Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Naturrecht: Ursprung; Natur (unbekannt in AT) - Philosophie;

Kurzinhalt: The idea of natural right must be unknown as long as the idea of nature is unknown. The discovery of nature is the work of philosophy.

Textausschnitt: 81a TO UNDERSTAND the problem of natural right, one must start, not from the "scientific" understanding of political things but from their "natural" understanding, i.e., from the way in which they present themselves in political life, in action, when they are our business, when we have to make decisions. This does not mean that political life necessarily knows of natural right. Natural right had to be discovered, and there was political life prior to that discovery. It means merely that political life in all its forms necessarily points toward natural right as an inevitable problem. Awareness of this problem is not older than political science but coeval with it. Hence a political life that does not know of the idea of natural right is necessarily unaware of the possibility of political science and, indeed, of the possibility of science as such, just as a political life that is aware of the possibility of science necessarily knows natural right as a problem. (Fs)

81b The idea of natural right must be unknown as long as the idea of nature is unknown. The discovery of nature is the work of philosophy. Where there is no philosophy, there is no knowledge of natural right as such. The Old Testament, whose basic premise may be said to be the implicit rejection of philosophy, does not know "nature": the Hebrew term for "nature" is unknown to the Hebrew Bible. It goes without saying that "heaven and earth," for example, is not the same thing as "nature." There is, then, no knowledge of natural right as such in the Old Testament. The discovery of nature necessarily precedes the discovery of natural right. Philosophy is older than political philosophy. (Fs) (notabene)

82a Philosophy is the quest for the "principles" of all things, and this means primarily the quest for the "beginnings" of all things or for "the first things." In this, philosophy is at one with myth. But the philosophos ("lover of wisdom") is not identical with the philomythos ("lover of myth"). Aristotle calls the first philosophers simply "men who discoursed on nature" and distinguishes them from the men who preceded them and "who discoursed on gods."1 Philosophy as distinguished from myth came into being when nature was discovered, or the first philosopher was the first man who discovered nature. The whole history of philosophy is nothing but the record of the ever repeated attempts to grasp fully what was implied in that crucial discovery which was made by some Greek twenty-six hundred years ago or before. To understand the meaning of that discovery in however provisional a manner, one must return from the idea of nature to its prephilo-sophic equivalent. (Fs)