John Locke: Questions Concerning the Law of Nature. Robert H. Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 19, Number 2, Winter 1991-92. Republished with permission; revised February 2018.

 

Locke begins this work by restating the argument the Apostle Paul makes for the existence of God: “Since god shows himself everywhere present to us and, as it were, forces himself upon men’s eyes, as much now in the constant course of nature as in the once frequent testimony of miracles, I believe there will be no one, who recognizes that either some rational account of our life is necessary or that there exists something deserving the name of either virtue or vice, who will not conclude for himself that god exists” (95). Locke ends the work in an equally firm moral tone: “the rightness of an action does not depend upon interest, but interest follows from rectitude” (251). The beginning and the end of the Questions dovetail with the teachings of Christian natural law, a fact many scholars today will take to confirm their belief that Locke reflected the reigning orthodoxy of his time and place. In his substantial introduction to this new edition of the Questions, the late Robert H. Horwitz observes that Locke deals systematically with the issue of natural law nowhere in his published writings (1). The Questions shows how carefully Locke thought about natural law during his tenure as senior censor of moral philosophy at Christ Church College, Oxford, in the 1663-64 term. Locke evidently prepared his manuscript around that time, prior to his participation in formal scholarly disputations with his advanced students (29-30); hence the format of question-and-response. Locke did not put his unpublished manuscript aside and forget it. As late as 1681-82 he had it copied by hand and corrected it. But he still refrained from publishing it, resisting the importunities of at least one friend who kept an studied it during Locke’s exile in Holland. Upon his return Locke took pains to conceal the manuscript among his papers, succeeding so well that it was not discovered and published for some two and a half centuries.

Locke’s supreme self-possession and prudence come out very clearly in Horwitz’s introduction, an exemplary specimen of biographical criticism. While urging readers “to concentrate their attention solely on the difficult task of understanding Locke’s reflections on the law of nature in precisely the form in which Locke has left them to us,” Horwitz makes this easier to do by providing not only an account of the circumstances surrounding the manuscript’s composition and subsequent history, but also a picture of Locke’s habits of mind as reflected in actions. The philosopher actively participated in the political events of late seventeenth-century England, in which Protestants and Catholics struggled for control of the monarchy. Locke, “a man who never took lightly, either in theory or in practice, the indispensable goods of life, liberty, and property (40), and who may have witnessed “the last major public book burning” at Oxford shortly before his six-year exile (the heretical works of Thomas Hobbes were consigned to the flames), survived even as other prominent Whigs such as Algernon Sydney served prison sentences and even died for their convictions (9, 29). Locke “took great pains to conceal authorship of many of his most important—and potentially most controversial—works from the time they were written and published [anonymously] until a few weeks before his death” (2, n.2). Even in his own library catalogue he did not classify his Two Treatises or his Letters concerning Toleration under his own name.

This caution extended to the manner in which Locke wrote his manuscripts. After the publication of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Locke’s contemporaries, immersed as they were in every aspect of the Christian natural law teaching, perceived an important and critical ambiguity in Locke’s position on these matters,” particularly a reluctance to “identify the Bible simply as the revealed word of God” (21-22). Some contemporaries found this reluctance profoundly unsettling; others, whom Horwitz calls “Locke’s helpers,” eagerly supplied, or urged Locke to supply, the decisively pious supplements. He never quite did so. These contemporary disputes have continued into our own time, as Horwitz shows in his discussion of the editorial work done by Wolfgang von Leyden, the scholar who discovered Locke’s manuscript in the 1940s and published it in 1954 under the title Essays on the Law of Nature. This title misidentifies the genre. These are not essays; some sections consist only of a question and a one-word answer. Just as important, von Leyden invariably ascribes a pious meaning to Locke’s answers, overlooking the “pervasive tension between two or more opposed understandings of the law of nature” found in the text (61), as well as the “manifold contradictions” that force attentive readers to think the problems through for themselves (61, n.138). As co-editor Diskin Clay observes, Locke speaks in a “Christian” voice, a “pagan” voice and, sotto voce, in the accents of Hobbes, Grotius, and Descartes (80). The Christian and pagan voices speak of natural law but must express different conceptions of the natural law. The ‘modern’ voices do not speak of nature in the same sense at all. One might say that in this ‘disputation’ Locke has brought several voices into dialogue with one another.

