Natural law concepts from Classical to Postmodern
This is part two of a five-part exploration of natural law. Links to all five parts will be at the beginning of part one.
Different cultures at different times and places have a different conception of what it means to be human, what values are important, and how society should be shaped. These ideas have been referred to as the “social imaginary” of a society. A social imaginary is not a reasoned position but usually taken for granted and accepted uncritically, as if it were the air we breathe. The social imaginary can develop gradually and organically over long periods of time, or it can be imposed on a society in much shorter periods of time, historically speaking. Natural law theories are developed by applying moral reasoning to these foundational beliefs about the nature of humanity.
As the social imaginary changes, so will the resulting idea of natural law. The natural law of one society will feel very natural within the society, but it can feel very foreign to a different society with a different social imaginary. Below, I will very briefly sketch out three different views of natural law from different times and places. This is more of a useful stereotype than a nuanced study, just to illustrate some concepts.
Classical Greek and Roman society was hierarchical, ordered, and structured into different categories and classes of varying moral importance, patterned after the hierarchical spheres of increasing purity in Aristotelian physics. Worship was a clan-centered affair, not based on individual salvation like Christianity. The polis is what mattered, individuals less so. Good was synonymous with beauty, strength, glory, and order like they gods they worshipped. Natural law for the classical period tended toward bringing out these elevated goals for the state and its leaders, and putting everyone in their proper place in the ordered hierarchy. The word “nature” in Greek had an aspirational character to it, so that natural law meant the precepts that would if followed lead to this ideal state of humanity, as the Greeks would have seen it.
The Christian social imaginary was fundamentally egalitarian, unlike classical society. Each individual with an immortal soul has value over that of the state. Good means individual Christian morality, leading to individual salvation. The Christian concept of natural law was aspirational, ultimately tending toward a society in which individuals and families would be free to lead individual moral lives unconstrained by the state except to rein in excesses of unacceptable behavior. Individual morality encompasses both external behavioral codes like the Ten Commandments, but also the more internalized higher law of the Sermon on the Mount (e.g. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”).
A third natural law concept that is influential today (though maybe not often thought of as such) comes from the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzschian / Heideggerian natural law is interesting because it was not organically derived from the social imaginary of the surrounding culture, but was actively conceived as a reaction against the Christian Western culture of the time. But now this reaction and associated natural law theory has essentially become the prevailing social imaginary of today. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger after him drew from classical understanding and classical examples as they developed their ideas, but the nature they arrived at was something new — deliberately antithetical to Christianity, but also a significant departure from the classical natural law.
Rather than aspiring to a divine nature, Nietzschian / Heideggerian natural law assumes that man’s true nature was the primeval state he must have existed in before the oppressive forces of civilization and religion deprived him of it. Humanity’s true nature and most fulfilled state is to be more like the animals we evolved from, unconstrained by religion and not over-thought by reason. This is authentic being for Heidegger, the Dionysian man or Ubermensch for Nietzsche. There is no objective good and evil, but the strong will identify his own values toward which to exert his will to power, reshaping himself and society aesthetically.
Contemporary popular culture (can we call it the “pop culture natural law”?) typically follows the Heideggerian natural law of authenticity, while maintaining the Christian value of equality and a partial return to the classical prioritization of the collective over the individual. In the place religion held in elucidating the classical and Christian natural law, the new natural law looks to evolution, psychology, and evolutionary psychology for guidance on the meaning of authentic human experience.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is careful to distinguish between two kinds of natural law theory. One is the idea of an objective set of moral principles for the improvement of humanity. The second is “the claim that standards of morality are in some sense derived from, or entailed by, the nature of the world and the nature of human beings.” The first type of natural law tends to look upward toward our natural potential and purpose. Christian natural law and (for the most part) Classical natural law look toward the divine as the natural telos of humanity and an elevated model for an ideal human existence. The difference between Christian and Classical natural law reflects the difference between God and the gods.
On the other hand, the Heideggerian natural law is of the second type — a completely different category of natural law theory that looks not to man’s higher potential and divine nature but to man’s baser instincts and animal nature. The Heideggerian natural law today has no god to look up to. Instead, it looks down to the apes it assumes we evolved from. The aspirational and the base natural law rely on two very different definitions of “nature” and arrive at fundamentally different conceptions of natural law that should not be conflated.
Link to part three
