“nature” for common sense 3 will be understood as body. This seems slightly counterintuitive, but as an example consider the way that the Platonic and Aristotelian version of “Form” is usually taught, with Plato’s “Form” expressed visually as “up there,” but Aristotle’s as “down here and in things.” Both express Form as invisible body, a common sense articulation, for body is understood by common sense as something which exists “already out there now real.”72 As “already,” a real body exists prior to and independent of our perception; as “out there,” not an idea but as possessing its own independent existence; as “now real,” possessing temporal distinctness as part of its independence.
Common Sense Objectivity and Innateness
Along with its “already out there now realness,” a corresponding sense of objectivity in knowing attaches to bodies as opposed to things. While theory may demand a formula or a proof or an experiment to justify claims to know, common sense tends to think that knowing is like taking a good look at a body, seeing what is there, assuming anything not seen or imagined is not really real. (Imagine a child wondering if God exists because we cannot see Him.)73
This kind of objectivity is often mirrored in the language of “innateness.” In ordinary discussion, natural law is often presented as if moral principles were somehow innate, as if we just had moral knowledge “in” our souls or minds. The “in” language corresponds to the body-language of “out there,” since objectivity for common sense is usually thought of as getting what is “out there” somehow in the “in here” of mind.74 The law, then, is objective because it exists independent of our perceptions and wishes, but fortunately we already know the law, it’s just part of our mental structure and framework; we just have it “in here” even though its objectivity is modeled after the “already out there now real.”
I’ll save the question of the innateness of natural law for later, although clearly I doubt innateness as pictured by common sense. But this pattern of “in” and “out” pervades common sense 3, with natural law thought to reside in things, but by this they mean nature as the physical world. Natural law is modeled after the properties innate in physical reality, and natural law is the ordo naturae.
Law in Nature, Enchanted or Disenchanted
In one form, the ordo naturae is a kind of cosmic-mysticism where the divine ordering principle of the universe operates within nature to render it cosmos rather than chaos, with an isomorphism between the ordering principle of the macrocosm and the microcosm of soul or city. To live according to nature is to follow the principle of order (arche, logos, physei dikaion, theios nomos). In each formulation, the ordering principle is symbolized as governing the entire cosmos, with a unity or parallel between the laws of nature, the laws of the city, and the laws of the soul—metaphysics, physics, politics, and ethics are, in a real if confused sense, about the same thing.75
Following Eliade, Merold Westphal identifies in mimetic forms of religion such commitment to nature, “not simply or primarily because nature is the primary manifestation of the divine, but because through worship human existence is to be assimilated to the natural order,” insofar as worship comports and imitates itself to the rhythms and forces operative in nature.76 Through ritual imitation, religion “seeks to integrate human existence into the natural cosmos,” in such a way that the distinction between ritual and mundane life is rather porous, but the order “in” nature becomes incorporated “into” one’s own life through mimesis.
In philosophical rather than religious history, the natural philosophy of the pre-Socratics, “started by inquiring into the origin of the universe, its physis,” was as much a metaphysical study as empirical, for the natural principles were thought to underlie and order “the comprehension of everything which proceeds from that order and now exists.”77 While each thinker and school presented their own account, the tendency was towards a greater connection between the laws governing the cosmos and all other aspects “in ‘the nature of being’ . . . in the spiritual world,” so as to find order and method in human life.”78 The turn from natural philosophy to the human things, as Socrates recounted his own biography, was already underway: “The experience of being activates man to the reality of order in himself and in the cosmos . . . the experience of being is the primary experience of the cosmos in which man is consubstantial with the things of his environment, a partnership that in philosophy is heightened to the awake consciousness of the community of order uniting thought and being.”79
In its pre-Socratic beginnings, philosophy, like earlier mythic or theological speculations, “attempts to find the origin of the cosmos in elementary forces,” although “the gods of polytheism are excluded from it,” leading to “the dissociation of a cosmos-full-of-gods into a dedivinized order of things.”80 Being, rather than the gods, is the unknown arche, the heuristic x, and thus metaphysics becomes the discourse concerning nature. Still, being is articulated as a material principle, whether as water, or air, or fire, or logos, but like mimetic religion the arche “stands at the beginning like a god from whose initiative a chain of events passes right down to the being that is experienced here and now,” the study of which is not merely abstract but intimately connected to the right, or natural, way to live.81 Asking, “what is right by nature?” still turns to forces outside of us, even if somehow coterminous (even innate) with our thought. Natural law is nature itself, or at least the principles of nature which comprise and govern all that is—us too.
Clearly I’m simplifying a complex development in the history of ideas and culture, but I’m trying to present a taxonomy rather than comprehensive history; my point is merely to demonstrate the possibility of a development in natural law which in its mode of inquiry is beholden to common sense in conceiving order as something which could be operative out there, or out there in nature, or as nature, even if mirrored in the “in here” of intellect.82 Nor are attempts to read law in nature relics from a previous time. Martin Rhonheimer, for one, thinks that such “physicalist” accounts dominated both neoscholasticism and revisionism into the current century:
This means that, within the perspective of certain academic trends (in which a large number of contemporary moral theologians have been educated), the natural law is frequently understood as an object of knowledge that lies, somehow, in the nature of things, over against the practical reason. . . . In close connection with this foreshortened conception of the natural law can be found a derivation of moral norms from a naturally (“physicalistically”) understood reality. . . . This is a result of identifying the lex naturalis—in the sense of modern scientific law—with a natural order that lies in the being of things; it means understanding the concept of a “natural order” (ordo naturalis) that lies beneath the “ought” in such a way that the reason is reduced to an organ that merely “reads off” what “is” and prescribes what “ought” to be.83
For someone like Rhonheimer, however, lex naturalis does not mean what it is often taken to mean, as “some external standard ‘out there’” or “in the heart,” as we’ll see.84
Concluding Thoughts
I opened
