I Think, Therefore I Draw by Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein

Author:Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

It’s Only Natural

Here’s a cartoon from Lee Lorenz that smacks some major philosophical questions right in the kisser: What are the laws of nature? How can we figure out what they are? And, most important, how do they apply to the moral and political principles of human beings?

In Western civilization, philosophers have been talking about natural law for millennia, going back to Cicero in ancient Rome, popping up in the Middle Ages with Thomas Aquinas, and developed later by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural law even shows up in the American Declaration of Independence, which declares that the American people should accept “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

The basic idea of natural law philosophy is that human morality can be deduced from basic human nature, because it was put there by the Divine Designer of the Natural World. Further, we can figure out exactly what these laws are and how they apply to us through reason and analysis.

Thomas Hobbes distinguished between natural law and the “state of nature,” and saw them in irrevocable conflict. Hobbes thought the natural state of humankind—before governments and civilization—was “nasty, brutish, and short” and that the natural law for humans was to not do anything destructive to their own lives. That meant getting as far away as possible from the “state of nature” and giving over our personal sovereignty to the sovereignty of an authoritarian state.

John Locke, on the other hand, felt that the state of nature had been generally peaceful, and that the natural law of reason taught that no one ought to harm another person in his life, liberty, or property. Nonetheless, this state was insecure, because, guess what, not everyone obeyed the law of nature. Since he had a rosier view than Hobbes of humanity’s natural state, Locke thought that limited, constitutional government was capable of maintaining peace and security. That’s why Locke is seen as one of the forefathers of American democracy.

We must admit, though, that our emotional favorite natural law philosopher is the eighteenth-century Genevan social and political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had an even more benign view of the state of nature. He asks us to drive right into that jungle and take a good look around, especially at savage man, because savages are in possession of uncorrupted morals—uncorrupted by such things as kings and landowners and CEOs and reality TV.

Wrote Rousseau: “Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.”

In particular, he preferred the way savages lived to the way civilized men and women did because they were not yet self-centered or corrupted by what he called “the petulant activity of our egocentrism.”

“The more one reflects on it,” Rousseau wrote, “the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man. . . . The example of savages .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.