The Classical Vision of Man’s Place in Nature

Lecture given at Temenos Academy 2013
Joseph Milne

To speak of man’s place in nature has become very difficult in our age, and some contemporary thinkers would suggest it is even absurd. Philosophers are saying we are past the age of ‘grand questions’ and should confine ourselves to more modest ones. Physicists are asserting that the universe is nothing more than a complex system of entities and laws, and there is no specific reason for man to exist in such a universe. Ethicists are claiming there is no ground in Nature for ‘moral values’ and that any kind of ethics is at best pragmatic and relative, and so each individual must devise an ethic based on their own private values and ‘life-style’. Religion is now openly dismissed as mere ‘personal belief’ and so has no further place in the public realm.

These ideas we hear all the time. They are largely taken as given truths in the popular media. They are spoken in bland complacency by leading intellectuals and artists, as though they had the certainly of Euclidean axioms.

Nevertheless, and despite this easy complacency, there remains an underlying perplexity before the ‘grand questions’ the philosophers once asked. To live in a mathematically abstracted universe, as much modern physics proposes, no matter how sophisticated such thought may be, throws no light anywhere, even though we are meant to stand in stupid amazement before such incomprehensible theory. The latest theories and claims of the physicists do not touch the place where our human questions of existence arise from. It is as if the physicists are trying to change the subject, or to replace the question of meaning with the question of mechanical history.

It is the same with the dismissal of the grand questions. The most intricate postmodern torture of words that make everything substantial seem to disappear also do not touch on the place where our human philosophical questions arise. All the noise of such convoluted thought has no real concern for anything. Reality and truth are regarded as indifferent, or merely material to manipulate in intellectual entertainment. Thought about things is no longer connected with things, and things no longer prompt thought. We can trace this position back to the first pages of Hobbes’ Leviathan, where he describes nature and man as nothing else than artificial automata with strings and wheels and joints signifying nothing else than mere motion. (Leviathan, Introduction)

So it is also with ethics. It is claimed that all moral values are relative and that each of us is free to elect our own moral position, and that nobody has the right to say how others ought to conduct themselves. Yet at the same time we hear the endless contentious demands for ‘human rights’, under the name of which we may make any kind of arbitrary claims upon society and our fellow citizens. Even so, amid this moral confusion that especially characterises our time, there remains an intuitive knowledge that justice and goodness are not relative or arbitrary or merely rights to be claimed. So, again, the climate of ethical debate does not touch the place where our ethical concern really arises from.

My point here is not to condemn our modern situation. Plenty of people are busy enough doing that. My point is to bring to the fore the profound disconnect between the prevailing ways of thinking and our actual sense of being and truth. For example, we naturally desire to know the meaning of existence. We sense there is an underlying meaning, yet we cannot quite get to it. The prevailing view of physics keeps us disconnected from any meaning that is there. And so it is with the prevailing moral relativism, and the dismissal of any religious significance to the universe or the life of man. The only ‘grand vision’ acceptable is that of reductive mechanism, such as Hobbes proposes in his Leviathan, and this lies at the opposite pole of any sense of connection with the life, truth, goodness or meaning of things. Western thought seems to have got stuck here for the last three hundred years, despite the many claims for new discoveries and advancement.

This situation sets us apart from the ancient Greek philosophers in a very profound way. This is why we find it hard to read them on their own terms. A good example is the persistent misreading of Plato’s political thought. It is assumed the Republic is a manifesto for an ideal society. Almost every philosophy undergraduate is introduced to Plato in this way. Not only is his Republic presented as a manifesto for an ideal society, it is also presented as a model of absolute authoritarian tyranny. At the same time, Plato’s Laws, which is in a certain sense a practical politics, is hardly read at all. Yet the Republic is not a manifesto. It is a gradual probing into the question of the nature of justice, not in order to arrive at a definition, but in order to praise it rightly and to see why it offers the best path for man to his natural place in Nature, where alone human nature itself may be fulfilled. In short, Plato’s Republic arises from a searching perplexity about whether the just life is the best life. And it asks this in terms of whether the just society is the best society for man. It is not, in any postmodern sense, perplexed about whether there is such a thing as justice. Rather, it asks if justice is to be praised above anything else as the proper way of life for man.