The Questions consists of eleven questions and answers. In the first answer Locke affirms the existence of “a rule of conduct or law of nature,” whereby “all creatures in their obedience to [god’s] will have their own proper laws governing their birth and life” (95). The law of nature differs from natural right, which does not command but rather authorizes “a free use of something”; the law of nature is “the command of the divine will, knowable by the light of nature” (101). The light of nature, human reason, interprets but does not make the law of nature—”unless we are willing to diminish the dignity of the supreme lawmaker” (101) and make man a self-legislator. This Locke professes reluctance to do, inasmuch as reason “is only a faculty of the mind and a part of use,” and so cannot give us laws, “the formal definition of the law seem[ing] to consist” in “the declaration of a superior will” (103). Unlike Aristotle, who describes man as a political animal, and accordingly divides political justice into natural and conventional kinds, Locke divides not political justice but “law” into natural and civil kinds; the law of nature exists ‘outside’ civil or political society, perhaps as its foundation but not as an essential part of human life itself. Indeed, Locke follows Grotius in saying that whereas natural things can be brought together in a science, conventional things differ as it were chaotically; where there is no order there can be no science. As evidence of these assertions Locke argues that some “principles of conduct” are recognized universally, and universality points to nature, some law of nature, as distinguished from the heterogeneous, even contradictory realm of conventional laws. Locke concedes that most people do not recognize ‘universally recognized’ laws of nature. The many are governed by “the onrush of their feelings and bad habits”; the many have reason but they don’t use it to ‘read’ the law of nature, even though that law is ‘posted’ everywhere (111). We must therefore turn for guidance to “the sounder and more perceptive part” of mankind (111). Unfortunately, these sound and perceptive thinkers do not agree, either. Locke doesn’t bat an eye: This disagreement only “strengthens [the conclusion] that a law of this kind exists, since concerning this very law all contend so fiercely” (111). Thus “all recognize that vice and virtue exist by nature”; they ‘merely’ disagree about what they (and it) are! As further evidence of the existence of the law of nature, Locke also sites conscience, the argument from design (the central of the five ‘evidences’ he offers), and what might be termed the argument from society: Society “seems to rest” upon a fixed political regime and the keeping of covenants; these “foundations” would “collapse” absent a law of nature, with supreme power enjoying supreme license (as in Hobbes) and citizens observing no deference (115). Finally, “without the law of nature there would be no virtue or vice”; “man [would be] the supreme and absolute free judge of his own actions” (117), evidently in violation of the rule ‘the party to a dispute must not be the judge’ and explicitly making men’s interest or pleasure the (im)moral standard of conduct. The discovery of conventionality of the law of nature would result in the concept of man as his own judge, legislator, and executioner.

The thirteen paragraphs of the second section, affirming that the law of nature is knowable by the “light of nature,” define the light of nature not as something “inscribed on tablets in our breasts” to be read by an “inner light”—conscience, in short—but as the “right use” of our natural faculties, unaided by “the help of another” (117, 119). Mind, reason, and sense are the “principles and foundations of knowing” (121); the means of knowing via these faculties are “inscription,” tradition, and (again) sense; sense is both a foundation and a means of knowing, inasmuch as our senses exist in us by nature and they also provide us with impressions (called “simple ideas” in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) such as ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Revelation “can be added as a fourth” means of knowledge (emphasis added), but Locke puts it aside because this investigation treats natural knowledge, not knowledge given to us by God. Our first impressions or ideas and the foundation of knowledge do not enter our mind by reason, which “does nothing unless something has been established and agreed to beforehand” (by inscription, tradition, or sense); reason does not establish knowledge of foundational truths, being capable of discovering such truths but not of constituting it (as it can, for example, in Kant’s moral philosophy). Inscription, the claim that the human mind has the law of nature “graven upon it (123), was rejected earlier as a source of knowledge of that law and will be rejected again in the answer to Question IV. Tradition is a form of knowledge we learn through our senses but believe through “faith” (125); Locke deems it useful in educating the young concerning “god.” But it is “not a primary and certain means of knowing the law of nature” because there are many and contradictory traditions (Locke mentions those propounded by Jews, “Romanists,’ and Turks) “warring among themselves,” sometimes even within the same state (127). To judge among these contradictory claims, we must “judge of things themselves” by “evidence which can be known by the light of nature” (129), whereas faith rests upon authority, “a derivative rather than an innate law” (131). He concedes that the founder of a tradition must have either “discovered this law inscribed in his heart or reached a knowledge of it by arguing from the evidence derived from his sense experience” (131), but observes that the rest of us can only take his word for it if we do not attain the knowledge directly, as well. This leaves sense. All of our knowledge of the law of nature “is derived from those things we perceive by our senses” (133). Reason then argues from the things perceived, concluding with “a certainty that there is some god who is the author of all these things” (133).
“[W]hatever possesses the force of law among men, necessarily recognizes as its source either god or nature or man” (133); man-given and God-given law are positive law; any other kind of law is the law of nature.

Why, then, do men disregard the law of nature? They fail to “make right use” of their “intellectual faculties”; that is to say, they fail to reason rightly from their sense perceptions (135). This should not surprise us. After all, not all who are of sound mind can master geometry or arithmetic, after having learned their numbers; for more advanced work, for discovering “the hidden nature” of geometry and arithmetic, one needs “concentrated meditation of the mind, thought, and care” (135). “Good, rich veins of gold and silver lie hidden in the bowels of the earth,” requiring hard work to “dig them out”; even then, “some we see toil to no avail” (135). “Only a few… are guided by reasons in the concerns of their daily life,” let alone in these more abstruse matters; “rarely do men probe deeply into themselves to discover there the cause of their life, its proper mode, and purpose” (135). Such knowledge may come to a Descartes, but “it does not offer itself up to the idle and indolent” (135). On the other hand, from the difficulty of this work one cannot conclude that there is nothing to be extracted. Locke challenges his young scholars to exercise their natural powers, and only their natural powers, to investigate the claims mad for the law of nature. In his essay on the Questions in What Is Political Philosophy? Leo Strauss remarks that the fact that the law of nature ‘makes itself scarce,’ ‘plays hard to get,’ parallels in intellectual life the material scarcity that characterizes Locke’s ‘state of nature.’ For the succor of both mind and body, men must (as Locke observes in the Essay on Civil Government) mix their labor with nature or starve. ‘Black is not white’ may be a self-evident truth, but the laws of nature and of nature’s God are not.

