into this or that tree, this or that individual, and which makes Socrates distinct from Plato. Still, when I know Socrates, I also know Plato since their essence is the same: “The object of rational knowledge or cognition is therefore not the particular or the individual as such; this the senses lay hold of. The object of cognition . . . is what the thing is: the essence of the thing which lies hidden in the core of phenomena as an idea in every thing of the same kind; in a word, the form.”117
Stressing the point, and demonstrating quite clearly the theoretical mode, Rommen continues:
Sense perception grasps only the particularity of the existent being, of the individual thing, as e.g., this man or this concrete state. But cognition is founded on the perception of the universal, of that which is in all things of the same kind as their quiddity or essence. The thing is that which the abstract concept of the thing, the object of intellectual knowledge, represents, signifies, means; and this object of intellectual knowledge is really in the thing.118
Note his language: (1) the thing is understood in abstraction, without reference to the contingent particularities, (2) the thing understood is the object of intellectual knowledge, or that which is intended or sought (a heuristic anticipation), and (3) it is only as an abstract object intended by intellect that we have representation, significance, or meaning. Meaning obtains when we have abstraction to the necessary and universal present in the individual, when we have grasped, in the concrete, that which cannot be otherwise.
Nature as Principle of Motion
For natural law, the first task is metaphysical, grasping essence or form, since in Aristotelian metaphysics a grasp of the form is also a grasp of its final cause or telos. When explaining motion, Aristotle distinguishes the contingent and changeable matter from the “inner, enduring core, the form,” with the form serving as the principle of act causing self-motion or self-change of the thing.119 This is particularly evident in natural entities, those which possess their own nature from themselves and are not given it by an artist or craftsperson, for nature is an internal source of motion or change, an entelechy, whereby the form “unfolds itself in the matter.”120
Since a natural substance is self-moved and self-governed, the “unfolding” follows the intelligible structure immanent in form itself, and since everything which is seeks its own act and perfection—perfection meaning the completeness proper to the form—natural entities seek their own end. But the end or perfection, the finality of a substance, is its goodness, and thus form is intrinsically linked to final cause; the final cause is nothing other than the form having become fully itself, having accomplished its principle of unfolding until it has become its own essence. God, having no potency, demonstrates this principle most perfectly, for he is pure act—purely Himself without possibility of development or change—and thus is also his own perfection and goodness. All else is good insofar as, in an analogous matter, it becomes like God, or insofar as it becomes fully actualized in the form which it is. Goodness is the being of the thing; goodness is being, and being is goodness. Teleology is the unity of being and oughtness.121
According to Anthony Lisska, the metaphysics necessary for natural law entails accepting essential properties as “dispositional properties” with a corresponding teleology.122 Dispositional properties are “potentially directed towards a specific development or ‘end,’” they are the object’s capacity to “do something.”123 The “something” is always a specific end, or act, “which is the fulfillment or completion of the potency.”124 Teleology is meaningful only in light of the relationship between the dispositional property, which is a real potency of the object, and the end, which is the actualization immanent to the dispositional property. As immanent, the “ends appropriate to human nature are built into the very nature or essence which determines a human person,” and, further, are not non-moral goods understood as utility.125
Dispositional properties, which make up a thing’s essence, are not static like a category, whatever our tendency to conceive of essence as rigid and closed, something like the properties which define a triangle. Rather, essential properties are more organic, something like a plant which has a form, and thereby develops and changes because of the immanent disposition of that form, although certainly the development is structured and directional.126 Thus, in the famous article 94. 2 from the Summa Theologiae where Thomas gives his most detailed account of the principles of the natural law, he is doing nothing more than identifying the structure of our dispositional properties: (1) Dispositions towards life, including continuation of existence, nutrition, and growth; (2) Dispositions towards animal sensation, including sense experience and offspring; and (3) Dispositions towards rationality, including sociality and understanding.127 Whatever these dispositions have as their accomplishment or terminus, this is the human good.
Good and evil are defined by reference to the dispositional properties, for the good is the “harmonious completion of the dispositional properties,” while the “hindering of any developing process” hinders the attainment of the act/good of the disposition, and thus also hinders or denies “the possibility of attaining human well-being.”128 Acts are wrong, then, not directly because a law-maker declares as such, even if that law-maker is God, but because “an immoral act prevents the self-actualization of human beings,” or hinders the harmonious attainment of the disposed ends and the well-being constituted by that attainment.129 In keeping with the earlier claims of the priority of ontology, it is clear that the ground of normativity is entirely shaped by metaphysics.
The notion of end is a prerequisite for understanding “good,” for the good of an entity is nothing other than the finality, or full actualization, of the dispositional properties. Good, then, is coterminous with being, and a the good of the thing cannot be defined except in relation to the form of the thing. To say the same thing, but with a nod to metaethics, “moral theory is dependent upon the metaphysical theory.”130 If the metaphysics fails, so too does the moral account, and a moral account which operated antecedently to the metaphysics would be either arbitrary or impossible. Thus, not only does intellect rightly govern the will in action, but theoretical knowledge, operating as a metaphysics of the person or theoretical anthropology, is prior to ethics. First we provide an account of human nature, and only then can we do ethics: “ontology is a necessary presupposition for . . . moral theory.”131 And not just any ontology will do, but only a metaphysics of essence, that is, of dispositional properties.
Conclusion
Such oughtness may seem aridly metaphysical, hardly the demand of responsibility we sense governs our agency. We are free, after all, self-governed agents and a merely instinctual pursuit of our perfection seems inadequate to human dignity, precisely why Plato rejects Callicles’s understanding of natural inclination. Rommen agrees, noting that the statement “we are free,” is an ontological declaration of our nature. There is an ordering principle grasped by intellect, and while this governs animals in iron-like rigidity, for beings such as us, “endowed with reason and free will,” those principles of necessary order obligate without thereby exerting efficient causality.132 It is our nature, our essence, to be free, and so morality exists insofar as the “order of being confronting the intelligence becomes the order of oughtness for the will.”133 The order is objective, it exists independently of our reason, but yet we must choose to will and follow that objective order.
Still, though, the metaphysics is first. We discover form in knowledge, form presents the goodness of being, the drive to the good proper to the form, and it is this very good which the human as free is called to bring about. Practical reason, reason insofar as we bring about the truth of our being through our action, depends upon theoretical reason, for “moral philosophy, the science of moral action, is an extension of metaphysics, the science of being. . . . First the theoretical reason knows and . . . truth thereupon appears to practical reason as truth to be accomplished through the will.”134 Metaphysics, or a theoretical grasp of the real, is the basis upon which the natural law depends; the natural law derives from metaphysics, from theory. Law, insofar