Plato, and also Aristotle, ask: what is the best life for man to live, or for society to live. They both find this question is essentially a moral question. The best life for man is the virtuous life. Only the virtuous life is the life of freedom, and only the free person can be virtuous. To be free is to be a citizen, a participant in the life that is human and belongs to man, and which distinguishes man from the other species. Yet this life, which is the proper life of man, is not simply given by nature to man. Nature gives to man a body and senses and faculties and the potential to become fully human, but this potential may be actualized only through man taking responsibility for his existence. Here is where man is distinct from the other creatures in nature, which actualize spontaneously, as the acorn grows into the oak. For the Greek philosophers ‘nature’, or physis, is the spontaneous birth and growth of things to their fullness, each according to its proper place within the whole order of things. This whole order of things is itself a manifestation of justice. It is ‘cosmos’ rather than ‘chaos’. Nature and justice are seen to belong inextricably together.

But man does not find his place in nature spontaneously, or indeed know his own nature spontaneously. Unlike the other animals, who live by natural instinct and fit into their natural environments, man does not live by natural instinct and fit into his natural environment. Rather man must live through his intelligence and build his habitat within the world. The human organism is defenceless before the elements and is compelled to clothe itself and make a shelter for itself. In this sense man is obliged to distinguish himself from the ‘womb of nature’ and to call upon his own resources or capacities in order to live within nature. For the Greek philosophers this peculiar circumstance of being compelled to discover resources within himself is the key both to man’s imprisonment in necessity and to his call to freedom. So long as man must labour to maintain his physical existence, or so long as he lets himself be ruled by mere necessity, he is not yet human but rather still living as an animal.

Yet it is possible to conceive of human life and the life of society as entirely ruled by necessity, which is to say, ruled entirely by the physical needs that arise because of man’s defencelessness and vulnerability before nature. The greater part of modern economic theory is based upon this view of man which goes back to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. From this has arisen the acceptance of the consumer society, where nature is no longer seen as a just and harmonious order, but merely as ‘natural resources’ for man to set at his disposal and use up. The consumer society, a society governed entirely by trade and commerce, is not regarded as a society at all in the view of Plato or Aristotle. At best it is a kind of pre-society, a society ruled only by material necessity and material appetites, and therefore not yet properly human. Plato and Aristotle see the tendency towards commerce and money-making as signs of the decline or degeneracy.

This dismissal of wealth creation and exchange of goods for money that we find in Plato and Aristotle is probably one of the most unexpected things the modern reader comes upon. Yet Aristotle dismisses wealth creation early in his Politics, regarding traders as mere slaves, and usurers as the lowest type of human beings. Likewise in Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger proposes that when founding their new city, Magnesia, it should be situated far from the coast because dwelling by the sea will encourage ship building and foreign trade, or invite invasions. Plato was quite aware of the Persian trading empire and the vast wealth that could be made through commerce. Yet he sees these as harmful to the proper life of man and as threats to the survival of a city state founded on justice and the virtuous life.

Neither Plato nor Aristotle are admirers of wealth. This is not because they regard gathering wealth as wicked in itself, but rather because it distracts from the proper life of man and binds him to necessity, to the mere sustaining of life for no end beyond sustaining it. To them such a life is that of animals. The animals live as a species, and therefore sustain their life for the sake of the species. But the human being is not subsumed to the necessity of the species. Rather each person has a life of their own, and therefore a life proper to a free being. That is to say, each man may perfect himself and his own life, and indeed is responsible for his own life before nature and the gods.

Here is a key to the Greek understanding of the proper life of man, and therefore his place within the natural order. Man is responsible for himself, and therefore responsible before the truth of things, or before the gods. This responsibility does not lie in commanding nature, in drawing wealth from nature, or in subduing it to his will. The Baconian idea of man as the master of nature, as the exploiter and thief of her secrets, is, from the Greek perspective, the embodiment of human slavery, of man chained to his desires and to physical necessity. It leaves human nature itself unperfected, unreflective and barren, a mere instrument of the exploitation of nature. In the modern sense, as expanded through the industrial revolution, it reduces man to a mere consumer of goods, as wholly bound to things external to himself, trapped in an endless chain of remaking consumables. Man as master of nature, as the age of reason imagined him, is still man as bound to necessity. The free man, for Plato and Aristotle, is neither a slave nor a master. Rather he is able to act according to truth and justice.

