Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Machiavelli; Hobbes, Naturgesetz (lex naturalis): nicht mehr Ziel, telos - Anfang, Furcht vor gewaltsamen Tod

Kurzinhalt: The complete basis of natural law must be sought, not in the end of man, but in his beginnings; Death takes the place of the telos.

Textausschnitt: 179a It was the difficulty implied in the substitution of merely political virtue for moral virtue or the difficulty implied in Machiavelli's admiration for the lupine policies of republican Rome1 that induced Hobbes to attempt the restoration of the moral principles of politics, i.e., of natural law, on the plane of Machiavelli's "realism." In making this attempt he was mindful of the fact that man cannot guarantee the actualization of the right social order if he does not have certain or exact or scientific knowledge of both the right social order and the conditions of its actualization. He attempted, therefore, in the first place a rigorous deduction of the natural or moral law. To "avoid the cavils of the skeptics," natural law had to be made independent of any natural "anticipations" and therefore of the consensus gentium.2 The predominant tradition had defined natural law with a view to the end or the perfection of man as a rational and social animal. What Hobbes attempted to do on the basis of Machiavelli's fundamental objection to the Utopian teaching of the tradition, although in opposition to Machiavelli's own solution, was to maintain the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the idea of man's perfection; only if natural law can be deduced from how men actually live, from the most powerful force that actually determines all men, or most men most of the time, can it be effectual or of practical value. The complete basis of natural law must be sought, not in the end of man, but in his beginnings,3 in the prima naturae or, rather, in the primum naturae. What is most powerful in most men most of the time is not reason but passion. Natural law will not be effectual if its principles are distrusted by passion or are not agreeable to passion.4 Natural law must be deduced from the most powerful of all passions. But the most powerful of all passions will be a natural fact, and we are not to assume that there is a natural support for justice or for what is human in man. Or is there a passion, or an object of passion, which is in a sense antinatural, which marks the point of indifference between the natural and the nonnatural, which is, as it were, the status evanescendi of nature and therefore a possible origin for the conquest of nature or for freedom? The most powerful of all passions is the fear of death and, more particularly, the fear of violent death at the hands of others: not nature but "that terrible enemy of nature, death," yet death insofar as man can do something about it, i.e., death insofar as it can be avoided or avenged, supplies the ultimate guidance.5 Death takes the place of the telos. Or, to preserve the ambiguity of Hobbes's thought, let us say that the fear of violent death expresses most forcefully the most powerful and the most fundamental of all natural desires, the initial desire, the desire for self-preservation. (Fs) (notabene)