Locke answers his third question, “Does the Law of nature become known to us by tradition?” succinctly—”It does not”—before turning to his fourth question, “Is the Law of Nature inscribed in the minds of men?” He evidently thinks he has refuted the claim that tradition provides an adequate source of such knowledge, but wants to address the question of “inscription” more thoroughly. He boldly declares that the existence of a law of nature has been “proved” (139). A careful reader might conclude that the existence of a law of nature has not been disproved. Returning now to the “light” of nature by which we might come to know such a law, he observes that this light illuminates the law of nature but its own “nature remains obscure and hidden” (139). And so he begins again. That which is known, he asserts, must be either imprinted in the soul at its birth, an inscription within us, or it must be perceived “through the sense” (139), something outside us. Are our minds ready-made with law of nature already inside them, or “clean slates” filled later by “observation and reasoning” (139)? Locke denies that there is a law “inscribed by nature in our hearts” (141). If there were, and given the fact that “in her working nature is the same and uniform” (143), how is it that we find no universal agreement about or obedience to it? And if one argues, with the Apostle Paul, that the wicked, “sin nature” of humanity since the Fall of Adam and Eve prevents such agreement and obedience, the very doctrine of original sin itself remains “completely unknown to the greatest part of mankind” (143). If one were to reply that this only proves the point, how is it that we know anything at all about the law of nature, as the Apostle Paul asserts even pagans do? “The very young, the uneducated, and those barbarian natures, which are said to live according to nature,” do not know the law of nature (145), and barbarians (also the young, according to Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education) are often fickle, perfidious, and cruel. Civilized peoples have piety, including the belief in a future life, ‘inscribed’ in them not by nature but by parents, teachers, and “others” (clergy?) (147), but not nature. It is from this human teaching in the earliest childhood that “we” conclude that our opinions are “inscribed in our heart by god and nature” (149); the claim of “inscription” actually amounts to the claim of knowledge by tradition, but its proponents fail to see this. “No principles, either practical or speculative, are inscribed in the souls of men by nature” (151). Axioms are established by observations of particulars and by induction from them, not by inscription. Decades before the publication of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke had already concluded that the human mind is a tabula rasa.

In his treatment of the fifth question, Locke affirms that reason arrives at a knowledge of the law of nature through “sense experience” (153). He begins his discussion with apparent optimism: “The gods beckon us and our nature tends” toward “the summit of virtue and happiness” (153). A problem quickly arises, however. The light of nature consists of reason and sense—more precisely, as he’s written, of sense and rational deduction and induction from sense-impressions or ‘simple ideas.’ Sense provides reason with “the ideas of particular things” and reason then “directs sense, and arranges and orders the images of things derived from the senses, and forms [and derives from this source other new images”; reason is not a set of principles of action or of “propositions laid up in the mind” (155), but rather “the discursive faculty of the soul” (157). Locke then calls the knowledge so achieved discoveries. But which are these more complex ideas? Rationally ‘constructed’ arrangements and orders of images derived from the senses, themselves directed by the mind? Or discoveries? Locke illustrates his point, again, with geometry, which has physical bodies as its foundation but itself consists of ‘abstractions.’ Do geometers amount to creators, constructing their ideas if not out of nothing then out of chaotic sense-impressions, or are they discoverers of patterns inherent in the objects of those sense impressions? Although it is tempting to assume that the latter explanation makes more (as it were) sense, one is reminded of nature’s epistemological and physical niggardliness, the scarcity of the state of nature, which might make it necessary for the human mind not merely to discover but to order the matter of which nature consists. For Locke makes one thing clear: “Every conception of the mind, as of the body, always comes from some preexistent matter,” deriving its premises from that (157). This materialism puts him at odds not only with Christianity but also with Platonism as it is usually understood, namely, as claiming an independent, non-materialist and even superior or prior status for ideas.

