Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Naturrecht: Ursprung; Sophist, Sophisten - Plato; vulgärer, philosophischer Konventionalismus; Hobbes

Kurzinhalt: We must make a distinction between philosophic conventionalism and vulgar conventionalism. Vulgar conventionalism is presented most clearly in "the unjust speech" which Plato intrusted to Thrasymachus ...

Textausschnitt: 114a We must make a distinction between philosophic conventionalism and vulgar conventionalism. Vulgar conventionalism is presented most clearly in "the unjust speech" which Plato intrusted to Thrasymachus and to Glaucon and Adeimantus. According to it, the greatest good, or the most pleasant thing, is to have more than the others or to rule others. But the city and right necessarily impose some restraint on the desire for the greatest pleasure; they are incompatible with the greatest pleasure or with what is the greatest good by nature; they are against nature; they originate in convention. Hobbes would say that the city and right originate in the desire for life and that the desire for life is at least as natural as the desire for ruling others. To this objection the representative of vulgar conventionalism would reply that mere life is misery and that a miserable life is not a life which our nature seeks. The city and right are against nature because they sacrifice the greater good to the lesser good. It is true that the desire for superiority to others can come into its own only within the city. But this merely means that the life according to nature consists in cleverly exploiting the opportunities created by convention or in taking advantage of the good-natured trust which the many put in convention. Such exploitation requires that one be not hampered by sincere respect for city and right. The life according to nature requires such perfect inner freedom from the power of convention as is combined with the appearance of conventional behavior. The appearance of justice combined with actual injustice will lead one to the summit of happiness. One must indeed be clever to hide one's injustice successfully while practicing it on a large scale; but this merely means that the life according to nature is the preserve of a small minority, of the natural elite, of those who are truly men and not born to be slaves. To be more precise, the summit of happiness is the life of the tyrant, of the man who has successfully committed the greatest crime by subordinating the city as a whole to his private good and who can afford to drop the appearance of justice or legality.1 (Fs)

115a Vulgar conventionalism is the vulgarized version of philosophic conventionalism. Philosophic and vulgar conventionalism agree as to this: that by nature everyone seeks only his own good or that it is according to nature that one does not pay any regard to other people's good or that the regard for others arises only out of convention. Yet philosophic conventionalism denies that to pay no regard to others means to desire to have more than others or to be superior to others. Philosophic conventionalism is so far from regarding the desire for superiority as natural that it regards it as vain or opinion-bred. Philosophers, who as such have tasted more solid pleasures than those deriving from wealth, power, and the like, could not possibly identify the life according to nature with the life of the tyrant. Vulgar conventionalism owes its origin to a corruption of philosophic conventionalism. It makes sense to trace that corruption to "the sophists." The sophists may be said to have "published" and therewith debased the conventionalist teaching of pre-Socratic philosophers. (Fs)