Living as we do in the modern industrial society it is quite challenging to see the proper life of society from the Greek perspective. We can see, at the very least, that man as mere consumer abuses the earth, by treating it as a mere resource to be called upon at will, with no life belonging to itself. The conception of the earth as nothing more than a resource for man is perhaps as far from the Greek classical understanding of nature as could be, and indeed from any ancient or pre-modern view of nature. In the Laws, Plato sees those who live in this ignoble manner as having a brief moment of glory to be followed by natures’ justice in wiping them out (Laws 716c onwards). A city state founded on merchandising and the gathering wealth cannot endure. The reason it will not endure is because the way of life it establishes for its citizens leaves them defenceless against the vices that will eventually poison the concord of the citizens. This manifests through partisan laws being enacted, dividing one part of the state against another. According to Plato the greatest danger for any society arises from it being divided against itself, a danger far greater than any external threat, but which also leaves it vulnerable to external threat. The typical way in which it divides against itself is through one party’s interests being placed above another’s and enacted through law. The legalisation of vice, or in modern language, of legalization self-interest, is the surest sign of a state in decline, because it sets private desire at variance with the public good.

A question Plato pursues in the Laws is, which laws should a state enact which will enable it to endure a long time. This question is quite foreign to how our modern age thinks about law. Our age gets endlessly entangled in legal complexities or debates over human rights behind which it is very hard to see any clear conception of law itself, or of law grounded in a justice beyond various conflicting interests. So our age asks what laws might best serve our immediate interests. It is becoming regarded as a kind of legal pragmatism. This means it is endlessly confronted with new questions for which it is not prepared. This is especially the case with the laws enacted by the European Community. Strictly speaking, these are ‘rules’ rather than laws in the classical sense, and rules arise from a different place than real laws.

So Plato’s question, which laws should a state enact which will enable it to endure for a long time, over many generations, springs from a ground hard for our age to stand in. It asks, what is the proper aim or purpose of law making? To answer such a question requires a quality or ability specific only to man, the capacity of foresight. To see which laws are needed and what consequences any law may have over a long time is the capacity that Aristotle names as the essential capacity of the politician. Indeed, it is the capacity that distinguishes the free citizen from what Aristotle calls the ‘natural slave’, the person lacking foresight. Only a mind free from the ties of necessity, or the endless stream of appetites, and fearless before truth and justice can have such foresight. In other words, only the virtuous man can see the true nature of law, its proper end, and know the art of law-making. Such a person is a human being in the real sense of being human.

If there are laws which, if enacted, would enable a society to flourish and endure for generations, this suggests that there is a correspondence of some kind between the nature of human society and law, or between human nature itself and law. Plato often likens the law-maker to the physician, one bringing health to the body and one to the state, and this suggests that human society is in some sense part of nature, even though of human devising. Aristotle is explicit in seeing the city state as natural, as part of nature, an insight forcefully opposed by the economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Aristotle man is the ‘political being’. If the laws that would enable a society to endure are in some sense natural to society, just as healthy living is natural to the body, it is but a small step to suppose that human society is natural to Mother Earth herself and has a place in the order of the whole universe, just as every other part of nature does.

There is an obvious connection between Aristotle’s understanding of human foresight and Plato’s concern for laws that would enable a city state to endure for a long time. The least that could be said of any such laws, if they were enacted, is that there would be nothing in them likely to produce a bad effect, or have a seed of future corruption in them – like the unwelcome side-effects of some medicines. A good law will be conducive only of a good end. Such a good end must be for the good of the whole society and for the individual simultaneously. Its goodness or rightness or justice must be perceived to be good on all grounds, by lawmakers and citizens alike.

Plato asks, what is the good end that all laws should seek? His answer is very Greek: it is friendship between all citizens. It is an answer far from the demands that our age makes upon law. In our times law is increasingly being regarded as a means of redress of wrongs, or even of retribution. In Plato’s view laws are not for the sake of overcoming wrongs or injustices, but rather for the sake of fostering individual virtue and the common good, and in such a way that citizens grow up to love the law as something beautiful and pure and good in itself. A good society is a society that loves good law. Indeed, the love of good law is a characteristic quality that makes man a citizen, a political being, a human being, as distinct from an animal or a slave. Likewise, only the virtuous person can know friendship, which springs from the common love of the true and the good and the capacity to reflect and discourse upon them.

We find friendship highly praised by the Greeks and also by the Romans, for example by Cicero who regarded it as a greater gift than wisdom. It is clear that friendship was understood to be more than the delights of companionship or comradeship. To the classical mind friendship is a good in itself, an end in itself, beyond any mutual advantage or utility. Friendship lies above the realm of necessity. It is good precisely because it is not useful. Friendship, as the aim of law-making, gives us an example of the civilized life proper to man that transcends necessity. As a mark of true citizenship it belongs to man’s public life, his life in the world at large beyond the confines of the home, which is man’s private life. Friendship springs from no ties or uses, but from the common nature of man as man in the noblest sense.