How does this relate to the law of nature as law? Law, Locke reminds us, presupposes a legislator, a “superior power” to which or to whom one is “rightfully subject”; further, we must know “there is some will of that superior power as regards the things we must do” (159, emphasis added). Our senses show us that there are “sensible things,” and that the “visible world” is “framed with wonderful art and order” (159), like a “machine” (161). “It is certain that it could not have been formed by chance and accident”; on the contrary, “it is a certain inference that there must exist some powerful and wise creator of all these things” (161). This creator could not be man, who cannot “produce himself” because “man does not find in himself all those perfections of which his mind could conceive”; for example, had man created himself he would have done a better job—making himself immortal, for example (161). To have created itself and yet to have botched the job so badly would mean that humanity was “hostile and inimical to itself” (161-163). Reason dictates that there must have been “a superior authority,” “god,” who created us. (As Horwitz remarks, Locke consistently, not to say persistently, puts “deus” in the lower case, with a few exceptions.) Does this mean that “god” was hostile and inimical to us? Locke answers with apparent piety, averring, “Who, indeed, will say, that clay is not subject to the potter’s will and that the pot cannot be destroyed by the same hand that shaped it” (167); “god,” too, has property rights. This does not quite deny that “god” is not hostile and inimical to man, as indeed Descartes’ “Evil Genius” is. But of course it might be that “god” only destroys man when man disobeys “god,” as seen in the Biblical God’s dealings with man from the Garden of Eden, on. A “wise creator” must have created humanity for some purpose (167); “god wills [man] to do something,” namely, “what [man] is naturally equipped to do,” “inclined and ready to perform the works of god” (169). The “function of man” is to honor “god” (169). Although one might expect Locke now to outline precepts of worshipful obedience, he describes man as “driven by a certain natural propensity to enter society,” so driven “not only by the needs and necessities of life”—by the scarcity he finds in the state of nature—but also by his capacity for speech, which implies a degree of sociality (169). Self-preservation is thus “part of his duty” to “god” and his neighbor (following Jesus’ Law of Love, that summary of Torah law) but also to himself, a point unmentioned in that law, although perhaps implied by the Biblical injunction against suicide.

Strauss remarks that a “propensity” is not necessarily a natural inclination, however. Locke backs away from Aristotelian teleology (and therefore also from Thomism) in his two-word answer to the sixth and central of the eleven questions, “Can the law of Nature be known from the natural inclination of mankind?” “It cannot.” Nor can the law of nature be known from “the consensus of mankind,” the topic addressed in the seventh and longest section (173). By the consensus of mankind, Locke refers to the claim that a universal effect requires a universal cause; that human agreement on a fundamental set of commands (for example, the Noahide commandments) points to the existence of such a set of commands or law of nature. Locke denies that there is any such effect. The voices of the peoples of the earth are not the voice of “god” or, if they are, then god’s voice contradicts itself, so much so that “were we willing to harken to this voice as if it were the herald of divine law, we should finally hardly believe in the existence of any god at all” (173). Consensus comes in two forms, positive and natural. A positive consensus is a compact, tacit or expressed, “no principle of nature whatsoever” (175). For example, the law of nations should not be confused with the law of nature, as the latter “neither supposes nor permits men to be inflamed by mutual enmity, or to be divided into hostile states” to begin with; the law of nations is strictly a European custom, seen neither in Asia nor America—a matter of “common advantage,” not natural law (177). A natural consensus, by contrast, is (or would be) “an agreement to which men are brought by a kind of instinct” (177). It would be a consensus respecting conduct, opinions, and principles and would “exact the ready assent of any sane mind” (179). As Locke shows, enthusiastically and with many examples, no such universal consensus exists. Even self-preservation is overridden in some societies, as for example in India, where the practice of suttee claims the lives of so many widows (191). To find laws of nature in a universal consensus of mankind, one “should not examine men’s lives, but their souls” (181); yet in fact the most vicious actions have been practiced by men who nonetheless do not suffer “the lashes of conscience” (185). Drawing upon a breadth of anthropological knowledge that is noteworthy even today, and must have been nearly unique in his own day, Locke observes that human societies “disagree on even the most fundamental principles, and god and the immortality of the soul are called into doubt. These, although they are not practical propositions or laws of nature, must, nevertheless, be assumed for the existence of the law of nature, for there can exist no law without a legislator and law will have no force if without punishment.” (193)  Further, agreement about the gods (polytheism) “was of no help whatsoever in the proper formation of morals,” as polytheists are “atheists under another name” (195). (As Strauss remarks, Locke himself more than once refers to “the gods” in this work.) Further, monotheism is not necessarily morally sound, as seen in the example (telling for Locke’s Christian audience) of Judaism. Further still, philosophers also disagree about the highest good (197), as Locke subjects Socrates and Cato to some slightly captious criticism. Even Christian monotheists disagree; Locke reminds his largely Protestant audience of Catholicism (197). Finally, mere agreement, even universal agreement, cannot prove the soundness of a moral principle, opinion, or action (199). This section devastates any claim to base natural law on its putative universal recognition; ultimately, the appeal to consensus amounts to a mere deduction from human authority, not from nature. The seventh section stands as the one rigorously empirical and logical section of the work, i.e., the one most thoroughly consistent with Locke’s definition of “the light of nature.”

