Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Naturrecht: Sokratisch-Platonisch-Stoisch; Transformation des Guten aus Natur zum politisch Guten; Kompromiss: Weisheit - Dummheit; Unterscheidung: erstes, zweites Naturrecht

Kurzinhalt: Civil life requires a fundamental compromise between wisdom and folly, and this means a compromise between the natural right that is discerned by reason or understanding and the right that is based on opinion alone.

Textausschnitt: 151a This solution to the problem of justice obviously transcends the limits of political life.1 It implies that the justice which is possible within the city, can be only imperfect or cannot be unquestionably good. There are still other reasons which force men to seek beyond the political sphere for perfect justice or, more generally, for the life that is truly according to nature. It is not possible here to do more than barely to indicate these reasons. In the first place, the wise do not desire to rule; they must therefore be compelled to rule. They must be compelled because their whole life is devoted to the pursuit of something which is absolutely higher in dignity than any human things-the unchangeable truth. And it appears to be against nature that the lower should be preferred to the higher. If striving for knowledge of the eternal truth is the ultimate end of man, justice and moral virtue in general can be fully legitimated only by the fact that they are required for the sake of that ultimate end or that they are conditions of the philosophic life. From this point of view the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated human being. It thus becomes a question whether the moral or just man who is not a philosopher is simply superior to the nonphilosophic "erotic" man. It likewise becomes a question whether justice and morality in general, in so far as they are required for the sake of the philosophic life, are identical, as regards both their meaning and their extension, with justice and morality as they are commonly understood, or whether morality does not have two entirely different roots, or whether what Aristotle calls moral virtue is not, in fact, merely political or vulgar virtue. The latter question can also be expressed by asking whether, by transforming opinion about morality into knowledge of morality, one does not transcend the dimension of morality in the politically relevant sense of the term.2 (Fs)

152a However this may be, both the obvious dependence of the philosophic life on the city and the natural affection which men have for men, and especially for their kin, regardless of whether or not these men have "good natures" or are potential philosophers, make it necessary for the philosopher to descend again into the cave, i.e., to take care of the affairs of the city, whether in a direct or more remote manner. In descending into the cave, the philosopher admits that what is intrinsically or by nature the highest is not the most urgent for man, who is essentially an "in-between" being--between the brutes and the gods. When attempting to guide the city, he knows then in advance that, in order to be useful or good for the city, the requirements of wisdom must be qualified or diluted. If these requirements are identical with natural right or with natural law, natural right or natural law must be diluted in order to become compatible with the requirements of the city. The city requires that wisdom be reconciled with consent. But to admit the necessity of consent, i.e., of the consent of the unwise, amounts to admitting a right of unwisdom, i.e., an irrational, if inevitable, right. Civil life requires a fundamental compromise between wisdom and folly, and this means a compromise between the natural right that is discerned by reason or understanding and the right that is based on opinion alone. Civil life requires the dilution of natural right by merely conventional right. Natural right would act as dynamite for civil society. In other words, the simply good, which is what is good by nature and which is radically distinct from the ancestral, must be transformed into the politically good, which is, as it were, the quotient of the simply good and the ancestral: the politically good is what "removes a vast mass of evil without shocking a vast mass of prejudice." It is in this necessity that the need for inexactness in political or moral matters is partly founded.3 (Fs)

153a The notion that natural right must be diluted in order to become compatible with civil society is the philosophic root of the later distinction between the primeval natural right and the secondary natural right.1 This distinction was linked with the view that the primeval natural right, which excludes private property and other characteristic features of civil society, belonged to man's original state of innocence, whereas the secondary natural right is needed after man has become corrupted, as a remedy for his corruption. We must not overlook, however, the difference between the notion that natural right must be diluted and the notion of a secondary natural right. If the principles valid in civil society are diluted natural right, they are much less venerable than if they are regarded as secondary natural right, i.e., as divinely established and involving an absolute duty for fallen man. Only in the latter case is justice, as it is commonly understood, unquestionably good. Only in the latter case does natural right in the strict sense or the primary natural right cease to be dynamite for civil society. (Fs)