It perhaps seems curious that friendship should be regarded as part of man’s public life. But it may be, as C S Lewis suggests, that modern man has forgotten the nature of friendship. But for Plato it is perfectly clear why it belongs to the public realm, because in friendship the defining feature of human nature is most manifest and most abundantly flourishes: man as the being of language. Aristotle likewise defines man as the speaking being, above being a rational or social species. It is through speech that man reveals himself to the world and participates in the world. Speech, or language, connects the inner life of the soul with the world at large, situating man within the cosmos. Speech articulates man’s reflection upon the truth of things, and so discourse upon the truth of things is the most natural occupation of man as man. It is precisely for this reason that Plato regards philosophy as the highest occupation of man, and the calling to philosophical reflection proper to his nature. Poetry likewise arises from this reflection on the truth of things and in affirming what is praiseworthy.

Yet, no matter how many ways Plato asserts that the virtuous and the philosophical life is the best and most human life, there remains a huge difficulty in establishing it, not only for the individual but even more so for a society. One might see all of Plato’s dialogues as ways of confronting this great difficulty. Each dialogue attempts to find a way of passing over from one kind of understanding to another. And this is precisely what Plato does in his dialogues about politics and law or justice. In each instance there is a ‘common sense’ given solution to questions which have to be overturned in order to pass over to a new understanding. Each dialogues presents us with a ‘threshold’ into a transformation of understanding. In terms of how a city state should be established that will endure, the Laws demands that human concern be lifted from the mere meeting of necessity – of concern for wealth and property and comfort and security – to the life of virtue and philosophical reflection. Or, in other words, from temporal things to eternal things. It is because extremes of wealth and poverty prevent or obstruct the cultivation of the virtuous and philosophical life that they are harmful.

This demand to pass over the threshold from temporal to eternal things springs from human nature itself. For Plato man is the mortal being who is open to the vision of the eternal. Unique among creatures, his faculties are open to everything that is. Thus Aristotle understands the mind as oriented towards the truth of things. It need not go there, but nevertheless it is by nature open and tends in that direction, and so is potentially the knowledge of all things. Although an individual need not go there, for Aristotle a man fails himself by not going there, or not aspiring to go there. Likewise with a society in Plato’s view. If it does not aspire to the highest it will inevitably adopt some lesser aim and eventually decline through division within itself.

One very obvious way in which this threshold situation of man may be seen is where the different parts of human nature are in conflict with one another. In the Laws Plato portrays man as at war within himself between the three elements of reason, desire and spiritedness. Therefore the first aim of education is to establish peace and friendship within the individual between these aspects. It is only then that he becomes an ‘individual’, or ‘undivided’. This is accomplished primarily through the cultivation of the virtues of courage and prudence, which for Plato is the purpose of education. The cardinal virtues are, in Greek philosophy, the ordering actions of the soul. They are not moral codes or rules, but capacities or skills, like musicianship or oratory. Only the virtuous person has rule over himself. The virtues bring concord between the different aspects of human nature, and the attainment of this concord is possible only through deliberate cultivation and skill. It is the same with the city state. A society ruled by the endless stream of desires for pleasures or possessions is essentially unstable and at variance with itself, or the individual is at variance with the state. The sum of conflicting self-interests does not add up to a common concord as Adam Smith proposes, or the happiness of the greatest number as Bentham proposes.

This concord of the soul, or the life of the individual, may then reach out to the apprehension of the concord of the cosmos, of the heavens, or of the gods. Or it may happen in reverse. The apprehension of cosmic concord, or the order of the heavens, or of the justice of the gods brings about concord of the soul, as Plato suggests in the Timaeus. Here is the greatest threshold of all, where mortal human nature conforms itself to the eternal order of the heavens and dwells, as it were, in the realm of the gods. It is in this sense that the Stoics, much later, understood the cosmos as the ‘city of man and the gods’. The proper dwelling place of mortal man is in the whole of nature or the universe. In this way of dwelling he transcends not only necessity but also the limit of his mortality. He becomes the mortal who abides with the immortals.

Here the frailty or weakness of the human species is balanced by its relation to the great order of the universe. Although frail and defenceless compared to many other species, and without a natural environment such as other species have which sustains and protects them, the human being alone builds a dwelling from the gifts of nature which is at once fabricated and yet natural, and his dwelling places man within the cosmos as a whole. Man builds his home consciously under the stars and the sanctity of the gods.

