Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Naturrecht: Ursprung; Philosophie - Natur als Maßstab; Vernunft - Autorität;

Kurzinhalt: ... philosophy appeals from the ancestral to the good, to that which is good intrinsically, to that which is good by nature.

Textausschnitt: 91a The emergence of philosophy radically affects man's attitude toward political things in general and toward laws in particular, because it radically affects his understanding of these things. Originally, the authority par excellence or the root of all authority was the ancestral. Through the discovery of nature, the claim of the ancestral is uprooted; philosophy appeals from the ancestral to the good, to that which is good intrinsically, to that which is good by nature. Yet philosophy uproots the claim of the ancestral in such a manner as to preserve an essential element of it. For, when speaking of nature, the first philosophers meant the first things, i.e., the oldest things; philosophy appeals from the ancestral to something older than the ancestral. Nature is the ancestor of all ancestors or the mother of all mothers. Nature is older than any tradition; hence it is more venerable than any tradition. The view that natural things have a higher dignity than things produced by men is based not on any surreptitious or unconscious borrowings from myth, or on residues of myth, but on the discovery of nature itself. Art presupposes nature, whereas nature does not presuppose art. Man's "creative" abilities, which are more admirable than any of his products, are not themselves produced by man: the genius of Shakespeare was not the work of Shakespeare. Nature supplies not only the materials but also the models for all arts; "the greatest and fairest things" are the work of nature as distinguished from art. By uprooting the authority of the ancestral, philosophy recognizes that nature is the authority.1 (Fs)

92a It would be less misleading, however, to say that, by uprooting authority, philosophy recognizes nature as the standard. For the human faculty that, with the help of sense-perception, discovers nature is reason or understanding, and the relation of reason or understanding to its objects is fundamentally different from that obedience without reasoning why that corresponds to authority proper. By calling nature the highest authority, one would blur the distinction by which philosophy stands or falls, the distinction between reason and authority. By submitting to authority, philosophy, in particular political philosophy, would lose its character; it would degenerate into ideology, i.e., apologetics for a given or emerging social order, or it would undergo a transformation into theology or legal learning. With regard to the situation in the eighteenth century, Charles Beard has said: "The clergy and the monarchists claimed special rights as divine right. The revolutionists resorted to nature."1 What is true of the eighteenth-century revolutionists is true, mutatis mutandis, of all philosophers qua philosophers. The classical philosophers did full justice to the great truth underlying the identification of the good with the ancestral. Yet they could not have laid bare the underlying truth if they had not rejected that identification itself in the first place. Socrates, in particular, was a very conservative man as far as the ultimate practical conclusions of his political philosophy were concerned. Yet Aristophanes pointed to the truth by suggesting that Socrates' fundamental premise could induce a son to beat up his own father, i.e., to repudiate in practice the most natural authority. (Fs) (notabene)