In answer to the eighth question, Locke affirms that the law of nature binds men. He refers to “God” instead of “god” or “the gods” only in this section. He begins by reprobating the claim that self-preservation could be “the fountain and beginning” of the law of nature; if it were, “law, virtue would appear to be not so much man’s duty as his interest, and nothing would be right for man were it not useful,” a matter of seeking “our own advantage”—the stance often imputed to Machiavelli and Hobbes before him, to Bentham and utilitarianism after him (203). But law entails obligation, and an obligation is a bond, a discharge of a debt; an obligation to “a superior power” derives first from “the divine wisdom of the legislator” and “that right which the creator has over his creation” (205), since “we have received both our being [and our continued preservation] and our proper function from him” (207). In addition to the debt we owe to God as creator and legislator, those who disobey God’s law also owe him “the debt of punishment,” not out of “fear of punishment” but out of “our determination of what is right” (207); to obey a king out of fear (as per Hobbes) “would be to establish the power of tyrants, thieves, and pirates” (213). “[W]e are bound by God, who is best and greatest, because he wills” as our creator and preserver, the One who authored and published the law of nature. To deny this would be to “overturn at one blow all government among men, [all] authority, rank, and society” (213). “[T]he law of nature is binding on all men, before any other law,” for several reasons: God authored it and duly promulgated it, “publish[ing] it sufficiently that anyone could know it, if he were willing to devote the time and energy, and turn his mind to its understanding”; “god [notice the shift to the lower case] is superior to all things”; we know this by “the light and principles of nature”; if the law of nature is not binding, neither is “god’s” divine, positive law; and neither is human, positive law, because kings, princes, and legislators obtain their rule by right, that is, “at the command of the law of nature” (215). The true ‘divine right of kings,’ the true ‘vox populi, vox dei’ are natural.

The tendency of Locke’s argument tempts one to consider whether the law of nature derives, then, not from some sort of universal opinion, and not from ‘conscience,’ but from the necessities of society itself. Insofar as men need society, they have the duty to uphold the law of society’s ‘nature.’ The law of nature conceived as the law of human society’s nature may be identical to the “propensity,” as distinguished from the “inclination,” of human nature. This law, Locke now confesses in the two-line Question IX (and in contradiction to his own assertion in Question I) is not binding on brutes. Locke can say this now because he has arrived at a human-social definition of the law of nature in this very section in which he most visibly affirms its ‘divine’ origin. Man’s obligation to obey this law seems perpetual and universal, even if his recognition is perpetually clouded and partial. But perhaps not: “[O]ne can rightly doubt that the law of nature is binding upon the human race as a whole” (217), for to assert the rightfully binding character of the law of nature would be to exercise a sort of tyranny: “What cruelty, even that of Sicily, was so great that it would will its subjects to observe a law which it would at the same time conceal from them and to show themselves obedient to a will that they could not know?” (219). Locke speaks of nature, but makes the reader think of God and God’s priests.

Such objections, Locke hastens to claim, are “not decisive” (219). The “bonds” of the law of nature are “eternal and coeval with the human race; they are born with it and they die with it” (219); “the obligation of this law never changes, although the times and circumstances of the actions by which our obedience is defined might change” (221). By bonds eternal and coeval with the human race, Locke has in mind actions involving force or fraud, dispositions such as reverence for and fear of divinity, a sense of duty towards one’s parents, and love of neighbor, and such public actions as worship of divinity, comforting afflicted neighbors, relieving those in trouble, and feeding the hungry (although “to these we are not bound forever but only at a certain time and in a certain manner” (223). The bonds of the law of nature also entail proper conduct in non-obligatory undertakings, such as candor and friendliness in manner if you choose to speak about another person. Generally speaking, the law of nature obliges us universally and perpetually, even if conditions do alter cases; one doesn’t greet children with the ceremony and humility we owe to princes. As “a fixed and eternal rule of conduct, dictated by reason itself” and “inherent in human nature,” and therefore “equal among all men” because they are men, by nature, by “god,” “it would be necessary for human nature to change before this law could either change or be abrogated” (227-229). The law of nature “depends not on a will that is fluid and changeable”—human or divine—”but on the eternal order of things” (229). That is, “there follows from the constitution of man at birth some definite duties he must perform” (229). Locke compares human nature with “the nature of a triangle,” which by definition must have three angles equal to two right angles, whether or not “many men [are] so indolent, so dense,” so inattentive, that they “are ignorant” of “truths which are so clear, so certain, that nothing can be more [obvious]” (229). While this is not a “self-evident” truth in the sense Locke uses the word in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, it will remind his readers of his later claim in the Essay on Civil Government, that there is “nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection,” absent the “manifest Declaration” of their “Lord and Master” dictates otherwise (II. ii). And even if “God” may sometimes suspend the law of nature through miraculous intervention, “god” never has and never will change the nature of man himself; miracles do not suspend the law of nature’s moral content.

The light of nature illuminates the law of nature by logical deduction from observations of humanity’s natural condition and inherent qualities. Conflicting opinions with respect to such obligations arise either from men’s seduction “by long established habits or the examples [they discover] at home” or from passions (229). The Pauline argument from design cited at the beginning of the Questions as evidence of “god’s” existence thus gradually metamorphoses into an argument for a law of nature as evidenced in man’s existence and constitution and the necessities derived therefrom. This constitution has a degree of malleability, as seen in the rarity of those who deduce their duties rationally from human nature, from the latitudinarian character of the duties Locke deduces rationally from human nature, as well as from the nearly chaotic diversity of human societies.

