prevails in our times, insofar as the modern school of ‘cultural relativism’ claims that the ethical norms of any society are only conventions, and that there is no universal ethics, or universal justice. On the contrary, all conceptions of justice and law are historically relative or conditioned. In its modern formulation this idea goes back to Thomas Hobbes, and with it comes the belief that all laws must be imposed upon a society by a sovereign power, or sovereign will, man being socially lawless by nature, in order to ensure peace between naturally warring citizens. And so emerged the idea that law was the ‘will of the ruler’. One thing that is perfectly clear in Plato and in Aristotle, and in the Stoics also, is that ‘law’ is not anyone’s ‘will’, and this is rather a definition of tyranny than of natural law or the rule of justice.

This is a very tricky knot to untie. Think, for example, how on the one hand many now believe in ethical relativism, or in ‘private morality’, while on the other hand appealing to universal human rights. This kind of contradiction is due to there being no concept of ‘natural order’ belonging to society. It leads to the notion of one morality for private life and another for public life – another notion defended by the Sophists. And also, as Simone Weil astutely observed, the modern notion of ‘human rights’ gives no definition of the ‘human person’ or of human nature. Indeed, she argues that codifying human rights dehumanises the person into a mere ‘legal entity’.

In this tangle of ideas there is little scope for an enquiry into natural law. However, we may observe that this kind of difficulty may arise in any society and any civilisation. There descends a cloud of forgetfulness of universal order and of human nature, and an effort is required to recover it. There is no question that Plato’s political writings are a response to a crisis of this kind in Athens.

END OF FIRST PART

[1] Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume III, p. 271