Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Konventionalismus - Meinung - Hedonismus (das Gute = das Angenehme); Sokrates, klassisches Naturrecht: Kritik an Hedonismus (Ordnung der Neigungen)

Kurzinhalt: The thesis of the classics is that the good is essentially different from the pleasant, that the good is more fundamental than the pleasant ... The good life is the life that is in accordance with the natural order of man's being, ...

Textausschnitt: 126a Conventionalism disregards the understanding embodied in opinion and appeals from opinion to nature. For this reason, to say nothing of others, Socrates and his successors were forced to prove the existence of natural right on the ground chosen by conventionalism. They had to prove it by appeal to the "facts" as distinguished from the "speeches."1 As will appear presently, this seemingly more direct appeal to being merely confirms the fundamental Socratic thesis. (Fs)

126b The basic premise of conventionalism appeared to be the identification of the good with the pleasant. Accordingly, the basic part of the classic natural right teaching is the critique of hedonism. The thesis of the classics is that the good is essentially different from the pleasant, that the good is more fundamental than the pleasant. The most common pleasures are connected with the satisfaction of wants; the wants precede the pleasures; the wants supply, as it were, the channels within which pleasure can move; they determine what can possibly be pleasant. The primary fact is not pleasure, or the desire for pleasure, but rather the wants and the striving for their satisfaction. It is the variety of wants that accounts for the variety of pleasures; the difference of kinds of pleasures cannot be understood in terms of pleasure but only by reference to the wants which make possible the various kinds of pleasures. The different kinds of wants are not a bundle of urges; there is a natural order of the wants. Different kinds of beings seek or enjoy different kinds of pleasure: the pleasures of an ass differ from the pleasures of a human being. The order of the wants of a being points back to the natural constitution, to the What, of the being concerned; it is that constitution which determines the order, the hierarchy, of the various wants or of the various inclinations of a being. To the specific constitution there corresponds a specific operation, a specific work. A being is good, it is "in order," if it does its proper work well. Hence man will be good if he does well the proper work of man, the work corresponding to the nature of man and required by it. To determine what is by nature good for man or the natural human good, one must determine what the nature of man, or man's natural constitution, is. It is the hierarchic order of man's natural constitution which supplies the basis for natural right as the classics understood it. In one way or another everyone distinguishes between the body and the soul; and everyone can be forced to admit that he cannot, without contradicting himself, deny that the soul stands higher than the body. That which distinguishes the human soul from the souls of the brutes, that which distinguishes man from the brutes, is speech or reason or understanding. Therefore, the proper work of man consists in living thoughtfully, in understanding, and in thoughtful action. The good life is the life that is in accordance with the natural order of man's being, the life that flows from a well-ordered or healthy soul. The good life simply, is the life in which the requirements of man's natural inclinations are fulfilled in the proper order to the highest possible degree, the life of a man who is awake to the highest possible degree, the life of a man in whose soul nothing lies waste. The good life is the perfection of man's nature. It is the life according to nature. One may therefore call the rules circumscribing the general character of the good life "the natural law." The life according to nature is the life of human excellence or virtue, the life of a "high-class person," and not the life of pleasure as pleasure.1 (Fs)

128a The thesis that the life according to nature is the life of human excellence can be defended on hedonistic grounds. Yet the classics protested against this manner of understanding the good life. For, from the point of view of hedonism, nobility of character is good because it is conducive to a life of pleasure or even indispensable for it: nobility of character is the handmaid of pleasure; it is not good for its own sake. According to the classics, this interpretation distorts the phenomena as they are known from experience to every unbiased and competent, i.e., not morally obtuse, man. We admire excellence without any regard to our pleasures or to our benefits. No one understands by a good man or man of excellence a man who leads a pleasant life. We distinguish between better and worse men. The difference between them is indeed reflected in the difference in the kinds of pleasure which they prefer. But one cannot understand this difference in the level of pleasures in terms of pleasure; for that level is determined not by pleasure but by the rank of human beings. We know that it is a vulgar error to identify the man of excellence with one's benefactor. We admire, for example, a strategic genius at the head of the victorious army of our enemies. There are things which are admirable, or noble, by nature, intrinsically. It is characteristic of all or most of them that they contain no reference to one's selfish interests or that they imply a freedom from calculation. The various human things which are by nature noble or admirable are essentially the parts of human nobility in its completion, or are related to it; they all point toward the well-ordered soul, incomparably the most admirable human phenomenon. The phenomenon of admiration of human excellence cannot be explained on hedonistic or utilitarian grounds, except by means of ad hoc hypotheses. These hypotheses lead to the assertion that all admiration is, at best, a kind of telescoped calculation of benefits for ourselves. They are the outcome of a materialistic or crypto-materialistic view, which forces its holders to understand the higher as nothing but the effect of the lower, or which prevents them from considering the possibility that there are phenomena which are simply irreducible to their conditions, that there are phenomena that form a class by themselves. The hypotheses in question are not conceived in the spirit of an empirical science of man.1 (Fs)