In the final section Locke returns to the claim that “private interest”—apparently similar or identical to “advantage”—constitutes the foundation of the law of nature, a claim he again denies. First propounded by the Cynic Carneades, this opinion of “great iniquity” denies natural right, defining liberty as self-interest (237). Locke permits himself an ad hominem argument: the proponents of this doctrine lacked the virtues and mental endowments that would bring them success in life, so they claimed that the human race had been treated unfairly and that republics were ruled unjustly. Locke immediately notes that private interest does not oppose “the common right of man” (237). Indeed “the law of nature is the greatest defense of the private property of the individual” (239). Locke denies only that the individual is “free to judge by himself what would be of advantage to himself as the occasion arises”; then again, “no one can be a fair and just assessor of what is good for another” (239). Where does that leave us? Locke distinguishes narrow, immediate advantage and the primary or foundational law of nature. If immediate advantage were our only guide, “those great examples of virtue which have been consecrated in the monuments of literature”—the labors of Hercules, for example, and of self-sacrificing patriots—”should be relegated to oblivion that the memory of such madness and vice should perish utterly” (241). This would have the effect of “throwing the window open to all kinds of vice” (245). For readers who might be so bold as to look calmly upon this prospect, Locke continues: “if the interest of each individual is the foundation of [the law of nature], it must necessarily be overthrown since it would be impossible to take into account the interest of all at one and the same time” (245). For such adamantine readers who might shrug, ‘So what?’ Locke continues further: nature’s “abundance” is “fixed,” and does not “increase with the need or avarice of men”; under such conditions of scarcity, it is impossible “for anyone to grow wealthy except through someone else’s loss” (245); by contrast, the virtues “kindle and mutually foster one another,” and do not drive men into conflict (as per Hobbes), fighting in a grim, ‘zero-sum’ war of all against all (247). While Hobbes is right to contend that property, private ownership, brings about justice (cf. Leviathan I. 15), obedience to the law of nature conceived as a set of deductions from the human propensity to civil society brings “happiness,” whose elements are peace, concord, friendship, freedom from fear of unjust punishments, security, and possession of our own property. Not present but long-term interest, not present but long-term advantage, is the consequence, not the foundation, of obedience to the law of nature. “So the rightness of an action does not depend upon interest”—interest narrowly understood—”but interest follows from rectitude” (251). Rectitude comes from “god” or from the social necessity that arises from human natural necessity.

The Questions leaves readers with questions. Locke affirms the Pauline argument from design, except that Locke’s “god” is not necessarily Paul’s God. As Strauss observes, Locke never attempts to prove the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and of rewards and punishments awaiting that soul after death, upon which the law of nature (Locke says) stands or falls. Locke observes that another Pauline doctrine, original sin, remains unrecognized by much of mankind but, then again, much of mankind lacks the diligence to discover the law of nature itself. There is an ambiguity about whether the “light of nature” whereby one may discover the law of nature amounts to a real discovery, a ‘construction,’ or some combination of both. The law of nature registers a human propensity, but this propensity isn’t a natural inclination or instinct; man’s propensity for society seems to arise from the human capacity for speech interacting with the scarcity of nature. This evidently means that atheism is ‘false’ because it injures human society by shaking its foundation in the minds of the majority of men, who lack diligence in their investigations of the law of nature, or indeed never undertake any such investigation at all.

This edition of the Questions should prove a permanent contribution to Locke scholarship. In addition to Horwitz’s valuable introduction, it includes a succinct, useful discussion of the manuscripts by Jenny Strauss Clay, the complete Latin text, and Diskin Clay’s facing-page translation in English with helpful notes that build on von Leyden’s earlier work. Because any outstanding work of Locke scholarship simultaneously contributes to the study of political philosophy, we are doubly in the editors’ debt.

 

Eva T. H. Brann: The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.

Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 17, Number 1, April 1993.

 

Imagining takes up so much of our mental life, yet so little of the ‘philosophy of mind,’ that Eva T. H. Brann calls it “the missing mystery of philosophy” (3). Understandably so: How can the ‘mind’s eye’ look at itself? She undertakes to clarify if not to ‘solve’ the mystery by examining six topics: the cognitive nature of the imagination, the psychological function of imagery, the logical status of the image, literary imagining, pictorial imaging, and the way imagination works in the world, i.e., in the practices of religion, politics, and private life.

With Aristotelian deliberateness, Brann canvasses an extraordinary range of learned opinion without ever losing sight of commonsense opinion. (The book is “dedicated… to the salvation of the obvious” [5].) Her learning is so wide and her thoughtfulness so unflagging that her book at the very least can serve as a comprehensive reference work on each topic—as a guide to and of further study. But it is much more than that, as the sum of her erudition does not confuse the substance of her argument.