For man to situate himself thus within nature, through building his dwelling place under the stars and before the gods, is to pass the first threshold that makes man human. As has often been noted by the philosophers, through building his dwelling out of his thought and craft, man adopts the ‘world’ as his home, as distinct from the other species who dwell only in an environment. Building in this sense does not treat nature as a mere resource. Rather man adapts himself to nature and cultivates it. We recall that in Genesis man is set in Eden to tend the garden, not master or subdue it.

The making of the human dwelling place has two aspects: setting on land and laws. Thus when Plato considers the building of Magnesia in the Laws, he addresses the question of location and lawmaking simultaneously. The city state thus has two kinds of boundaries, one in stone and one in speech. The physical setting aims to secure physical benefits and protection, while the law aims to secure the harmony of the community and the soul. For Plato the architect and the lawmaker are both ‘craftsman’, builders of the city, and both set the city under the heavens and under the gods. The city forms itself around two centres, the temple and the agora – the temple where the gods are honoured, and the agora where speech is honoured. For Plato it is in these two centres that the way of life most proper to man takes place. The city exists in order that the gods be praised and honoured and that true speech may manifest or articulate enquiry into the truth of things. It is in order that the citizen might pass over the threshold of necessity that the temple and the agora are founded and the laws are instituted. The city state has a purpose beyond its material benefits or utility, yet this purpose can never be assured, either by the architect or the lawmaker. It can arise only when the citizens desire and strive for what is good, true or beautiful for its own sake.

Paradoxically, for Plato and Aristotle man is free to be free only if he elects to be free. His freedom is not a given, and is even less is it a right in the modern sense. This is because his freedom lies not in arbitrary acts of will or self-determination, but in the love of the good, the true and the beautiful – in the ‘divine’ attributes of the eternal. To put that another way, it belongs to man to contemplate the eternal wisdom manifest in the order of the universe, and this is possible only so far as man brings about order in his own soul and actions. Man is, as it were, open to the truth of things only so far as his being is harmonious and his actions just and prudent. Man attains his full stature through transcending himself and becoming a mirror in which the truth of things is reflected and brought into speech. From this all the arts arise and have their proper place.

Yet in order to receive and to be witness to the order and truth of things, he must himself manifest his own being through speech and virtuous action before his fellow citizens (see Arendt, The Human Condition (1998) p. 199). It is through making himself visible and admirable to men that the ancient virtues of glory and fame have their origin. We still see glimpses of this view of citizenship in Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman plays, where immortal fame is the highest achievement, and its contrary, shame and loss of reputation the greatest tragedy.

A distinguishing feature of the life that is proper to man is that it consists of acts that are meaningful in themselves, and which have no end beyond themselves. Thus Aristotle asks, what is the work proper to man as man (Nicomachean Ethics 1097b). He observes that there are different works that belong to different individuals, such as carpentry or leather working, yet he wonders what is the work that belongs to the human being as such. It seems that this is the work of reason and virtue, the life of the soul. But more than this, for man there is a choice between doing action, and doing action well. For example, it is the work of the harpist to play the harp, but of the serious harpist to play well and beautifully. This distinguishes the life proper to man, to live well and beautifully, so that the work done and the manner in which it is done are both final ends in themselves. So again we find a threshold that human living must pass over for it to become properly human, and to transcend any utilitarian usefulness.

If the life of the soul is the proper life of man, as Plato and Aristotle both agree, how then does this place human life within nature as a whole? How does this place the polis within nature as a whole?

For Plato this question can be answered only if the nature and origin of the gods is understood correctly. In Book X of the Laws the Athenian stranger argues that man goes astray most dangerously, not through disbelief in the gods or atheism, but in the belief that the gods and the divine intelligence in things come into being after the bodily or physical existence of things. In other words, the opinion that the physical elements are the causes of the cosmos. On the contrary, Plato argues that the nature of the universe is perceived rightly only when ‘soul’ or ‘divinity’ or ‘intelligence’ are seen to be the cause and origin of the cosmos, and that the cosmic order remains governed by intelligence or soul.

The same is said of the human being: the soul exists prior to the body as its cause and ruler. Without seeing in this way, man can neither know the universe nor himself as they really are. But once the highest is seen to exist prior to the lowest, or the rational prior to the irrational, then the realm from which good laws may be apprehended which will bring human life into harmony with nature may be recognised and articulated. This is where the lawmaker draws his art from. And this is why the polis, or a society, is founded first in law, in speech, in intelligence, in reason, prior to being built from stone.