of same-sex sexual activity in animals is used to articulate the naturalness of homosexuality, as is the experience of same-sex attraction within humans. Some animals, and some persons, have sexual inclinations or desires for members of the same sex, and it is thus natural for them, while others find such desires alien and thus unnatural.
The unifying thread between Callicles and contemporary sexual politics is the role of inclination and desire in interpreting and defining nature. When we say of a person’s behavior, “It’s only natural,” are we appealing to the statistically common inclination, or the inclination of this particular person whether statistically usual or unusual? In either event, nature is defined in reference to patterns of inclination, perhaps biological, but also aesthetic or dramatic. It’s quite easy to find judgments on the naturalness or unnaturalness of a desire, a food, a behavior, even of religion, art, and architecture which seem to express the common sense understandings of how “we” or “they” organize and control our judgments.
Natural Law as Proverb
Common sense interprets data relative to us, and it was that aspect I stressed in natural law as inclination, but already by the conclusion of that section emerged the intersubjective or communal aspect of common sense. We don’t have inclinations as individuals solely since inclinations are formed, educated, and interpreted within communities of meaning. Every parent, every tribe, every nation, and every tradition hands on certain tested and verified judgments about inclinations and desires in the hope of shaping both the behavior and inclinations of the other members. A parent wants not only to form their children’s actions, but wants them to love certain things in certain ways.
Plato provides multiple examples of this as well. For instance, the opening exchange between Socrates and Cephalus in the Republic brilliantly reveals how accumulated insights pass into the habitual texture of community life, and how philosophy (theory) disrupts such meaning. Socrates has accompanied a group of young men to Cephalus’s home where they find him dressed in the regalia of ritual religious observance, as befitting a man of social position and wealth. Very rudely, and in some violation of the rules of hospitality, the polite conversation between the two elders is forced into elenchus by Socrates who asks of Cephalus how his money was obtained and whether Cephalus’ own account of the justice with which he acted was sufficient. Entirely unperturbed, Cephalus draws upon the poetry of Pindar—“a fine saying and admirable”—in explaining justice as a kind of honesty and fairness in one’s business with men and gods.68
In doing so, Cephalus relies upon the customs and education of his generation, for whom Pindar adequately states the laws and customs of the city and its form of life, its common sense. The appeal to Pindar is an appeal to authority, but not the authority of someone who explains, but the authority of someone who represents “our” way of doing things. Cephalus has no interest in explaining the reason behind the custom and has no sense of law’s principles, for he is one of those kept lawful by the “force of tradition and habit . . . but they are not righteous by ‘love of wisdom.’”69 So long as no crisis threatens the community’s ability to hand on its ways and mores, custom governs, and proverbs rather than explanations form the young; but such a community cannot explain or justify itself except by appeal to its venerable authorities, and they cannot justify themselves except by being accepted as venerable, and so in moments of crisis the old ways are exposed as nothing other than convention. Upon being challenged by Socrates, Cephalus departs, returning to the prayers and sacrifices mandated by his office in the polis, leaving the argument to his son, heir both of property and proverb, who begins with proverbs of his own before acknowledging his ignorance, the inadequacy of the poets, and the status of Socrates as superior and guide. Socrates, the symbol of theory, threatens the established order of custom, for theory and proverb attend to the same world in different ways.
In the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, the hold and force of common sense is powerfully presented.70 Duty-bound to avenge the murder of his father, Agamemnon, Orestes confronts the horrible reality that doing so entails the slaughter of Cassandra, his mother. Of course, one could read Cassandra as having justly restored the balance in her killing of Agamemnon, for not only did Agamemnon sacrifice their daughter, Iphigenia, for favorable winds to Troy, but Agamemnon’s family bore guilt for the murder of his cousins, the brothers of Aegisthus, and violation of hospitality to his uncle. On almost every level, some customary duty is denied and requires a righting of the scales.
In the matricide, Orestes demonstrates filial piety, earning for him the favor and protection of Apollo but also the hate of the loathsome Furies, chthonic and ancient spirits of revenge. Older than the Olympians, and protesting that their venerable rights have been ignored by the younger deities, the Furies demand Orestes’ death, for he has killed his mother. He’s also defended his father, and much of the play concerns the conflicts within common sense—for there are, recall, many common senses, and since they are little concerned for the universal they easily contradict each other: age versus youth, mothers and fathers, men and women, ground and sky, body and mind, blood and contract.
The dispute is resolved through the procedures of law in the court established by Athene on Mars Hill. The Aereopagus overcomes mere custom, for each side presents its case before the discretion of the jury, even though Athene arrives dressed for war in order to persuade the Furies to accept the court, and even though the deadlocked jury is resolved by Athene who admits her (arbitrary) preference for the male. Enraged, the Furies seek to reassert their rights, and Athene first threatens them with the force of Zeus before seducing them with the promise of enthronement in the soil below Mars Hill, from which their spirit will seep into the soil, water, plant life, and air of Athens. Revenge will be domesticated, but the law will be revenge shrouded with the robes of justice. Aeschylus reveal to us that the law of a city is nothing more than “common love” and “common hate” by which the city unites in its self-regard against all foreign and alien encroachments. What is one’s own is obviously good, while the foreign is obviously bad. Such is the natural law of common sense made sacrosanct by time.
Natural Law as Nature
In distinguishing the first two varieties of common sense natural law, I’ve emphasized various aspects of common sense as a mode of meaning. For instance, common sense tends to (1) describe the world relative to us, and (2) tends to codify its insights in concrete and practical terms which while not concerned with universalizability are nonetheless handed on intersubjectively. Common sense also (3) tends to consider the real under the description of “bodies,” and develops a version of objectivity in keeping with a world so described.
Unlike common sense, theory relates data to data and things to things, as, for instance, velocity is determined by the relation of distance to time or temperature is determined in terms of degrees Celsius in relation to water’s freezing point. For theory, the world we sense is not so much described as it is explained, with explanations taking us into the realm of the intelligible more than the sensible; common sense, on the other hand, has no interest in leaving the sensible, and expresses its grasp of intelligibility with constant eye to sense and concrete action. Thus, not velocity but the fastness or slowness of the car relative to my safely crossing the street, or the hotness of the water relative to boiling an egg or scalding my hand. To distinguish the object of concern, or the way reality is grasped by the modes, Lonergan distinguishes things from bodies.71 For the world of theory, the object of our conscious intention is understandable rather than necessarily imaginable, whereas common sense intends and thinks the real as imaginable. For the chemist qua chemist, water is a formula of intelligible relations, for the chemist qua person of common sense, water is something to drink. Water as thing is understood, but not imagined or touched, while water as body is always imagined as touchable. In the world of theory, God is three persons in one being united in a dynamic relationship of periochoresis; God for the child of common sense is an old man who sits on