In classical philosophy imagination is a faculty of the mind. Imagination is indispensable to cognition because images “have a middle status between the being proper to a form in matter and the being proper to a form that has come into the intellect through abstraction from matter” (62). In its work of abstracting ideas from perceived materials, the intellect needs images. By contrast, according to Descartes and his successors, willing motivated by the passions is the preeminent attribute of the human mind. Imagination loses its function as an aid to understanding nature, and becomes an incitement to the conquest of nature. In Kant, for example, the human self is as hidden and unknowable as the Biblical God, and in its own way as creative—its mental faculties imposing forms upon appearances. Modern philosophy tends either toward dismissing imagination as useless for this constructive task (Locke, Hume, modern rationalism generally) or, at the other extreme, exalting it above all other faculties (Romanticism).

Modern psychology reflects this difficulty. Psychologists try to “extract measurable evidence” (209) from interior experiences that are “behaviorally inaccessible and formalistically inarticulable” (222). “Claiming that the brain imagines is like saying the mouth eats—a suggestive metonymical figure but not a sufficient account” (266). Still, recent psychologists have turned up evidence that the imagination does indeed exist—a point denied by many of their predecessors.

Brann’s consideration of the relation of images to logic reinforces the psychologists’ discovery. She discusses Plato’s Sophist, showing how an image, the product of the imagination, is even while it is not the original of that which it is the image. Even a lie is something, albeit not what the liar wants his auditor to believe it is. The image is other and less than the original, but it does exist, with its own center of gravity. “Fictions have force” (246).

The force of those fictions called literature arises from the complementarity of sight and speech, the human power to represent sights in words that bring out the significance of the sights they conjure. If too far separated from originals, however, sight and words deceive—as in Romanticism, which Brann describes as imagination’s “fateful attempt at self-sufficiency” (520). The imaging of nonverbal depiction—whether mathematical, as in geometry, or painterly—requires “the fit of thought and space” (596). In modern, non-Euclidean, geometry a sort of Romanticism creeps in, as the mathematician posits or wills delimitations of infinite space; axioms or intuitions disappear, replaced by arbitrary concepts. Interestingly, Brann does not make this charge with respect to modern painting; abstraction there starts with imaging (641), and therefore with originals. Modern politics is another matter, as Brann cites the ill-fated exhortation written on a wall in Paris in 1968: “Let the imagination seize power” (712). Utopias are, paradoxically, powerful only when they are not willed, as may be seen by contrasting the longevity of Plato’s ideal city with the evanescence of the dreams of Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

If the imagination serves as  sort of pivot between the senses and the intellect, spiritedness (the Greek thumos)—that part of the soul that get angry, that loves honor and victory—serves as a pivot in the soul “between the gross desire for things and the love of truth about them” (767). Imagination and spiritedness are related, as even social workers see when the speak of the ‘need for a positive self-image’ as indispensable to ‘self-esteem.’ Brann discusses this relation succinctly, and might have done more with it. It may have been quite significant in the transition from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern.’ It is surely significant in the academy today, where so many of the confusions in literary criticism and political activism evidently arise from a sophistic-Romantic inclination to conflate intellectual eros with a polemicized imagination.

This book represents a lifetime’s observation, reading, thoughts, and imaginings. Thankfully, there can never be a definitive work on the subject. There is now a just and wise one.

 

Hilail Gildin, ed.: An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.
Thomas L. Pangle, ed.: The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 17, Number 3, Spring 1990. Republished by permission.

 

“One cannot settle any Platonic question of any consequence by simply quoting Plato,” (Pangle, 193) writes Leo Strauss. Strauss titles a collection of his essay, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy; insofar as Strauss Platonizes, he must be quoted with care. Quoting Plato or Strauss with care means to quote them in the spirit of evidence, in the spirit of ‘pointing to,’ not in the spirit of demonstration, of ‘Q.E.D.’ He who knows he does not know will unfailingly frustrate those who want to know what to believe as well as those who know what they want to believe. The frustration and even suspicion Strauss stirs in dogmatic souls has found ample ventilation in a variety of journals and books. Those readers for whom controversy arouses curiosity instead of indignation may seek firsthand knowledge of Strauss from Strauss’s writings.

Hilail Gildin’s collection will serve as an excellent place to begin. This new edition contains four additional essays: Strauss’s own brief introduction to political philosophy, one on the theologico-political question, and two on liberal education. Gildin’s introduction succinctly outlines Strauss’s principal concerns as a politicl philosopher, particularly the way in which modern political philosophers brought out the nihilistic implications of Machiavell’s thought in ever more elaborate forms, and the consequent need for a renewed radicalism, so to speak—recourse to the Socratic roots of political philosophy.

