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Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law

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TERMS: ontology, epistemology, teleology, metaphysics, phenomenology, essentialism, realism, existentialism, Stoicism.

NAMES: Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas, Hooker, Grotius, Thomas Paine; and Thomas Hobbes, John Locke.

With the current strong renaissance of Natural Law thinking, John Wild, a Harvard University philosopher, is worth the closest study as he here gives us what is effectively an advanced lecture course in natural law philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The above word list is a short test for anyone contemplating investing in the book, being a good sample of the moral philosophical terms which will be freely deployed. If you can put a meaning to these terms 'on the fly' whilst reading then this book is for you. However, John Wild writes so clearly that anyone with a strong interest in any of the individual philosophers will benefit from just the one or two chapters of relevance. Anyone wanting the short course can safely jump in and read just Part Two, p.103-172.

PART ONE
The name list indicates the key philosophers discussed. The first seven are shown to be standard NL theorists according to Wild's own canonical five-point rule. Hobbes and Locke are tested and proved to not to be NL believers: Hobbes fails drastically; Locke fails in the ambiguities of his free use of the term Natural Law, hence his mistaken inclusion in the pantheon by some moderns--having the term but not the concept. Wild's own technical definition of NL is given as: 'a universal pattern of action, applicable to all men everywhere, required by human nature itself for its completion'. These deceptively bland-sounding terms are carefully developed.

As the title suggests, Plato receives the lion's share of the space, as he is shown to be the first to construct an analytical Natural Law theory; the canonical test is drawn out of Plato and given for checking later theorists for goodness of fit as NL philosophers. (Stoics are generally given the credit as they use the term freely, but they followed Aristotle and laid no new foundations. C.S. Lewis in his famous short work, 'The Abolition of Man' (1943), also clearly credits Plato as the first Western NL philosopher in chapter one. This is the classic literary approach to NL.) Plato is rarely given credit for being the originator of NL theory as he has the concept but rarely uses the term, and it is a major theme of his thought as opposed to a theory direct.

Errors perpetrated on Plato by modern interpreters such as the theologian Niebuhr and the British politician Richard H.S. Crossman are explored. Sir Karl Popper's neo-positivist, 'The Open Society and Its Enemies', gets the sharpest trouncing (rather amusing if you give way to Schadenfreude). Plato is soundly defended against the usual modernist charges, as: irrational dogmatist, militarist, totalitarian, racist, and reactionary defender of a closed society. The general subjectivism and the modern relativistic separation of fact and value are briefly analysed as the root causes of the misunderstandings.

Five current misconceptions of NL are then considered in detail.
A. NL as dubious inferential teleology (ie, the shallow scientist's attack: the universe is mechanism but we do not and cannot know the meaning...but then science is just a bag of tools).
B. NL as a vague and indeterminate moral standard (ie, the sociologist/anthropologist attack: everyone believes differently...but they don't).
C. NL as confused with descriptive or prescriptive law (The commonest attack, ie, the confusion between factual scientific laws and the values that are totally separate from them; cf. naive Kantian dualism.)
D. NL as a naturalistic fallacy (ie, reductionism, if you break something down to simple parts meaning disappears, therefore there is no meaning. And the inadequacy of negative definitions.)
E. NL as a reactionary force in history. (ie, the Marxist error, NL prevents progress. But there has to be fixed goal or you can't score goals.)

PART TWO
Chapter 4: the theory of NL and its history in the West. NL as moral realism; existence and value; five related meanings of the term Nature (phusis); the central tradition of NL phil. (The early Stoics; Marcus Aurelius; Thomistic ethics and the NL; the moral phil. of Richard Hooker; Hugo Grotius; and Thomas Paine.) Two modern deviations: Thomas Hobbes; and John Locke. Each of the schools/individuals is carefully shown to fit or not fit the NL canonical pattern.

Chapter 5: Plato as the founder of moral realism and NL phil. A detailed twenty-page analysis, a good way to get your arms round Plato as a thinker as it draws widely from the dialogues and major works to illustrate this central unifying theme. Good on the ontological foundation of Platonic ethics. Rounded off with three derived moral principles: A) universality of moral law, B) norms grounded on Nature; C) the good for Man as the realization of human nature.

Chapter 6: The Aristotelian theory of NL. Particularly good chapter (helpful if you ever struggled with Book 1 of the 'Nicomachean Ethics'!). Aristotle is shown to extend, refine, systematize Plato's system, retaining the canonical form. The ontological foundations of Aristotelian ethics are very close to Plato's:
A. Nature as a normative world order.
B. N. as the eidetic structure of finite entities.
C. N. as formally determined tendency.
D. N. as the correct ordering of incipient tendency.
E. N. as existential fulfilment (roll over JPS).
Also covers: the concept of Nature in Aristotle; and, derived moral principles, cf Plato's above.

PART THREE
NL and some problems of contemporary ethics. Reductionism, dearth of metaphysics, need for a new phenomenology, reasserts essence and existence (cf, object orientation theory in computer science), active tendency as an ontological principle (reintegration of fact and value). Realistic analysis of value, etc.

Notes/bibliography are very full and helpful, there is an index of names, and an index of subjects.

A study of Plato is peripheral to the objective of this book. The purpose is to demonstrate that right action and right social order are determined by the nature of man; that this nature is a propensity or system of change which follows a pattern of a certain structure when it is not impaired; that this tendency can diverge from this structure or fail to meet it, in which case the divergence or deficiency is evil; that human choice and human action can allow this propensity to comply with the structure or hamper it from so doing; that right action and right social order permit the tendency to achieve itself according to the structure which is exclusive to human nature, while wrong action and social order do the reverse.

Not solely the human being but all living things and, in a more indefinite way, even nonliving things, says Wild, are what they are by reason of a procedure of change possessing a composition which is common to all members of the species.

Ergo good and evil are established by the nature of things when nature is understood to be compositions more or less completely satisfied by the system of change which arises in each existing thing. Moral obligation is the stipulation of this intrinsic cardinal tendency in man to satisfy itself in proportion to the composition which differentiates man from what is not human. It must be admitted, man remains human when this tendency digresses from the proper form; but when this comes about internal self-destructive processes begin. In a living organism we call this "disease." When it arises in the human mind the psychotherapists have various theories about it, but they all identify it as a kind of disability.

Much modern-day thought raises many objections to this exposition of right and wrong and to this expounding of nature. Wild is cognizant of these objections and meets them. He illustrates that Plato and Aristotle initiated this approach to the problem of ethics and social order; and since their time many have supported it. Much of ethical theory now dominant in philosophy oppose it; but these theories are incapable of providing an attestable rationale for a universal ethic. Wild's evaluation of natural law is able to present such a basis.

Fountain of Justice: A Study in Natural Law (New York; Sheed and Ward, 1955)(London: Sheed and Ward, 1959)(Taipei: Mei Ya Publications, 1971)
Jingxiong Wu

Shakespeare can be brought in too

Shakespeare and the Lawyers
By O Hood Phillips
Page 163 has Jingxiong Wu noting the existence of strong natural law reasoning in Shakespeare.