Скачать книгу

“our” language to convey “our” beliefs about how “we” live, and perhaps even “our” thoughts about how “they” live.

      Common Sense as Law

      Since common sense is intelligent, its accumulated insights are very often coherent and reasonable, but that which is coherent and reasonable has a claim to be true, even binding—“this is the way that we organize and do things here, and it is the way you ought to do it as well.” Still, the way that common sense obliges or demands is peculiar to the mode of common sense; in the following sections I explain three variations of how common sense expresses natural law.

      Natural Law as Inclination

      Insofar as common sense confronts the world relative to our own perspectives, projects, interests, and concerns, it carries a latent possibility of reductionism whereby the being of the world is what it is insofar as it serves or frustrates my projects and concerns. The world, after all, is not given to us except through the mediation of our own awareness, an awareness which we govern through our own mode of concern:

      In a more contemporary context, the ambiguity of “nature” is observed in the moral and legal disputes about sexuality. On the one hand, homosexual acts are described by some as unnatural acts; on the other, the prevalence 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

Скачать книгу