Strauss adopted the Socratic view of philosophy as first of all a way of life, even the way of life—the highest form of politics or self-rule. This view regards human life as needful of wisdom, as rightly animated by love of wisdom, the quest for knowledge of the whole. Even the vast majority of human beings, who are unphilosophic and content to stay that way, in some sense need philosophy; the political good requires education of qualified young persons for philosophic life, not only for political life as conventionally understood in a given regime. At the same time, philosophers need to start with political life as conventionally understood, to treat citizens’ opinions as portals to understanding, not as barriers to be knocked down. Socratic philosophy contrasts sharply with historicism, which begins with Rousseau’s rejection of the naturalness of reasons and issues in the divorce of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ in the name of realism. For radical historicism, even reality becomes an ‘ism.’ After Nietzsche refuted optimistic historicist progressivism, only self-conscious nihilism remained. The modern attempt to dismiss ideal republics and cities of God in order to free man for reshaping nature to his own liking, ended in a rebirth of tragedy, first with, then without, nobility. “The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man’s becoming absolutely homeless” (108).

Modernity often fuses reason to spiritedness, forming ideology and propaganda. Socrates associate reason with eros, not spiritedness, seeking a self-sufficiency that need not harm (or directly help) the philosopher’s fellow-citizens. Only force or, perhaps, a form of love, patriotism, could induce the philosopher to participate in politics. In his essays on liberal education we see Strauss as a kind of statesman, indeed as a reformer describing “the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society” (314). This language will exercises egalitarians among Strauss’s critics, who may overlook his call for “unhesitating loyalty” to decent constitutionalism (345). Or, what is more likely, perhaps some critics balk at constitutionalism itself, and at Strauss’s observation, made in the same breath, that the “grandiose failures” of Marx and Nietzsche should teach us never to separate wisdom from moderation. Be this as it may, even at his most ‘political’ Strauss never fails to point to philosophy, to the awareness of our understanding the philosopher may enjoy, beyond the ambitions of the modern project.

Strauss crafted each of his published essays to stand alone and also, in most instances, to stand within a book. A cautious reader will therefore approach Professor Gildin’s collection with some reservations, concerned that the act of extracting essays form their original contexts will somehow lose many intended resonances. Such fears prove needless here. Gildin has given us a real book, one whose chapters lead logically from one to another, making a coherent argument. Even readers familiar with these essays may find these new juxtapositions instructive. The book’s only shortcoming is its bibliography, which has not been updated since the 1975 edition. If there is another printing, the publisher might consider making this useful revision.

Thomas Pangle’s collection first calls attention not to Strauss as political philosopher but to Strauss as philosopher, to Strauss’s “classical rationalism” or “erotic skepticism” (xi-xii). In this, however, Pangle is as politic as Gildin, given current academic interest (bordering on obsession) with things epistemological. The volume may give Strauss a hearing before those who expect the philosopher to ‘do philosophy’ rather than to ‘know himself’ or to ‘live philosophically.’

In his introduction Pangle quickly brings his readers to politics, to the way epistemology and politics intertwine. “Norms of civic justice, of civic virtue and vice,” emerge from dialogue (xii). Not absolute in the sense that natural laws or categorical imperatives are said to be, they are nonetheless trans-historically valid because they are grounded in unchanging human nature. Modern philosophers attempt to lay down laws evident to non-philosophers, reducing observation, prudence, and classification to methods and rules. ‘Method-ists’ want to overcome the need for both kinds of wisdom, practical and theoretical, and thereby rigidify both politics and philosophy, including the liberal education of potential statesmen and philosophers.

In the United States during Strauss’s lifetime there was much talk of ‘humanism’ as an alternative to totalitarian ideology. Strauss saw that humanism cannot replace the traditional religion as the foundation of morality in commercial republican society, even among the academic elites. Humanism cannot account for the whole of being, as may be seen in Isaiah Berlin’s concept of “negative freedom” or “freedom from,” which needs an absolute foundation but denies itself one on principle (7, 16-17). And even the self-created limits favored by existentialists cannot be seen as limits without “the light of infinity” (38). After the Nazi disaster convinced Heidegger that “contempt for reasonableness and praise of resoluteness” (30) quickly run themselves aground., Heidegger retained his contempt for reason but added patience. His patient ‘waiting-for’ a religion that cannot be consciously created, produced the atmosphere of our own time, called by André Malraux, “the days of limbo.”

Classical political rationalism begins with political opinions but seeks a conversion to truth, away from lies (however noble). “The political man is constantly forced to have very long conversations with very dull people on very dull subjects” (74). he philosophic life avoids much of that, without losing all moderation, and without losing its sense of humor. (“Modern research on Plato originated in Germany, the country without comedy” [206]; too many commentators on Strauss are German, all too German.) Philosophic life begins in wonder; Biblical wisdom begins with fear of the Lord; modernity, which has tried “to preserve Biblical morality while abandoning Biblical faith,” loses philosophic and Biblical virtues (240). Because Western civilization lives in the relation between ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem,’ radical modernity tends toward the disintegration of the West. Contemporary ideologues who chant for the purging of writings by ‘dead, white, European males’ from university syllabi know what they don’t want, sort of. The spirit of Strauss in the pages of these books counsels us to react to such incantations with neither indignation nor dismissive laughter: “The recognition by philosophy of the fact that the human race is worthy of some seriousness is the origin of political philosophy or political science” (126). (Emphasis added and, it is to be hoped, balance observed.)